Same Grim Mime Rags

NOTE: An article in this week’s New Yorker (”The Riddler” by Burkhard Bilger) mentions that one of the puzzlemasters points out that Pepsi-Cola spokesdroid Britney Spears anagrams to “Presbyterians” while Pepsi-Cola anagrams to “Episcopal.”

At last night’s RIM GAMES, hosted by TART JEW SON, it was no surprise that SILKY ACE AI won a total of 5 GERM AIMS or that FOLLY NATURED took Best Female Vocal Performance. And YELL DAME DRAMA from the movie RUIN MULE GOO deserved the award it got. Old-Timers ZANY RV TINKLE won for Male Rock Vocal Performance and ROYAL JAM SET got Male Pop Vocal Performance. But no one was expecting EARTH WHORE BOTHER TOUR to walk away with album of the year! After all, HOW HE TORTURE EAR BROTH is ASS LEG RUB music!

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On a non-anagramatic note, man was I pissed at Michael Greene’s diatribe against Napsterism! As if the recording industry is looking out for the interests of the musicians. As Ken Layne writes, Michael Greene “is like John Ashcroft without the charm. ”

Courtney Love for President!

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Links and Responses

Jeneane Sessum and Others have started the “BlogSisters” communiblog. I love the tagline: “Where men can link, but they can’t touch.”

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Kevin Marks blogs about Dawkins in response to my annoyed comments. Says Kevin:

Dawkins has written very well and clearly, and had some very original ideas. Hwoever, these days he seems to be writing the same book over and over again…

Or, as I’d put it, Dawkins is one meme away from being a crank.

(Kevin’s blog also recommends the right Steven Pinker books to read.)

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Crit Snit

The Affaire Dvorak has happily meta-ed itself well past Dvorak himself. I’m quite enjoying the many blogs about the importance, danger and art of criticizing one another. Wealth Bondage has a awesome list of How to Criticize, and AKMA reminds us how hard real criticism is. Damn straight. That’s why good teachers are so rare.

AKMA points to Cinnamon’s correspondence with Dave Rogers in which she suggests that bloggers happily blogging to and about one another constitute an exclusionary clique. AKMA responds by recasting the same phenomenon in different value-laden words: “Somewhere someone got the odd idea that it’s wrong for people with similar interests to hang out together…”

You’re both right. (And to satisfy those who insist that criticism is the only proof of authenticity: You’re both wrong.) CAUTION: Extreme obviousness ahead. Of course we like to talk with people who are interested in the same things and who share the assumptions that let a conversation go forward. Of course this can become a clique when it excludes difference and pats itself on the back for doing so. Of course this can also be the way in which the world is joined and minds are enlarged. And that is precisely why we are — in general — better off opting for praise and elaboration rather than criticism and condemnation: criticizing others is all too often a way of excluding them from the conversation.

Of course, such criticism isn’t what criticism is truly about. Separating the wheat from the chaff — the original meaning of criticism — is a form of respect. But, in that regard I’d say that the hyper-clique that grew up around the blogthread on authenticity was highly self-critical.

But we don’t have to — and can’t — legislate what is the Proper and Acceptable Form of Criticism. As AKMA writes, we

…can keeping writing one another into copyright-free harmony, and we can criticize one another, and encourage one another, and printa donna journalists can find criticism and encouragement at the level of insight that’s comfortable for them.

CAUTION: Sermonizing obviousness ahead. It’s the same in bloggery as everywhere else: we are drawn to what draws us, we are interested in what interests us. The only difference is that we have an epochal opportunity to learn from one another. The criticism that mocks does so at the cost of learning, although it has its own pleasures: little is more enjoyable than a ripping good flame fest. The cost: flames anodize cliques. Real criticism is exactly what makes learning possible.

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R-E-$-P-E-C-T

Megatokyo, spurred by Blue Mountains Arts deciding to charge for their e-cards, has a long reflection on respect and the Web economy. MegaTokyo is serving up 10,000,000 page views a month and thus has some skin in this particular game.

I think that an understanding of human nature is almost more important here on the web than in any other business environment. Why? because unlike in the real world we are used to, we’ve been trained to an ‘us and them’ mentality in regards to our entertainment and things that we purchase in stores – we are consumers, they are providers. On the net, its different. … We all have the same basic presence on the net – its how we use it that makes us who we are here.

This doesn’t change the fact that Blue Mountain Arts has picked the wrong business model. Rather than charging the sender, they ought to charge the recipients: “You’ve received a card from A Secret Admirer. Please deposit $0.50 to retrieve it.”

[Thanks to David Landgren for pointing me to MegaTokyo.]

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Sitting Out the Flames

I’m deeply uninterested in having a flame war with John Dvorak. In fact, I wasn’t going to blog today since I’m on the road and have about 45 seconds before I have to unplug.

I did like Tom Matrullo’s comments on Kottke’s board.

And to become rather miscellaneous, Chip points us to an article that continues the propagation of the belief that a major conspiracy is about to emerge, one involving Afghanistan, Bin Laden, pipelines, Enron and why Cheney is hiding those with whom he met. (Michael Moore said on The Daily Show the other day that Cheney was meeting with the Taliban about a pipeline up until a month before 9/11.) I haven’t had time to read the page I’m pointing you to, which is, of course, the height of irresponsibility. That is, it’s bloggin’, baby! Go decide for yourself if this is worth reading. As always.

I also haven’t had time to read the new Dystopical but I don’t have to be confident in recommending it to you.

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More MiscLinks

Martin Jensen recommends a site about Richard Dawkins, about whom I
railed the
other day.

Here’s a John Perry Barlow interview
in which he uses the phrase “private totalitarianism”
to label the corporate attempt to own the economy
of ideas as well as the economy of work and money.

Eric Norlin has uniblogged his metablog about the inner relation of blogging and rap. (Ok, so maybe “uniblogged” for publishing a concatenation of blogs isn’t a keeper. But Eric’s content is.)

If you want the inside scoop on the Olympics ice skating scandal, you should glide on over to Mary Lu Wehmeier’s site. She’s not just a geek, she’s a former figure skating geek.

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At Your Self-Service

You can read the online version of an interview with me in FastCompany here. Best of all, you’ll be spared the super-high-res, super-close-up, actual-size, mole-and-pore enhanced photo.

Also, I’ve collated my blogged TED trip reports to make them even easier for you to avoid. Yes, JOHO, serving the needs of its readers since 1995.

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Ancient Works of Fiction

The lovely tinyapps.org site that features — surprise! — tiny applications is running a contest involving getting a CD ROM to be recognized by a Windows 95 partition. The reason I mention this is the prize:

The first subscriber to provide an answer that solves this problem … will receive a gently used copy of (this is not a joke) “Writing Solid Code — Microsoft’s Techniques for Developing Bug-Free Programs”. I spotted it at my local “Friends of the Library” for a mere 10 cents. Find out more about this masterpiece at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1556155514/

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MiscLinks

At Dan Dubno’s site, Gizmorama, you’ll find a link to the amazing EarthViewer, demoed at TED. Type an address into the client and it delivers a cinematically thrilling aerial view of the locatio. There’s a 14-day free trial on the site. The Gizmorama site also has links to other ditigal images of the earth and a link to CBS News’ comprehensive links about disasters of every stripe.

Dave Rogers blogs on Dvorak on Cluetrain and blogging (see my previous blog entry).

Tom Shugart has started a blog. Looks promising. His very first entry is a reflection on the authenticity blogthread. Tom takes a pretty radically existential position: “…inventing the self is a supreme act of personal responsibility. You’re either creating it and putting it out there or you’re operating as a default self—i.e., without authenticity.” Invent or discover? (Note: Tom’s way too flattering about this blog. I am blushing undeservedly.)

Hermani Dimantas has started a blog. I assume it’s good because, although it’s in Portuguese and thus impenetrable to me, I know from correspondence with Hermani that he’s an enthusiastic, smart guy.

Ryan Mulcahy, from Darwin Magazine for whom I write a weekly online column, recommends a site for people trying to quit cigarettes. My mother died of lung cancer, Ryan, so you know I mean it when I wish you luck and strength.

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Dvorak on Cluetrain and Blogging

John Dvorak goes after Cluetrain and blogging. His closely reasoned argument is “Isn’t this dumb?” and his evidence is “Hey, I’m cynical and they’re not!”

Fun reading. For example:

In fact the brown-nosing that goes on between bloggers singing each others’ praises makes the worst office kiss-ups look tame by comparison. I mention this anomaly since these Cluetrain folks all believe the opposite to be true. Somehow networking like this, according to the Cluetrainees, reveals truth—when in fact it supports and forces the worst kind of conformist behavior. Try to find a blog that is ever critical of another blog. I’ve never seen it.

Yeah, we’re generally guilty of trying to find what’s good in what other bloggers are writing. (Wasn’t the original point of blogging to recommend sites?) But maybe Dvorak should read a little a more before he announces bloggers never criticize one another. What a hoot.

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Mike Sanders and Halley Suitt blog excellent comments on Dvorak. (Oops, excuse me, there I go being positive again! I meant to say: Mike Sanders and Halley Suitt are full of shit! My God do they suck! I hate them!)

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TED Saturday

This was an extraordinarily good day. The only weaknesses of the day are weaknesses of TED’s format itself: the presentations are non-interactive with the audience and with one another so it is very difficult to develop ideas. For example, if a Nobel prize winner raises a provocative issue in his allotted 15-20 minutes, there’s no Q&A, no panel, and no further discussion by later speakers who, by and large, have labored for months polishing a presentation from which they dare not swerve.

This weakness was quite apparent in the first presentation of the day. Daniel Dennett, a philosopher of amazing clarity and originality of focus, compared the ideas humans are willing to die for to an actual virus whose propagation requires causing its hosts — ants in this case — to commit suicide. As he led us to believe he was talking about militant Islam, he pulled the rug and said that our Western memes are a virus that threatens to do to the non-Western world what real viruses did to the native Americans when the Europeans arrived. Just as he was about to tell us what he thinks can and should be done to protect the world from these mental viruses, his time was up. As a result, he left us at the weakest part of his argument, it seemed to me. Yes, ideas are like viruses in that some multiply at the cost of their hosts’ lives. But, unlike viruses, they do not necessarily act in a mechanistic, deterministic way (unless one believes that all thought is deterministic). There is something profoundly anti-intellectual and demeaning about the “ideas are viruses” meme. After all, this view has to say that all ideas are viruses, doesn’t it? Rationality is a virus as much as extremist religious views. Otherwise, we’re just picking the ideas we don’t like and labeling them viruses, smuggling the negative sense of “virus” under the coat of the genetic sense of virus. But Dennett would have revealed all … if only Ted slots were wider and the speakers fewer.

Here are some more highlights:

Steve Jurveston had 7 minutes to talk about the nanotech revolution. Fascinating but way too abbreviated. He expects revolutions in computing, medicine, materials and manufacturing in 5-10 years. He also pointed out in passing that the human genome is smaller than MS Office.

Nobelist Kary Mullis gave a country-boy reminiscence of his discovery that the scientific method is a human invention. After giving a vivid sense of what “doing science” means to him, he attacked politicized science, taking global warming as his example. He cited two recent studies that found no warming in the past 50 years, throwing into doubt the “More CO2 = More Warming” hypothesis first formulated 100 years ago.

Next came Richard Dawkins who pissed me off mightily. He’s obviously one of our great minds but … he’s got an impressively blinkered view of religion. I wholeheartedly agree with his main point: American culture needs to accept atheism as a mainstream belief, and I liked his proposal that atheists come out of the closet in order to legitimize the atheist position. But he wrapped this in a virulent and, frankly, ignorant attack on religion. I wanted to go up to him afterwards and say: “I hate science. Scientists experiment on animals.” He would reply (I imagine): “First of all, you twit, astronomy, physics, etc. don’t experiment on animals.” Then I would pounce, it being my fantasy and all: “Exactly. And a critique of religion-in-general is just as twitty.” It genuinely irks me that he recklessly conflates all religions as if they all reject science, all insist on blind faith, and all appeal only to the weak-minded. (The fact that my wife, who has a doctorate in philosophy and is one of the clearest-headed people I know, is an orthodox Jew certainly doesn’t affect my attitude :)

Josef Penninger gave a fascinating presentation on his genetic research that may result in treatments for osteoporosis, arthritis, and pain management. More interesting, however, was his explanation of discoveries about how particular genes work. For example, the gene that controls the death of cells is also used by the body to “sculpt” fingers out of fetus’s webbed mass. I spoke with him afterwards and found him to be shy and friendly. (Yes, you can be both.) When he talked about his new institute, he talked mainly in terms of human values. Emotionally, he felt like Dawkin’s mirror image.

By the way, I also had a chance to talk briefly with Dean Kamen. “Since Segway challenges so many of our habits and many of our institutions,” I asked, “how do you see it getting accepted? Who’s going to adopt it first? Where will the breakthrough be?” “I wish I knew,” Kamen said while standing, as always, on his Segway. But, he said, things are looking up since the Segway’s introduction: Automobile companies don’t hate it the way he thought they would and two states have passed laws allowing Segways on sidewalks.

Steven Pinker, whose work on language and the brain is brilliant and too hard for me, gave a highly understandable preview of his new book that argues that there is indeed such a thing as human nature. He pointed to four reasons we fear that idea: We don’t like the inequality of capability it implies, we think it means that we are not perfectable, it seems to imply determinism and it seems to suck all the meaning out of life. He gave brief, effective counters for each fear.

Next up was Deepak Chopra, a popular spiritualist. He opened up by saying that Dawkins “seems to be a bit of a fundamentalist [laughs from the audience] and even perhaps a bit of a bigot [gasps from the audience]. He then spent his twenty minutes trying to erase science’s distinction between observed and observer, using indeterminacy and quantum leaps as his proof points. He spoke the language of physics fluently, but even I, whose lack of understanding of quantum mechanics is truly deep, spotted some misunderstandings. I think. Besides, his approach can’t possibly convince scientists because he’s not telling them anything they don’t already know.

Quincy Jones talked about his life. Frank Gehry chatted about his life as an architect. Chris Bangle, BMW’s chief designer, told an amusing story to show that love and trust are at the heart of the collaborative process.

Overall, it was an amazing line up of intellect, squeezed, alas, into slots as small as veal pens — with just as much room to move around.

This is Richard Saul Wurman’s last year as the head of TED. Next year, Chris Anderson, founder of Business 2.0, will host it. Chris is promising to maintain TED as it is, but it remains to be seen if it can weather the departure of its leader and icon.

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By the way, I managed to leave out one extraordinary presentation yesterday. David Macauley cycled through about 100 drawings in 20 minutes to show the process by which he created his upcoming book about Rome. (What’s the graphical equivalent of thinking out loud?) He is such a magnificent artist.

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TED Friday

Report on Friday at TED, the Technology Entertainment and Design conference in Monterey, an eccentric mix of presentations and performances, celebrities and civilians.

This was a more successful day than yesterday, IMO. The highlights from my point of view:

Robert Full from UC Berkeley discussed his group’s research into animal motion. They’ve been able to make robots that navigate through complex landscapes without requiring a computer brain to match actions to an internal representation. Instead, legs made out of materials that are complexly flexible — just like animal legs — adjust the critter’s movement to the terrain simply because of the shape and nature of the legs themselves. This seems quite similar to Rodney Brooks’ work on getting inner representations out of the AI picture. Full also talked about the mechanism by which geckos can scoot up walls: It turns out that the gecko’s toe pads foliate to such small nodes that molecular Van der Waal forces can overcome gravity. (Was that a look of inspiration I saw in Dean Kamen’s eyes as he thought about he might apply this to wall-climbing Segways? Nah.)

Frans Lanting, a photographer for National Geographic (is there a more evocative job description?) cycled through astonishing photographs of wildlife. You can see a few here.

Jeffrey Katzenberg showed the first 7 minutes of his new animated feature (”Spirit: Stallion of Cimarron”) about wild horses. It puts characters drawn in 2D illustration style into a detailed 3D world. The artwork is beautiful (but familiar) and the movie’s opening tries for the bravura sweep of the opening of The Lion King. The problem is with the writing. The narration is so hackneyed and trite that Matt Damon’s reading can’t save it. And the very first words of the script are just flat out wrong: The star horse intones that the horses have been in the American west forever. Yeah, even before the Spanish brought them?

The late morning session presented a string of humorists (a chuckle of humorists?). Bruce Vilanch told some funny jokes of the Viagra, Shirley Maclaine and Richard Gere and smally furry mammals variety. Emily Levine did a routine that managed to be genuinely funny about philosophical dualism. And MacArthur Genius Ben Katchor deadpanned his way through his arch, illustrated prose-poems that are as willing to be ambiguous as Katzenberg is willing to be trite. Jill Sobule performed again; I had the chance to tell her that I fall more in love with her every day.

Dan Dubins, a CBS News producer, demo’ed software that combines satellite imaging data with geological elevation data so that you can zoom, tilt and pan as if you were flying a space-capable helicopter. Others have produced similar software, but this had more data than I’d seen and, more dramatically, treated the entire experience cinematically, an excellent example of the importance of entertainment in presenting information. Unfortunately, Dubins didn’t give the software’s name, although I thoughtI heard him refer to “earthview.”

Steven Petranik, editor of Discover magazine, ticked off his Top Ten list of ways the world could end suddenly:

Top Ten Ways the World Could End Suddenly 10. Failure to address the worldwide epidemic of depression 9. Alien invasion 8. Ecosystem collapse 7. Particle accelerator accident produces an uncontrollable black hole 6. Biotech disaster 5. Reversal of the magnetic field 4. Giant solar flares 3. An epidemic 2. Contact with a rogue black hole 1. Giant asteroid

He wasn’t kidding about any of these. See you in hell.

Amory Lovins talked about the hypercar project, a radically redesigned car that uses hydrogen fuel (producing water as its exhaust) or fuel cells. It reverses most of the principles that have guided car design from the beginning. Most exciting, he has put the design into the public domain so that no one can patent it and many can build them.

Nicholas Negroponte wrapped up the sessions by predicting that in 1-2 years, we will see the development of a “viral telecommunications network” based on 802.11 wirelessness, a single installation serving an entire neighborhood. This will go beyond merely enabling multiple connections to the Internet, Negroponte predicts, resulting in a peer-to-peer network that parallels the current Internet topography. Further, he suggests that establishing wireless networks in areas of strife will enable children to reach past their parents’ stupidity.

He connected this with our culture’s odd idea that at the age of 5 children should stop learning by playing and start learning by facing forward and being taught. Give kids a connected computer and they will teach themselves and others by exploring the Internet. Pointing to his experience building schools in rural Cambodia, he said: “People say it’s not sufficient to give kids computers and connectivity. You know what? It is.”

Damn good stuff.

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Finally, the day ended with an astounding set of musical performances. In the first half, Gary Burton, Maokoto Ozone and Julian Lage played. Julian is a prodigy, a 14-year-old with technical expertise and musicality that’s jaw-dropping. I shared an elevator ride with him and his parents and they seemed loving and grounded. Could my impression based on this 45 second experience be wrong? Actually, no, it couldn’t be. You can’t lie in an elevator any more than you can lie down in an elevator.

The second concert featured Herbie Hancock. Astounding.

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As a bonus, I ran into Jakob Nielsen, the Usability Guy. I’d long wanted to meet him. By happy coincidence, he was talking with Maryam Mohit, in charge of Amazon’s UI. (She’s on a generous maternity leave. Her 4-month old son is gorgeous.) Very enjoyable discussion, in part about the importance of voice and its relation to authority.

A good day.

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Thursday at the TED Conference

Report on highlights of the first full day at TED, the Technology Entertainment and Design conference in Monterey, an eccentric mix of presentations and performances, celebrities and civilians.

This morning gave us a dull-as-it-sounds panel discussion of the design of chairs preceded by a sparkling performance by singer-songwriter Jill Sobule The only moment of interest (for me, anyway) in the chair panel came when the guy from SteelCase talked about Bluespace, a project with IBM to rethink the cubicle. The chair becomes the brain of the place, automatically adjusting the lights and temperature. Of course, the desk folks are going to insist that desks are the center of the universe. And Apple has already made it clear that it thinks that all revolves around the desk lamp. (Bluespace is reminiscent of Bruce Tognazzini’s Star Office concept.)

The chair panel was followed by the truly mirthful Respyni Brothers juggling act.

Walt Mossberg was next up. Before he started his tech column at the Wall Street Journal. ten years ago he was covering wars, the world economy, international affairs and other such frothy delights. Yet he would only get one or two letters a year from readers. As soon as he started the tech column, he started hearing from hundreds of readers a day. Why, he asked, do people not care enough about world affairs to write, but if they disagree with his slightest opinion about computers, they write long, passionate missives? Great question with lots of answers. (My book, Small Pieces, actually is an attempt to answer that question, at least with regard to the Web.)

Mossberg is quite funny, by the way. And frank. He said that James Baker, Secretary of State under Bush Sr., used to have a computer in his office that Baker had no idea how to operate. One key was color coded and hard wired to call up the current value of the dollar so that in meetings with foreign dignitaries, Baker could spin around, hit the key, and say “Hmm, looks like the dollar is currently trading at 1202 Lira,” or whatever. He also said that when Mossberg told Baker that he was dropping his coverage of the State Department in favor of writing a tech column, Baker said, “What the fuck would you do that for?” Answer: Mossberg saw that a revolution in technology was going to change the world. When last seen, Mossberg was one of the most respected tech journalists with an international readership and James Baker was fixing a tawdry election in Florida.

Dean Kamen gave a 30 minute presentation, standing the entire time on a Segway. The Segway is supremely cool, but seeing Kamen “pacing” on the scooter made it look like a cybernetic attachment rather than a mode of transportation. In his rambling (rolling?) remarks, he defended the value of the Segway by saying that because it goes three times faster than walking, it extends the effective range of a person without a car and thus can replace cars within cities. (Of course, so can bikes for most people.) I have no idea if the Segway will catch on because it involves replacing so many ingrained habits and assumptions. His bionic pacing only seemed to make the hurdle higher. (Dan Bricklin’s article on the Segway’s importance is likely to become of historic interest as we look back on how the Segway phenomenon transformed human mobility and cities … or just fizzled.)

But Kamen really wanted to talk about First, not Segway. First is his program to involve more women and minorities in the sciences. He showed a tape of one of the First robotic competitions. The high school students’ stories were quite moving. There is greatness wrapped up in Kamen. And legends have already begun.

He also said that the Ibot — the stair-climbing, human-elevating wheelchair — should be cleared as a Class 3 medical device this year. And, he showed one of the Stirling engines he’s been working on. He says that the small engine can move a Segway from New York to Boston on a kilogram of propane. And, the heat that it throws off could be used, he said, to distill 10 gallons of water an hour, potentially ending the curse of dirty water that is the world’s biggest killer while simultaneously bringing electricity to remote villages.

Yo-Yo Ma brought out a troupe of musicians playing instruments from around the world. They performed two pieces written around 1500, the sort of courtly, tuneful European music of the time that I’ve found no more than entertaining. This I found moving. In part it is the joy with which Ma leads his group and the joy with which they play. It helped also that I’ve been listening to Ma and watching his astonishing growth (from his astounding beginning) all my adult life. Ma is not particularly articulate in terms of his sentence structure, but he is remarkably eloquent. He conveyed vividly the way in which the world’s music is connected. I choked up.

Then, in response to the multiple standing ovations, he played Bach, alone. This was one of the richest musical experiences in my life. I wept. (Good thing he stopped because the next escalation of my response would have involved unsightly stains.)

There were many other speakers. Some were excellent. A few were self-involved, conspicuous duds. For the rest of the day, I never quite left Ma’s performance.

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TED is all about the time between the presentations when we mingle and the class sytem is evoked in every glance even as it is ostensibly being overcome. I bumped into Ma and did the standard fan thing: shook his hand, told him that his performance moved me. Among the other celebrities: Rupert Murdoch dressed like someone had to tell him what “business casual” means. Bruce Villanch, the center square on Hollywood Squares. Neil Simon. Art Buchwald. Jeffrey Katzenberg.

I am not counting computer industry folks such as Danny Hillis, Jeff Bezos and Alan Webber. And, of course, why would I even mention the non-celebrities? Just because that’s from whom I’m learning almost everything of value? It does seem that there is an extraordinarily high percentage of really interesting non-celebs here; almost anyone you strike up a converation with is passionate and articulate about something.

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There’s no reason to point to the dud presentations. But I’m steamed about one. A marketing guy from Nike talked with great pride about the “world shoe” project, which he presented as a way for Nike to expand sales from the 180M sneakers per year it’s been stalled at for three years. So, he came up with the idea of designing a shoe that can sell in the third world for about $10. Fine and dandy.

I’m not saying he had to use the word “sweatshop,” but some acknowledgement in his brief history of Nike that there have been some, let’s say, concerns about Nike’s record would have been appreciated … especially since he said that “Now the kids who work in the factory can buy the sneakers they make.” “Kids”?! Can a Nike marketing guy really be that insensitive to the perception of Nike as an exploiter of children? But what really moved my cheese was his casual assumption that if Nike needs to make more money, of course it should stimulate demand for swooshed shoes among those who could find a better use for their $10. Demand stimulation is one of the things wrong with capitalism although in an affluent society it is merely wasteful and psychologically debilitating. In an impoverished society, it is manipulative, selfish, and pornographic. So, fuck him and the sneaker he rode in on.

[Note: The author wishes to acknowledge that the preceding remarks on Nike show a remarkable naivete about the world economy and the nature of capitalism. Thank you.]

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Self-Promo

Imagine my surprise to find that James Fallows plucks the following passage from Small Pieces Loosely Joined, my upcoming book, in an article in The New York Review of Books about a discussion in the Boston Review of Republic.com by Cass Sunstein. He uses the quotation to counter Sunstein’s “central claim that the Internet has a narrowing effect on people’s minds”:

…there is more and more to distract us—more sites to visit, more arguments to jump into, more dirty pictures to download, more pure wastes of time. The fact that the Web is distracting is not an accident. It is the Web’s hyperlinked nature to pull our attention here and there. But it is not clear that this represents a weakening of our culture’s intellectual powers, a lack of focus…. Maybe set free in a field of abundance, our hunger moves us from three meals a day to day-long grazing…. Perhaps the Web isn’t shortening our attention span. Perhaps the world is just getting more interesting.

Cool! Of course, I mean that in a blase, post-hip sort of way.

But, enough about me. (Hah!) Fallows’ article is its normal thoughtful, lively self. Plus, it ends with a long letter from Bill Gates explaining why he would never and could never have said “640K should be enough for anyone,” a canard that — like Gore supposedly claiming to have invented the Internet — will probably never take No for an answer.

[Thanks, Doc and Kevin Marks for pointing the article out.]

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MetaTag: You’re It!

So, Dave blogs about Doc blogging about Jacob Shwirtz blogging about bloggers blogging about blogging, and now I reference Dave, enabling me to achieve a Level 5 Meta-Blog, making me the most meta-blogging blogger on the planet! Woohoo!

…At least unless someone blogs this (:

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Renewable Energy

Dan Pink suggests that the global epidemic of obesity

will become a public health brouhaha—replete with big ad campaigns, legions of law suits, and political posturing—that will make the battles over smoking seem tame.

Au contraire! The obese will be recognized as a renewable source of energy as the oil companies open up giant liposuction wells in the middle of every American population center. (Two in Chicago). Overeating will become our patriotic duty.

Sure you can have my Twinkie … when you pry it from my cold, dead, pudgy fingers.

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Life among the Famous

So, I’m standing next to Yo-Yo Ma who’s saying to Herbie Hancock that Herbie’s new outreach program is tremendously exciting. So, I say to Yo-Yo … absolutely nothing. I stand there like a dork. Totally appropriate behavior.

I expect to have many more C2D (Celebrity-to-Dork) non-encounters over the next few days. I’m at the TED conference, this odd confab of digeratti, entertainers, media types and then the rest of us.

I missed yesterday’s sessions and arrived in time only for the opening cocktail party, a self-consciously “elegant” affair that pretended that holding a martini automatically makes you sophisticated. I took a tour of the jammed ballroom when I got there and realized that I was literally the only person not talking with someone else. I am not good at meeting strangers. In fact, I get depressed in crowds of strangers, especially if they’re enjoying themselves.

Eventually, however, I fell into a conversation with the guy who was demoing the Alias/Wavefront Portfolio Wall touchscreen device. “Touchscreen device” seriously understates it. It’s a gorgeous, large flat panel screen that responds to gestures, very much as Bruce Tognazzini’s “Star Office” video envisioned it years ago. Watching people walk up to the screen it seems that there are maybe three gestures that people naturally use (pointing to select, dragging to move, waving to turn a page) and after that, we’re going to have to make up more. The gestures Alias/Wavefront have invented seem completely obvious once they show you. (The company has looked at American Sign Language as a source.) The demo Alias/Wavefront has put together is stellar, including a seemingly pointless sketching app that spins out swirly, fading designs as you move your hands … sort of like what you saw when your chemcially-whacked brain watched your hands waving in air. You know your product demos well if it actually causes an acid flashback.

I started talking with the demo guy who turns out to be Tom Wujec whose third book, “Return on Imagination”, will be out in April. (His previous book was the felicitiously titled Pumping Ions.) We spent a half hour talking about visualization software, the effect of the Web on real world self-understanding, gestures, and the like. Better than a martini.

The trip from Boston to LA was surprisingly fun because I happened to be seated next to the illustrator David Macauley (”The Way Things Work”) who was also on his way to the conference. I’ve long been an admirer of his work. What a gift he has. And what a good guy. Thoughtful, warm-hearted, funny. He’s just at the beginning of a project that will take him 2.5-3 years: a book that describes visually the building of a human being, system by system. This will be fascinating not only because of its topic but because Macauley is reflective about how to convey information … not to mention that he draws real good, too.

As if to round out my day of the Varieties of Famous Experience, at the LA airport where I volunteered to be bumped from an overbooked flight (in place of a guy who said he had an important meeting … that afterwards turned out to be with the national Meat Association, causing my vegetarian heart to momentarily have misgivings) who was standing next to me at the counter but Ben Stein. Those of you not immersed to your pineal gland in pop culture may not know that he’s the whiny-voiced, dull-looking actor who also was a law professor and on Richard Nixon’s legal team. In our little Celebrity Encounter he was actually quite nice and self-effacing. Unlike with Yo-Yo and Herbie, I did not feel speechless.

More reports on Fear of the Famous from the conference later. Who knows, I may even blog about the content.

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Enron Humor

The Enron voice answering system.

Thanks, J. Arnold

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Get Your War On

The new mnftiu is available. We’re watching genius unfold.

Thanks, Gary for the early warning.

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Meta Tag: You’re It!

So, Dave blogs about Doc blogging about Jacob Shwirtz blogging about bloggers blogging about blogging (and also points to Kumquat on the five stages of blogging, and now I reference Doc, enabling me to achieve a Level 5 MetaBlog, making me the most meta-blogging blogger on the planet! Woohoo!

…At least unless someone blogs this (:

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Domestic Life On Slashdot

 

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday February 14, @09:25AM Kathleen Fent Read This Story Kathleen, I wanted to do this in the most potentially embarrassing way possible, and I figured doing it here and now, in front of a quarter million strangers, was as good a way as any. We’ve been together for many years now, and I’ve known for most of that time that I wanted to spend my life with you. Enough rambling. Will you marry me?” From Kathleen Yes Dork. You made me cry.

 

Yo, InstaClair, It’s your turn to do the dishes by Dogaroni
I cooked. You clean.
Doggy howl by Mackaroon
Arf! You tell her, Dogman!
	RE: Doggy howl Posted by Jimba23
	Mark your territory, man!
	RE: Doggy howl Posted by Tootertwist
	They ought to make yellow scented markers smell like pee.
		RE: Doggy howl Posted by Scarrrly
		Another marketing genius speaks.
		RE: Doggy howl Posted by GetOuttaFace
		Let me know if you need a refill, moron.
Household economy Posted by Louisalot
Yeah, swing your pathetic 4 inches of capitalist hegemony, Dogaroni. And pray that no one sends her to a link to anything by Mahauser.
	Re: Household economy Posted by OnePureDork
	Oh, like Mahauser, that Gramsci-wannabe dwarf, had anything to say about feminism that’s worth the petrochemicals it took to print it. Wood pulp makes more sense than Mahauser.
		Re: Household economy Posted by Happifat79
		And it tastes better too. Mmmmmm, wood pulp.
			Re: Household economy Posted by EyePokemon
			Oooh, a Simpsons reference! How clever!
				Re: Household economy Posted by Famisboyo
				D’oh!
YinYang Posted by SweetWind
Cook/Clean. The yin and yang.
	Re: YinYang Posted by Alfalfamale
	Such typical BS. Suppose he scorched 6 pots making bald eagle stew and she’s a vegan monk who only wants a cup of basmati rice? Where’s your yin now? What gives you the right to pontificate from your mountaintop? How about putting down your yang for a while and coming to live in the real world.
		Re: YinYang Posted by SweetWind
		You show the pain of one still strugling in the world.
			Re: YinYang Posted by TheMoe
			You show the pain of one still "strugling" with touch typing.
And also Posted by Acknoider
I looked. You lean.
	Re: And also Posted by Dogaroni
	I booked. You bean.
	Re: And also Posted by Minimerlin
	I croked. You cream.
	Re: And also Posted by Oisybeois
	I choked. You chinese.
	Re: And also Posted by MmmmenoR67
	Nookie nookie nookie nookie nookie
No it’s not Posted by InstaClair
I did them last night when I cooked so you could watch the "Mork and Mindy" reunion. Remember?
	Re: No it’s not Posted by Dogaroni
	Oh yeah. I forgot. By the way, have you seen the remote?
		Re: No it’s not Posted by Smilgrezza
		You know, we wouldn’t have this problem if remotes went Open Source.
			Re: No it’s not Posted by Arkwrong
			D’oh!

 
PS: Here’s Suck’s
parody of Slashdot. (Thanks, Doc.)

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Both And

Kevin Marks, inventor of the Marks marks of Googlewhacking, writes:

Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily, a couple of pieces that may throw some oblique light on lengthy meditations on how one’s personality is expressed and even formed though public writings.

One is an article by Constance Rosenblum about what it’s like to lose all your email. Having lost the past five months’ worth, I sympathize; I might as well have been told that a brain virus ate five months of memories.

The other is a review by the philosopher Thomas Nagel of a biography of Nietzsche. Writes Nagel:

This does not mean that greater self-knowledge is impossible: indeed, plunging beneath your own inner surface through both psychological and historical investigation is essential. But knowledge is not the main point. The point is to achieve a different kind of existence: to live one’s life in the full complexity of what one is, which is something much darker, more contradictory, more of a maelstrom of impulses and passions, of cruelty, ecstasy, and madness, than is apparent to the civilized being who glides on the surface and fits smoothly into the world. Because we are not animals, we are in a position to take conscious possession of ourselves in this way; but because we are socialized human beings, we tend instead to accept the superficial identities and the orderly system of beliefs that civilization has assigned to us.

You go, Nagel! The Web is an unparalleled realm for living the complexity of our social identities.

Which is a backwards way of getting at something that’s been bothering me. Remember Nietszsche’s Appolionian/Dionysian complementarity — the sedate, rational, respectful-of-limits Apollo and the wild, drunken, omni-mounting Dionysus? Having been involved in an Apollonian discourse on the nature of authenticity and self — the blogthread that’s been wending it’s way through many blogs over the past week — my inner Dionysius is getting antsy. All yin and no yang makes Jack a dull boy. Not that there’s been an overall shortage of Dionysian yang on the Web; we should be welcoming Apollo back and trying to make him feel at home. But, let’s face it, Apollo gets a bit tiresome (while Dionysus is just plain exhausting). We need to be able to say Yes to both the clear, insightful, patient and loving work of Apollo as well as the murky, felt, hasty, lusty, funny and loving work of Dionysius. Then they need to hit the road and star in a buddy movie together…

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Game Notes

Scott McCloud, in his comic strip about games (”Discovering Games”) in the March Computer Gaming World, quotes game designer Doug Church:

Our desire to create traditional narratives and exercise authorial control over the gaming world often inhibits the players’ ability to involve themselves with the gaming world.

Exactly the same is true of businesses presenting themselves on the Web. The more they exercise control over their site, the less involving (or even useful) it is for visitors. All but a handful of business sites make this mistake. They view think their site is for them. Which is why we don’t care about them.

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The “Shadows of Luclin” add-on to the online game
EverQuest requires 512MB of RAM for the graphics to
display properly.

This necessarily generates Geezer Stories such as: “Why, I remember when I was at Interleaf in 1988 and it was considered outrageous and even arrogant to require a Power Mac user to have 4MB of RAM. Why, today’s programmers are spoiled…”

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MiscLinks

From Chris Pirillo’s Lockergnome games discussion board comes a free game, called Crash!, that is surprisingly hypnotic in a Bejeweled sort of way. Thanks, Ernest! (The help files for this beta version aren’t very helpful. The object is to clear the board. Clicking on a square will clear it if it shares a border with two others of the same color; its border mates are also cleared. The bottom line of the screen shows you the next line of squares that will be added.)

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Paul Graham, who is an acquaintance from a previous life at a software company, has written a really interesting explanation of why his start-up used Lisp to write their application, including an argument about what constitutes a higher level language. (Thanks to Bret Pettichord for pointing this out.)

Of course, this recalls the old joke that circulated via email about ten years ago. “I’ve managed to hack into the Defense Department’s Star Wars code,” it explained breathlessly. “Unfortunately, I was only able to get the last page.” What followed were 2,000 close-parentheses. Oh, the tears of laughter were like CDRs to the Lisp geeks’ eyes over that one!

My own book, The Adventurer’s Guide to Interleaf Lisp, continues to sell high into the single digits every year. I only wish I were kidding.

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A Day on the Blogstream

Take Friday on the blogstream…

Read Mike Golby, Akma, Steve Himmer and Tom Matrullo, four brilliant writers with fast-beating hearts all writing on the same topic. Ten days ago, three were new to me.

Compare Akma’s and Steve’s careful precision that honors the topic to Tom’s inhabiting of history that enriches it to Mike’s jazz that invigorates it. Or don’t compare. Just delight in them all.

See if you can follow the threads which led to those posts. Reconstruct a dance from a snapshot. Here’s a salad, now rebuild the lettuce.

In the course of a week, they and others just as worthy have spun up a body of thought about an idea. Analysts have analyzed it. Artists have riffed on it. Practitioners have applied it. Ideas have been proposed and withdrawn. Certainty has been broached by a more useful indecision. A new type of focus has drawn an ever-widening horizon. Feelings have been hurt as we feel our way towards one another. There’s been at least one return to faithful roots. I have a handful of new friends I expect never to lose. We are writing a new book — distributed, contradictory, in process, unowned, right and wrong, loud and soft, angry and glad, inspired and dull, alone and together.

Don’t tell me this isn’t new. Don’t tell me that it’s “basically like” this or that.

This is what happens when you take the ownership out of the authorship and build a world out of conversation.

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Authenticity – Another perspective

Vergil Iliescu says it’s ok for me to blog email he sent me yesterday:

Just a comment on the authenticity issue in your blog. I’ve just started reading “The Psychology of the Internet” by Patricia Wallace. I don’t know whether you’ve heard of it, but it is quite interesting so far. Chapter 3 is called “Online Masks & Masquerades”, and includes the following comment : “When we alter the characteristics of ourselves on the Internet – even fundamental ones like age, race or gender – we might not think of ourselves as liars or con artists. … We might feel more like researchers, or experimenters. We are playing with our own identities and trying out different hats to see how they feel and how others will react to them. Though deception is a key ingredient, it may not seem quite the same as lying for personal gain.”

The Internet creates the opportunity to create a persona (mask), and this is generally acceptable. If you did that kind of thing in the office, you would likely be considered either a liar, not genuine or nuts. Yet we probably all are slightly different people at home to the person we are in the office. Too big a difference might be a problem. I think the Internet somehow creates a distance, a separation which allows you to be/play a different personality. I wonder why. Maybe it’s because you just don’t get the same visual and verbal clues, and it is easier to be consistent, since you are writing, for the most part. In Billy Connolly’s biography, written by his wife Pamela Stevenson, she notes that Billy doesn’t use the internet because the people who do are “the kind of people you wouldn’t talk to in a pub anyway” (or something like that, I’m quoting from memory). I don’t agree literally with that comment of course, but I think it illustrates that his perception is that the relationship, for him, would not be sufficiently authentic – can’t see the guy, can’t smell the guy, and worse, can’t share a drink.

As for corporations, I don’t know what to think –- authentic must basically mean consistency in behaviour, actions, and statements (more like the congruence you mentioned [And I was quoting Bill Seitz - dw]). If the Body Shop starts exploiting natives in South America, and testing only on unpleasant little animals like smelly sewer rats, then they would instantly lose their authenticity, since that is what they are on about. But there is no point in looking for a soul. Push past the vision statements and financial reports and you just find a bunch of people doing their job, or trying to.

Vergil pulls us back to the topic we started with: Can marketing be authentic? When the British Mini company creates an aw-shucks, witty site, should we trust it and them, or should we feel manipulated, or both, or neither? Yes, the Internet introduces (or exposes) a gap in our selves, a gap I think it’s useful to think of as like the gap between an author and her characters. Yes, “authenticity” seems not to apply to marketing campaigns and corporations, but congruence of statement and action seems helpful. Yes, the bodilessness of the Internet must have a deep effect on the nature of our self. Yes, Billy Connolly reminds us that one of parrhesia’s greatest forms, at least in the modern world — from Lenny Bruce to mnftiu — is humor.

Thanks, Vergil.

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A Miss and a Link

KateCoe writes:

I read your mention of Hot Topic and “bottom up” fashion design. This is nothing new. Six long years ago I worked as scout for Converse. I went out with a home video camera, talked to people in surf shops, movie lines, concerts, etc. Then, I turned over the tapes, and the kids’ opinions and reactions were endlessly analyzed. And I was at the tail end of the action, as they’d been doing it for about 3 years before I got the gig.

A & F [Abercrombie & Fitch] no doubt does just the same thing. All the companies use forecasting services who scout around for coming trends that some brave soul is already wearing, and then revamp it for mass market. If you wanted to give a plug to Hot Topic, that’s nice. But this technique isn’t anything revolutionary.

Yeah, I can see that. I wouldn’t even have mentioned it except I wanted to get to the inherent contradiction in Hot Topic’s mass marketing to non-conformists. Thanks for the info.

---

Marek says that b!X’s mom’s blog is “the coolest.” No argument here.

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The Clued and the Clueless

Mark Justman, from the Institute for Alternative Futures (leading one to ask: aren’t all futures alternatives?) recommends Zoot as a product and a company:

Zoot is a ECCO/Agenda-like PIM that is coded and
sold by a one-man operation. What can be rather
interesting is that bug fixes and suggested new
features can (and do) get added in a matter of
days…not months or never.

Also, the Zoot faithful do a fair share of user
support on the Zoot discussion group, which also
contains sample databases and instructional files
created by Zoot users. Several of these users have
even begun to construct a collaborative guide and
help manual for Zoot:

It’s also a very nifty tool for personal Knowledge
Management.

I haven’t installed the demo version yet, but James Fallows, in a 1997 review in The Atlantic Monthly, praises it. The site has a sense of humor, and the fact that it was built by one person (a recovering ad man) makes me trust its voice more. (Could I have fallen for a fiendish attempt to sound friendly? Absolutely!)

---

Jonathan Peterson writes:

… I think it’s a
really nicely put together view of how NOT to grow a
Cluetrained company. I’ve long been hoping that
someone would write down what happened at arsDigita
and Philip Greenspun can’t because of his legal
settlement.

The drift from open, active profitable (What Joel
calls the Ben and Jerry’s model) to big, closed (and finally unprofitable is
sad and painful even to the detached reader. The
quotes from employees are the voices that pull the
whole story together.

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AutoGoogleWhacker 2

Ken Walton has put up a site that lets you googlewhack painlessly. It also tracks high
scores. You should also check this site, although the name of the person who created
it got lost in my disk
crash. Sorry!

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Authentic Miscellany

The blogthread (hmm, does the fact that it’s multi-site meant that it’s a blogyarn, not a blogthread?) about authenticity, marketing and the world has some excellent comments and additions.

Bill Seitz writes:

… in addition to authenticity and voice, perhaps the term Congruence has some play here. I’ve run across it mainly in a management context, but it’s a bigger/meatier/softer idea.

On Bill’s site congruence is defined as “Having action be congruent with thought. Doing what you know you should do.”

Oy, Bill, don’t go deepening this discussion on us! Authenticity has usually been taken to be within the realm of self-understanding, not action. But, of course, not only could you re-construe the entire discussion along the lines of the congruence of thought and action, but you would immediately plunge into a literally theological debate. E.g., faith versus works, to put it Christianly. For Jews, the faith/works model doesn’t work all that well. And now we’re off to the races…

Maybe congruence is all that we can or should demand of a business. I still believe that “authenticity” just doesn’t apply to organizations, but if we take corporate “thought” to mean not only the codified “vision” and “mission” but its external marketing, then, yes, if Monsanto is preaching “building a better world for all of us,” then I damn well want their actions to be congruent with that. In fact, I care much more about congruence than authenticity in this case.(By the way, I made up Monsanto’s motto.)

---

Andrew Ross writes:

I have been reading your recent thread about authenticity with great interest, as my own research [He's at Oxford - dw] deals quite a bit with learners creating a sense of community (and with that, a sense of belonging) on the Internet.

I’ve come to believe that authenticity is where you find it — some people arrive at the person/ether interface with a well-established sense of self that carries through in toto into the Internet, and some others use the opportunity to lose the body as a change to renegotiate their selves. What results is a system that allows people either to import or to synthesize identity. It seems strange (and probably misleading) to discuss whether or not a projection of self is ‘true’ or ‘authentic’, mostly because doing so assumes a binary true/false duality of self. Perhaps we should speak in terms of two relative loci of being (’In situation X, I am more/less like I am in Y’) rather than one fixed and one fluid locus, as we tend to do (’In situation C, I am more/less like myself’). Authenticity therefore would be more a description of how acting/speech in a particular context is like that in contexts that a person believes are important to defining who s/he is.

I like the way this helps get us out of the trap of thinking (to put it in a purposefully loaded way) that not only do we have a single “inner self” but that that self is who we really are. It also provides a model that removes some of the traditional moral weight of authenticity — “Thou Shalt Be Authentic” — so that it’s more descriptive than prescriptive. This lets authenticity apply better to the Web where having a variety of selves and personae may be a sign of creativity, flexibility or playfulness rather than an indication that your moral core is flabby.

I think that Andrew’s view of authenticity makes it pretty irrelevant to corporations, which is fine with me. Or am I just thinking about this wrong?

---

Jonathan Peterson writes:

David Rogers‘ observations are pretty interesting, as is your response. It seems that the voice of the ideal cluetrained corporation is a gestaltic chorus, guided by a clear understanding of core corporate values and ideals. To become clue’d, a company has to have fundamental values that are clearly understood and shared by all employees (and partners/customers for that matter).

The problem is that all the vision statements in the world won’t actually tell you who a company IS, for that you must be there for a period of time. And the majority of companies are very different from who they say they are.

I worked with Earthlink in the very early web days, packaging an Earthlink sign up kit in our CD-ROM titles from CNN in ‘95), and have been a customer since then. Perhaps apocryphal, but earthlink’s founders claim to have created this statement BEFORE deciding what their business was going to be: http://www.earthlink.net/about/ourvalues/cvb/

Interestingly http://www.earthlinksucks.net/ is a good example of how the internet can enable the voice of a single person. How these things inter-relate may be an interesting real-world lesson in corporate core values, voice and what happens when a company forgets where it came from through mergers, loss of founders, etc.

So, this would ground a company’s idea of itself in its actual history. I like that a lot. And it has an odd impact on the implications of Andrew’s and Bill’s ideas, for we don’t necessarily want congruence between a company’s history and its actions but this longer view of corporate identity maybe gives a way to identify an authentic (!) inner core of a company. (In The Cluetrain Manifesto, Doc and I wrote that positioning isn’t a matter of taking a blank piece of paper and jotting down some ideas. In fact, the market positions companies. And it can take generations before, say, Volkswagen is no longer “branded” as a Nazi car.)

---

Good heavens, is AKMA a masterful writer and the rare person who raises up all who meet him. His latest is brilliant along several axes. Unfortunately, I deleted the blog of mine to which he refers because I thought it was, well, crap. Had I known that it figures in AKMA’s latest authentico-blog, I might have left it up just so his links wouldn’t be dead. (I also was affected by the “hot ‘n heavy theological mash note” AKMA’s wife sent him yesterday.)

---

Dave Rogers, part of the original blogthread on this topic, has a terrific piece on whether Love is really the killer app. It’s very much on the same theme as the blogthread since it asks if businesses are capable of love. He also has blogged praise for Santa Cruz Bicycles as a company that perhaps deserves to be described as authentic. (I ran an interview with them in my ‘zine because I was similarly impressed with them.)

---

Jason Thompson is off to a great start with his new blog, including an entry about voice and marketing.

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And, Jacob Shwirtz has entered the fray with a piece on trust. (”Fray” is the wrong word for this virulently civil discussion.) He includes a long quote from an entertaining rant from Dennis Miller.

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MiscLinks

Mike O’Dell sends us to a taxonomy of Flame Warriors, i.e., obnoxious Net types. Unfortunately, I recognized myself in over 75% of them.

Chip has found “more Google tales,” a provocative column by Eric Zorn that juxtaposes anecdotes about where the new line of privacy should be drawn given that we can find out ‘most anything about ‘most anybody by doing a search at Google.

Brad Bauer recommends Sidestep.com where you can download a free tool that lets you see various travel sites’ suggestions side by side. (I haven’t tried it, so if it eats your desktop and sends pornographic fonts to everyone in your address book, send your flames direct to Brad.)

Gary Unblinking Stock, Creator of the Googlewhack, points us to The Secret Life of Numbers, a fascinating (in the literal sense) site that does an amazing job of presenting its research into the frequency with which we use particular numbers. I assume that the fact that I can’t make heads nor tails of the shimmering graphics is my fault; I have trouble making sense of timelines.

Gilbert Cattoire has a pair of finds. First at the home of the Post-It Note, he writes, we learn that “refillable holders have a unique,very specific objective: Improve employee relations.”

Second, he points us to Annotis.com where you can get the tools to scribble on top of your email, highlighting passages, drawing little smiley faces, and putting horns on top of every instance of the phrase “my manager.”

Although I’m late blogging this, it’s sure important enough to repeat: Peter Kaminski recommends Lawrence Lessig’s Creative Commons where creators can get IP licenses that make sense. (Both Peter and Larry are Net treasures.)

---

Dave Rogers recommends a lecture by Brenda Laurel called “Creating Core Content in a Post-Convergence World.” She says:

… we are not experiencing convergence in the sense of media. We are experiencing a diaspora of displays and devices that will address even finer distinctions in situated context. … The opportunity here is to understand how to design what I would call “core content” that contains the potential to be shaped appropriately for myriad devices and contexts.

She proposes that we think “transmedia” to begin with, rather than rooting the content in one medium, and then talks about ways to think about this cross-device content, including a quote from Rob Tow that “narratives are the constitutions of new worlds.”

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NPR: Weblogs and Journalism

Click here if you want to listen to my brief commentary last night on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” on weblogs’ effect on journalism. (You’ll need the Real player to listen.) If you’re a blogger, you’re not going to learn anything you don’t already know…

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The Real Blogger’s Manifesto

Because parody is the sincerest form of flattery:

The Real Blogger’s Manifesto
Life is uncensored.	Life is uncensored, but my clients and my Mom may be reading my blog.
You have no right to judge me.	You have no right to judge me, but judging you is totally fun.
If you don’t like what you see, look elsewhere.	If you don’t like what you see, still link to me.
I love talking about my life.	I love talking about my life but, unfortunately, not to myself.
I love writing about other people’s lives.	I love writing about other people’s lives when it makes my life look good.
I will post whenever I feel like posting.	I will post obsessively.
I don’t have to blog every meme.	I don’t have to blog every meme. But I will. Oh, and I count fantasies, insults and grunts as memes.
You don’t have to agree with everything I say.	You don’t have to agree with everything I say so long as you link to me.
I egosurf Daypop, Google, and Blogdex nightly.	I egosurf Daypop, Google and Blogdex compulsively as if it gave meaning to my life.
I share what I want to share.	I share what I want to share. But you have to ask first.
I like linking to Dave, Doc, Evan, and Cam.	I like linking to people who link to me.
Blogging is theraputic.	Blogging is a neurosis.
Pictures of myself are not obligatory.	Pictures of myself are highly edited.
I visit every site in my blogroller regularly.	I visit every site in my blogroller regularly to make sure they’re still linking to me.
I won’t post for the sake of posting.	I won’t post for the sake of posting. I will post to get linked to.
I have a life outside of blogging.	I have a life outside of blogging, but when I blog about it, I lie.
I have registered my blogging tool(s).	I have registered my blogging tool under the name “B. S. Bogusboy”.
I may criticize other bloggers, not harass them.	I may criticize other bloggers, but I will only harrass them until they link to me.
I have the right to revise a post.	If you criticize me, I will revise my post so that yours looks stupid.
When blogging becomes a chore, I’ll quit doing it.	When blogging becomes a chore, I’ll write about my cat. Again.
I’ve given something back to the blogging community.	I’m giving the blogging community a headache.
If I want to complain about something, I will.	I want to complain about everything.
If I want to praise something, I will.	If I praise you, you must link to me.
I am not the best blogger on the planet.	I’m the best motherfucking blogger on the planet.
I don’t have to explain myself to you.	I don’t have to explain myself to you. But I will. Endlessly. Until you link to me.
- Chris Pirillo	- David Weinberger
Chris’ original Blogger’s Manifesto is here.

Happy Valentine’s Day, Chris : )

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The Authenticity Complex

There’s too much to reply to in AKMA’s, Tom’s, and Dave’s blogthreading about authenticity. I feel like we’ve developed the topic well enough that blogging is no longer the right instrument of conversation. We should move this to a discussion board where the topics are more fragmented (shorter posts, faster replies) or even to a chat room. Nevertheless…

AKMA is right to remind us that selves are much more complex than my “inner self/outer self” explanation of sincerity and authenticity implies. In fact, “authenticity” impies a much more complex relationship whereby what is public is either “owned up to” or not … in an infinite variety of ways. Most of our great literary characters, from Hamlet to Madame Bovary to Zuckerman, are great because the complexity of the relation of who they are, who they seem and who they own up to being. (That this starts with Shakespeare lends credence to Bloom’s seemingly ridiculous claim that Shakespeare invented what we think of as a person.) This fact makes it much, much harder to think about what authenticity is.

AKMA’s main point in that particular blog entry, however, is that our Web personae are not extrinsic to our real selves. I wholeheartedly agree. That’s why our Web personae are interesting and important to us. That’s why we’re writing ourselves into existence on the Web. In fact, in a single blog I managed to say both that “As I understand the term, ‘authenticity’ assumes that there is a public outer self and an inner private self and that the two are intimately related” and “If your outer self doesn’t pretend to represent your inner self, you’re now in a politics of theatre or authorship, not one of personal identity.” (Emphasis added.) I meant the first to say exactly what AKMA says better: we are our public selves. The second overstates what I meant, for it implies there’s no relation between public and private selves. AKMA admirably spells out the complexity of that relationship. The point I was trying to make was that the relation of Web self to “real” self is different than, and looser than, the relation of RW public self and RW private self. It’d be useful to explore that relationship. Maybe it’ll take a Tolstoy or a Flaubert to do it successfully.

So, I like AKMA’s suggestion that “while ‘authenticity’ may be elusive as a positive quality, ‘inauthenticity’ may be easier to get hold of.” (I also like Dave’s idea that could reel in this discussion by talking about what it actually means for business.) John Austin, the British philosopher, once warned us not to be fooled by the existence of a word into assuming that it must denote some existing thing. For example, I may use the word “real” to distinguish a real gun from a toy gun, real money from counterfeit, real feelings from feigned feelings, real juice from reconstituted juice, etc. It would be a mistake, suggests Austin, to assume that there must be a thing called “reality.” Rather, the word “real” perhaps only has a use like the word “very.” Likewise, the word “authentic” when applied to people (as opposed to Louis XIV furniture) perhaps should be understood as meaning “not inauthentic.” (Well, I guess that wasn’t exactly Austin’s point, but I like Austin’s point so much I’m going to leave it here anyway. So there!) Perhaps “authentic” means nothing more than “Not a phony, not an ass-kisser, not a lying sack o’ shit.”

We got started on this because I blogged about whether the Corporate Voice could ever actually be authentic. (Actually, as I reread my post, I don’t use the term “authentic.” Dave Rogers introduces the term. So blame him! :) And I still think that neither “authentic” nor “inauthentic” can apply to an entity with neither body nor soul … nor, as RB always reminds us, sex organs.

(And I haven’t even replied to extraordinarily rich blog entries from Dave and Tom!)

Here’s a blogthread, not quite up to date, of the story so far.

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Learning from the WSJ

One of my many failings (don’t get me started!) is an unreasonable antipathy to the Wall Street Journal. Yet, every time I read it, I learn something. I just don’t want to be the type of person who reads the WSJ. Adolescent? No, and now I’m going to go sit in my room, listen to OTown and eat an entire tube of Pringles.

Yesterday, for example, there were two interesting articles on the first page of the B section. Carol Hymowitz writes in the “In the Lead” column about a collaoration between the Orion String Quartet and Bill T. Jones’ dance troupe. The title of it implies that we’re supposed to be able to apply what we read to business: “Artistic Collaboration Offers Tips for Creating a Harmonious Merger.” It’s an interesting article, but the relevancy isn’t obvious. For example, it opens by telling of the quartet’s first meeting with Jones:

…they met a statuesque man wearing a long cape who immediately wanted to show them the dance he had choreographed to the third movement of Beethoven’s String Quarter in F, Op. 135.”

It may have gotten the collaboration off to a great start, but I’d really like to see how this applies to a business partnership:

…they met Jeff Bezos, an ordinary looking man wearing a long cape who immediately wanted to show them the investors’ dance he had choreographed to Amazon’s latest quarterly results.”

On the same page, there’s an article by Maureen Tkacik about Hot Topic, a suburban chain of clothing and accoutrement for teens. Unlike the Gap and Abercrombie & Fitch, Hot Topic doesn’t cater to “popular” teens. It’s clothing for the rest of us. In fact, Hot Topic sends scouts to rock concerts and other teen events to see what kids are wearing rather than trying to coerce kids into wearing what Hot Topic wants them to wear. Bottom up fashion design!

Of course, Hot Topic is stuck in its own teenage Hegelian contradictions. As the article notes, kids love it and hate it, no doubt in part because teenagers are determined not to like what they’re supposed to like. Similarly, “the chain strips dedicated nonconformists of a bit of their originality” by making it available to anyone whose Mom will give them a ride to the mall. Mainstream nonconformism is both an oxymoron and a way of life for a particular age group.

Given my own reaction to the WSJ, apparently I am in Hot Topic’s target demo.

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RW Collision and Rogue Agents

During the Q&A after my talk to the Customer Care 2002 conference, I was asked how the expectations being set by the Web show up concretely in customer call centers. Good question. Being fact-averse and reality-challenged, I claim no expertise, but it seems to me that there are two obvious effects.

First, there’s the nebulous effect of expecting to be treated like a live human being by another live human being. Hewing to the script is more annoying than ever after having been on the Web with employees who talk for and as themselves.

Second, when I call for customer support, I no longer assume that the person on the other end of the line is my only source of information. If I can’t find out from the cable company, for instance, how to hook up my home network through a Linksys router (”We don’t support home networks”), and if I can’t find out from Linksys (”We don’t know the details of your ISP”), I know for a fact that I can find someone on the Net who either already has a site up devoted to networking Linksys and my ISP, or I can find someone to ask. And the information I get from another user is more likely to be helpful — truthful, no BS — than what I get from the call center. I am no longer a supplicant when I call for help.

In fact, when talking with Sarah Kennedy, one of the conference conveners, we came up with an idea. If a customer support agent is uncomfortable giving me an off-script answer, send me to a “rogue agent” (Sarah’s phrase), someone explicitly positioned as a source of creative ideas and information that may not work but that may get me out of my predicament. A rogue agent would be permitted to say things like, “Yeah, I heard about that problem once before, and I saw on a Web site that if you uncheck PPPoE it should work, which makes sense to me. On the other hand, there’s a small chance it might fry your Linksys box, so don’t come crying to me, ok?” Obviously, rogue agents should be patrolling the Internet, to learn and to teach. Sounds like a cool job to me.

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Bush Abandons Universal Connectivity

Forwarded by David Isenberg from Benton.org, a non-profit devoted to gaining social benefit from communications technology:

Bush abandons national strategy to bridge the digital divide.

After a year of public speculation over whether the White House was committed to expanding Internet access and skills to all of America’s citizens, the administration has finally broken its silence. In its FY 2003 budget, the White House stripped over $100 million in public investments previously available for community technology grants and IT training programs—programs that offer real payoffs to rural communities, the working poor, minorities and children.

So predictable.

(For more infopinion(tm), see my blog entry about Technet and a piece called “The Paradox of the Best Network” that Isenberg and I wrote.)

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Missing a Day of Blog

I have to run to catch a plane. (Ottawa in February! Ah!) I’m speaking at a customer support conference and I’ve definitely decided to come out in favor of supporting customers. Sure it’s a controversial stand, but it’s what I believe.

This is the first time I’m going to be away from my blog. I barely have time to do an entry today, and tomorrow I expect to be blogless. I feel like the first time we went away for a night without our kids. Sniff sniff.

Mostly, I feel bad that some really interesting conversations are going to continue swirling and I’ll be left behind. Fortunately, I just finished reading the book “Thinking with the Left Side of Your Behind,” so maybe I’ll be able to catch up.

Here’s an example: AKMA has advanced the conversation about voice and authenticity that I’ve threaded here. Although I never thought I’d be using this as an analogy, I feel like I’m on a curling team. There’s this 42-pound stone that’s sliding its way down an alley, and AKMA, Dave Rogers, Tom Matrullo and I are walking along with it, adjusting its progress by sweeping the ice with brooms.

Gotta go…before I write any more bad analogies.

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Request for Product: International Searches

Through an email conversation with Jeff Chapman, we have come up with a Request for Product for Google:

Suppose you could optionally say that you’d like your search terms translated into other languages and then get returns in those languages.

For example, suppose you were looking for information on what vegans eat and for some reason you want to find English and German pages. You enter “vegans eat” into the search box and click on the “Find German pages” box. Google returns the hits for that phrase, but behind the scenes it translates your search terms into German and returns the pages that contain the phrase “Vegans essen”. It optionally translates those pages into English for you. Or, search for “environmental politics” and click on the “All languages” box, and it will translate into however many languages Google has dictionaries for.

As the engineers used to say at Interleaf, how hard could it be? You just have to get the bits in the right order :)

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Blogthread: Voice, Authenticity and More…

Continuing the blogthread among AKMA, Dave Rogers and AKMA (see the end of this entry) on authenticity, preaching, marketing and just about everything…

The latest entries are beautifully written, nuanced, thoughtful … everything I’ll mess up if I try to summarize them here. They have to do with whether authenticity for corporations is possible. But this has raised the question of what authenticity is for real individuals.

I’ve always been uncomfortable with the term “authenticity” but it names a concept that nevertheless we seem to need. I think this blogthread points to two places where the basic model of authenticity falls apart. As I understand the term, “authenticity” assumes that there is a public outer self and an inner private self and that the two are intimately related. “Sincerity” has to do with how accurately the outer self represents the inner self’s intentions, while “authenticity” has to do with how well the outer self represents the inner self’s self-understanding. Or maybe it just has to do with how well the inner self understands itself, which then gets reflected in the outer self.

If something like that is the case, here are two places where the term just doesn’t fit very well:

(1) Marketing. The problem isn’t a lack of sincerity, for marketing can reflect excellent intentions (although it’s rare because it has to fight the corporate entity’s inherent greed). The problem is that there’s no inner self to a corporation. It is an organization, not an individual. So the model within which “authenticity” makes sense breaks down.

(2) The Web. I’m less confident about this, but it seems to me that the Web frees us to create online selves that are personae. If your outer self doesn’t pretend to represent your inner self, you’re now in a politics of theatre or authorship, not one of personal identity. Asking “Is RageBoy authentic?” doesn’t make a lot of sense. If you were to discover, as per AMKA, that Ben & Jerry are polluting, right-wingers who have their ice cream made in Tunisian sweat shops, you would feel like you’d been lied to. If I were to tell you that Chris Locke is actually a sweet, kind man, you wouldn’t feel betrayed any more than if I were to tell you that Nabokov — despite Lolita — actually wasn’t a murderous pedophile.

This is why I’m so interested in the ways in which our Web selves are literary. (I’m sort of working on a sort of book proposal on this idea. Unlikely to succeed, so don’t hold me to it.)

Blogthreads (alphabetical order):

AKMA and AKMA
Tom Matrullo and Tom Matrullo
Dave Rogers, Dave Rogers, Dave Rogers
Me and me

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