Gill and Cudahy on the state of our democracy

Jock Gill and Michael Cudahy have an op-ed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette today suggesting that maybe not everything is so great with our democracy at the moment.

Cliptoon #2

Google screws up

Somehow Google's update of its index boosts me to the #3 listing for "david" and #4 for "blog"

I've lost a lot of respect for Google.

Awkward profile introductions

Zephoria uses something I wrote to delve into the way in which our profiles in a social network don't well serve the role of small-talk generation so important to building new relationships in the real world.

Cliptoon

Which of these, if either, do you prefer?

Life goes on. Hooray!

Denise is a mom!

Duelling showers

We're visiting my sister for Thanksgiving, staying in the traditional cheapo motel. This morning the shower started off strong: excellent volume and steaming hot. Suddenly, it went cold. I turned up the heat. After a few seconds, it was too hot. I turned it down. Suddenly it went cold. I turned it up. This repeated until I finally gave up.

As I got out, I realized that there was probably another patron in a neighboring shower who was working the dials in contradiction to me, establishing a rhythmic dance of temperatures.

And isn't that like so much of life?

Nah.

Lousy J

God but American journalism sucks when it's ordinary.

Take story (link will break tomorrow) on the front page of the Boston Globe today. It's fine. It's ok. It's typical. It sucks. The headline is a pretty good summary of the article:

On Trail, Dean hones
a populist message

Oh, sure, there's a whiff of cynicism: Dean is honing a message, not speaking from his heart. The media is fully complicit in the transformation of politics into marketing; that's the filter the media themselves use.

Then the article itself begins.

As a presidential contender, Howard Dean has made a name for himself as a verbal rough-rider — arguing his case against the war in Iraq and President Bush's tax cuts with the kind of unstinting rhetoric that has won over Democrats eager to see a bruising battle against Bush next fall.

That is: "Up until now, we've focused on Dean as a verbal rough-rider." In fact, the author may pretty much admit this in the next paragraph:

But on the campaign trail, Dean's throw-down-the-gauntlet mantra is woven with another message, one strikingly different in tone, that preaches the virtue of community and the evil of corporate behemoths unconcerned, he says, with the collective good.

This is just plain old bad writing. The two paragraphs draw a distinction between Dean throwing down the gauntlet and Dean preaching. Is the article saying that he's been delivering two different messages in different venues all along or Dean has recently (when?) made a change in his theme? This is basic to the idea behind the article.

Then there's a juicy paragraph quoting Dean talking about corporations being blind to the human soul and the alienation that results from their pursuit of efficiency above all else.

Jump to the inside of the paper where the story is continued. This message, we are told, "strikes a chord in some quarters." And now we get some full-bore stupidity: a single Iowan states his support.

"I love that talk about community because we are supposed to be a Christian nation, and if we are a Christian nation, I have to be concerned about you, I have to be concerned about him," said Paul McFarland, 62, a retired military man who listened to Dean at an Ottumwa VFW Hall. "That's the way God wanted it, that's what a Christian nation is all about and we have strayed away from that."

This is a Boston paper. Surely the author expects us to cluck over this as dumb remark. "Poor, stupid, Iowans," we're supposed to respond, "We know better than they that this nation belongs to no one religion."

Even if the author had chosen someone whose views we couldn't write off so easily, what is the point of running any one individual's views? What does that tell us? That there's at least one person in Iowa who agrees with Dean? No, this quotation was included not to give us information but to affect our attitude towards Dean's new "message": It is simple-minded and has been dumbed down to appeal to the herd-like Midwesterners who lack our East Coast intellecual sophistication. And if I'm wrong in reading this sub-text, it still seems to me that there has to be some sub-textual reason why the author included this particular Iowan's views.

The author now tells us that "Dean's message is tactically sharp" (the author's cynicism again being imputed to the candidate). But then she moves off that tactically sharp message and says that it "dovetails" with the critique against special interests that "virtually all" the Democratic candidates have proffered.

How sloppy can you get? First, does "virtually all" mean anything more than "I didn't bother checking them all on this issue?" Second, what does "dovetail" mean? What's the actual connection of these ideas? Third, why are we now transitioning to a critique of special interests? The theme of article is supposed to be Dean's gentler side. Yet, the author extends the special interests slant by saying:

Dean, in particular, has used the anti-special interests idea as a battering ram.

That doesn't sound gentle. Ah, so the author now remembers what she's supposed to be talking about:

But in the quieter settings, Dean often launches into the theme of uncontrolled power to highlight social policy issues. He points out the importance of structuring the sale of Canadian drugs in the United States without enriching middlemen, so that Main Street pharmacies can be saved. He talks of the need to do away with "No Child Left Behind" legislation, to give control back to local school boards.

So, now we have a third theme: uncontrolled power. But the two examples she gives aren't about the perils of uncontrolled power. The Canadian drug issue could be taken that way if Dean's critique is that US pharmaceuticals have used their excessive power to prevent US citizens from buying high-quality drugs at lower cost. And that is in fact what Dean says. But according to this article, it has something to do with middlemen. And Dean's argument against W's education policies isn't that they result from uncontrolled power but that they over-centralize control. There is a difference. Further, Dean complains that W left "No Child Left Behind" unfunded. Neither of these make the point the author wants to make.

Now we're told that this softer side "can be jarring for those accustomed to seeing him in attack mode" (i.e., seeing him as the media has chosen to show him):

It comes, after all, from a man seemingly determined to keep his personal biography — and sentiment — out of his campaign, and often seems oddly juxtaposed with Dean's militaristic march though his stump speech

What? Dean has tried to keep his biography out of the campaign? A guy who routinely refers to himself as a doctor? A guy who is publishing his biography as a freaking book?

Trying to keep sentiment out of his campaign? What does "sentiment" mean here? It implies a cold-hearted, pure rationality, especially coupled with the militarism of his march through his speech. "March" implies that his heart isn't in it. This is, to use the technical term, bullshit.

Now the article quotes one more Iowan and then trails off in a cloud of psychological speculation, an explanation by Dean of the genesis of the theme, and "Some say..."s, as in "Some say there is a risk in too much dilution..."

We are left without clarity about the central idea behind the article: is the softer side of Dean something new? We are told it is a "side" of him, an "alter ego," dependent on "quieter settings," a "message," a "tactic," "rhetoric" ... Which is it? It makes a difference.

What's really going on, in my opinion, is that a journalist is seeing something that was there all along but that she, and most of the rest of the media, have missed because Fire-and-Brimstone Howie is better copy. As the author writes:

For a man not given to idle chatter, with an extreme aversion to small talk, Dean seems surprisingly comfortable offering up his emotive meditation on the nation's soul...

Who's surprised here? The crowds who have heard, amidst the "thunderous" denunciations of Bush's policies, a message of deep hope and true compassion? That's what's sent the chill down my spine when I heard Dean speak. That's why I'm working for Dean. I'm not surprised at all by this "side" of Dean because it was there in plain sight. No, the surprise is the journalist's. And that should be taken as an admission of failure.

I am not saying that the Globe is picking on Dean. I wish I thought that. No, this article, which is by and large quite favorable towards Dean, strikes me as typical of so much of the media's sloppy, lazy and marketing-centric way of working.

Bible in 10 sentences

If you run the book of Genesis through Microsoft Word's automatic summarizer and ask for a ten-sentence summary you get:

31 Terah took Abram his son, Lot the son of Haran, his son's son, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram's wife. 17 Abraham prayed to God. 7 Isaac spoke to Abraham his father, and said, "My father?" Abraham became the father of Isaac. Yahweh blessed him. 18 Jacob loved Rachel. 10 Zilpah, Leah's handmaid, bore Jacob a son. Esau and Jacob, his sons, buried him.

19 The sons of Rachel, Jacob's wife: Joseph and Ben

and a bunch of footnotes.

You know, it's actually not that bad. At least they got God into it.

Skim, Not Aggregate

I don't want an aggregator. I want a skimmer.

Functionally, the two are quite alike. But while an aggregator pulls together the stuff I want to read, the point of a skimmer is to let me figure out what not to read.

I'm not looking to read automatic summaries because, well, they suck (see the next blog entry). Once I've decided to read something, the skimmer lets me read it in full. I just want help in knowing what not to read.

(As far as aggregators go, I'm continuing to like Bloglines.com.)

Dan Bricklin has long studied skimming. See the Good Documents site, e.g., this page from 1998 that includes the skimmable version of the Starr report.

Old or Bold

Britt Blaser:

"Every warrior knows that perfect safety is a fool's paradise. The premise of the current war on terror is that we can entertain our way out of the terrorist threat. It's entertainment to feel an illusory omnipotence that will hunt down every evil-doer and infidel–a kind of adolescent road rage, really. The old heads in your squadron know to protect such greenhorns from their enthusiasms, at least until they learn or die. "There are old pilots and bold pilots. There are no old, bold pilots."

The Web as Anti-Rumor: Why the Authorized Web is Boooring

Michael Jackson has created his own, highly dignified Web site:

I have set up this website to serve as a source of official communications on my case. Any statement that does not appear on this website must be considered unauthorized.

The three links on the page lead to statements that say nothing more than that it's all lies. Maybe as the rumors get more specific, the rebuttals will become more worth reading. So far, though, the site is yet more evidence that the more authorized a site is, the less interesting it is, which you may take as a backhanded, unsupportable and unfair jibe at digital ID and the Semantic Web.

Campaign ad round-up and Flat Howard

IowaPolitics.com has links to the text of all the candidates' ads running in Iowa.

Meanwhile, you might want to take a look at Flat Howard, an odd bit of highly informal video from CBS. For me the best part is that Flat Howard is doing what our 12-year-old considers to be Dean's signature finger stance. (You'll need the Real Player unfortunately.)

Decisiveness and Passion

In Heidegger's Children, Richard Wolin quotes Hans Jonas on why he should have seen Heidegger's Nazism earlier: it's embedded in Heidegger's talk of "resoluteness" and "decisiveness." Says Jonas, whereas Heidegger accused idealist philosophy of being a step removed from the world,

one could accuse him of something much more serious: the absolute formalism of his decisionism, where decision as such becomes the highest virtue." (132)

If this is right (and it's been too long since I read Being and Time to be sure), it means Heidegger gives us no way of distinguishing a "resolute decision" to support the worst of German nationalism from a decision to work in a refugee camp or to definitely go on the Atkins diet next year.

I seem to recall this Cluetrain book that talks about the importance of passion. And in that it's echoing Tom Peters' call for passionate commitment to serving one's customers. (I like Peters' new book, Re-Imagine, btw.) Isn't Cluetrain guilty of the same content-free call for a form of commitment?

Granted, we're not talking about Nazism here, but what do you do with a pointy-haired boss who is passionate about creating a truly oppressive, soul-less business environment for the people who report to him? It'd be foollish to deny that PHB's can ever be passionate. There are Taylorist guys with stopwatches dedicated to squeezing the life out of an organization who are completely committed to what they're doing: They spend their spare time reading about it, they can't wait to tell you about it, and they sleep well at night convinced that every day they're making the world a little better.

So, no, passion isn't enough. Passionate oppression is no better than dispassionate oppression. (It might be worse. I don't know.) But decisiveness is often the opposite of passion. It wants to end the suspense and take an act, any act. It doesn't like the doubt and uncertainty that is built into passion because decisiveness doesn't like possibility. It wants the future to be nailed down, and the decision is the first bang of the hammer. Decisiveness is essentially disengaged from the openness that is the future. Passion is the embrace of that openness. Just think about the difference between a manager who is overly-decisive and one who is passionate about the company's reason for existence.

Passion by itself isn't enough: Some of them Nazis were pretty damn passionate. But pound for pound, I'll take passion over decisiveness any day.

Dean of Virtuality

Edward Castronova is looking for a university dean who wants to house a Center for the Study of Synthetic Worlds. If you wonder whether there's useful academic work to be done by such a center, check the Terranova group blog.

RFH: Battery shocker

[RFH= Request for Help]

I bought a big, fat Sony lithium-ion battery (NP-FS21) for my digital video camera two years ago. Now, after fairly minimal use, it's dead, Jim. When I plug it into the recharger, the charge light comes on for about 15 seconds. The thing just doesn't take a charge.

Any ideas about how to regenerate it?

Failing that, does anyone have any recommendations for offbrand batteries that actually work from vendors who don't suck?

Street Art

Has everyone already seen this photo of Kurt Wenner's street paintings? Well, then you can just see them again...

FBI Scrutinizing Anti-War Protestors

Hello! That's me, the 107,356th person back, just to the left of that nice old man in the green baseball cap. Helloooo!

Kudos to Wired and more

Wired's on a roll. In the October issue, they ran a page by Rebecca Harper that puts the effect of music sharing into perspective: The labels have released 14% fewer new CDs since 1999 and they've raised the prices 16% since 1997 (after adjusting for inflation). Yes, she says, file sharing has cost the industry money. "But what the RIAA doesn't want to admit is that the CD is reaching the end of its life cycle..."

Then in the December issue (the one with Uma on the cover), they devote a part of a page to step-by-step instructions on how to make a copy of DVD.

And while we're on the topic(s):

1. Don't miss Larry Lessig's Wired piece on user-owned fiber to the home.

2. LOCA is a new music label that's trying to do it right: the music is free but the CD's gonna cost you. Worth a look, a listen and maybe some bucks.

3. I'm off to buy the latest Dixie Chicks CD. I first listened to them because of The Controversy. Turns out I like them.

Kucinich the Pirate

Dennis Kucinich has posted the memos that Diebold claims we may not be post because Diebold doesn't want us talking about possible vulnerabilities in its electronic voting machines. Nice move, DK! (And good blogging by Donna at Copyfight.)

Correction: According to Dan Gillmor, DK's page has links to sites with copies of the Diebold memos, not the memos themselves.

Linux for Deskflops

Amy Wohl's always excellent — and free — newsletter reports on a Linux for Desktops conference:

Nat Friedman of Ximian (another Novell acquisition), offered a lively presentation, pointing out that the Linux desktop is ready now and that most of the problem is that of a mismatch between what’s there and user expectations, rather than of something being wrong. ... Nat notes that users turn to the Linux desktop for control and choice first, and lower cost, second. Barriers remain application availability, interoperability (file formats, network protocols, device drivers), and the cost of support (mainly because of the need for better usability and more manageability tools).

Usability? Hah! If you want to see the barrier to desktop Linux's acceptance, watch over my shoulder one day as I try to use KDE or Gnome to do ordinary tasks such as keeping my MP3 player running if any other sound is emitted (oh yeah, guessing which processes are audio ones so that I can then manually Kill them hoping that I got the right one is reaaaal user friendly) or downloading and installing a new application. Fabulous end user experiences.

Lord love Linux and godspeed to it, but desktop Linux is so Windows 3.0.

Pre-Refusing

I've was asked yesterday to pre-register for an event because of security concerns. (Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of England is speaking.) I'm refusing. Oh, I'm happy to register. But I draw the line at pre-registering unless I'm registering before the registration process begins.

Patent Progress

From Living Networks (the book) by Ross Dawson comes this Fun Fact:

In 1421, the government of Florence award the world's first patent to Filippo Brunelleschi for a means of bringing goods up the usually unnavigable river Arno to the city. He demanded and was duly awarded legal protection for his invention, being given the right for three years to burn any competitor's ship that incorporated his design. (p. 92)

How brutal and primitive! Now, of course, we take a much more civilized approach to patent infringement: We sue, destroying not just the boat but the factory, the business, the distributors' business, and the future ability of all those who ever worked on the infringing object to earn a living ever again...unless of course the boat could be used for terrorist purposes in which case we can whisk the inventor and manufacturer away to get a twelve year tan at Guantanamo.

BTW, the source Ross cites says that before this first patent, inventors and scientists "used ciphers such as Leonardo's mirror-image script" to protect their ideas. Now, of course, writing backwards violates the US PATRIOT Act.

Down the slippery slope

Jeff Jacoby is a conservative columnist in the Boston Globe. His response today (link will break tomorrow) to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's ruling permitting gay marriage is to warn us — Sanctorumly — that we've started down a slippery slope towards polygamy and incest. After all, he writes, one of the dissenting judges said that state's equal rights amendment was cited in the Court's decision, and the Boston Globe in 1976 had dismissed the claim that "the amendment would...legitimize marriage between people of the same sex." Yet, 27 years later, that's exactly what's happened. Likewise, in 1989, the Globe editorialized that the gay rights law does not "put Massachusetts on a 'slippery slope' towards" a right to gay marriage.

Cool research. But I seem not to be following Jacoby's logic here. The ERA of the Massachusetts Constitution started us down a slippery slope that has led to gay marriage. This is evidence that the gay marriage ruling will lead us down a slippery slope to polygamy and incest. Thus the gay marriage ruling is bad. That's his reasoning, right?

But doesn't that logic also mean that the ERA was bad? Does Jacoby really want to maintain that guaranteeing equal rights for women was a bad thing for the state? "Equality under the law shall not be denied or abridged because of sex, race, color, creed or national origin." Yeah, there's a slope we should be afraid to get on. Who knows where it could lead?

And there's an argument just as good as Jacoby's that says that the 15th Amendment started us down the slippery slope to the ERA. Damn Abolitionists!

You know, there's a reason why the slippery slope argument is classified as a fallacy. Jacoby's just illustrated it.

Spewing Pirates

The S.P.E.W. Factor is what most of the contributors to the Word Pirates page think Word Pirates is about. (Thanks to Tom Wilson for the link.)

Shows You the Money

Here's a map that shows you where each candidate's money is coming from. Interesting. (Thanks to Darhl Stultz for the link.)

The Value of Thin Connections

I've been guest blogging at the Corante Many2Many site and just posted an entry on how non-rich connections enable social networks.

Dean on "ReRegulation" and a social contract

An article in the Boston Globe (online today and tomorrow only) reports on an interview with Dean in which he calls for "reregulation":

In an interview around midnight Monday on his campaign plane with a small group of reporters, Dean listed likely targets for what he dubbed as his "reregulation" campaign: utilities, large media companies and any business that offers stock options. Dean did not rule out "reregulating" the telecommunications industry, too.

Go Dean!

And, Gov. Dean gave an important speech yesterday that talks about the economic issues that (from my point of view) underly the question of whether the economy is trending up or down this month. Some snippets without context:

The government today is no longer working for all the people. We need a new social contract for the 21st century...

[The Bush administration has] created an economic program that enriches their friends and supporters at the expense of ordinary working Americans. A program deserving of the name — Enron Economics."

Today, there are new technologies which can be the foundation of our economy for the next century. We can invest aggressively in them, just as our nation did when it invested in railroads, in rural electrification, and in public roads and highways.

We will never win the war on terror with a purely military strategy. Al Qaeda knows that their most powerful weapon against us is not terrorism — it is persuasion. We are waging a military campaign, but for years, they have been waging a political campaign. And our military campaign is only serving to strengthen their political argument. They are preaching fear and hatred against all that we stand for, and we are not responding.

We need a global effort to provide education, to foster democracy and to promote capitalism and economic opportunity in areas of instability. We need to champion the rights of women across the world. Above all, we must demonstrate that our vision has the interests of the world at heart, and not merely our own.

Worth reading in full.

PS: At our get-together last night, 15 of us wrote 100 letters to undecided voters in Iowa. Feels good to write the letters and even better to meet a diverse group of Dean supporters.

The Dream Comes True

Back in 1995, I was VP of Strategic Marketing at Open Text, which at the time was 25-person SGML indexing company. The company had initially built itself on a single lead project in the late '80s: Indexing the Oxford English Dictionary. Doing a full-text index of such a massive work was considered impossible. Who could dream of indexing tens of thousands of pages, hundreds of thousands of words? But under the technical direction of Tim Bray, breakthroughs were made and full-text retrieval took an important step forward.

Fifteen years later, Tim Bray and Open Text have moved onto other challenges. But only now has the fruit of that original effort paid off in full. Yes, the latest issue of WordWays, the oddest journal on the planet, announces that computer-aided searches of the OED have found 523 of the 625 vowel tetragrams. A vowel tetragram, in the words of Susan Thorpe of Great Missenden, England, the author of the article, is "a group of 4 vowels unbroken by consonants." She suggests that AQUEOUS, QUEUE, ONOMATOPOEIA, COOEE, HAWAIIAN and SEQUOIA "are perhaps the most familiar." For example, I recently found myself saying, "The aqueous Hawaiian and great sequoia stood in a queue to ask, in onomatopoeia, what the hell a cooee is."

Thorpe has unearthed other familiar words such as EEEEVE (the iiwi bird), BEOUIEN (tremble), IUAEIN (to hate), OUOUO (no stinting), UIUIA (type of beer), PLOIIER (ply), and MEAOUSTE (see Miaotse). If you know of words that contain UIII, OIIU, OOOU, AAAO, AUUU and about 100 others, Susan wants to hear from you.

Ah, yes, it's the kind of day that makes your hard work figuring out how to use B-trees to encode arbitrary SGML data seem all worthwhile...

Surprisingly Happy

I support gay marriage yet I found myself made unexpectedly happy by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's ruling. I'm elated. Woohoo!

I like marriage. It's a great thing when it works: being married has made my life into something even I like. And I no longer can see what the serious objections are to gay marriage, assuming that "Seeing men kiss on the lips is creepy" doesn't count as a serious objection.

So, let me repeat: Woohoo! (And now begins the fight to avoid a constitutional amendment that would annul today's joy. Sigh.)

Ed Cone on the Dean Campaign

Ed's written an excellent and thorough article on what's different about the Dean campaign, especially as seen through the lens of marketing. For example:

Using tools like weblogs, Meetup, and the "Get Local" application, which lets supporters create their own Dean events - such as house parties or service projects - without any central control, Dean has subverted the traditional branding ethic with great success.

Frichés

From Lockergnome comes this link to a page that shows the equivalent clichés in French and English. E.g., "He's knee-high to a grasshopper" in French is "He's tall like three apples...

The socio-political infrastructure

I'm continuing to guest blog at the Corante Many-to-Many site and just posted something on which parts of the new social/political network being created during this campaign season are likely to survive the campaign.

Havel on the soul of democracy

Jay Rosen, in a fine piece on what's wrong with politics, quotes Vaclav Havel:

Many of the traditional mechanisms of democracy created and developed and conserved in the modern era are so linked to the cult of objectivity and statistical average that they can annul human individuality. We can see this in political language, where cliche often squeezes out a personal tone. And when a personal tone does crop up, it is usually calculated, not an outburst of personal authenticity.

Sooner or later politics will be faced with the task of finding a new, postmodern face. A politician must become a person again, someone who trusts not only a scientific representation and analysis of the world, but also the world itself. He must believe not only in sociological statistics, but also in real people. He must trust not only an objective interpretation of reality, but also his own soul; not only an adopted ideology, but also his own thoughts; not only the summary reports he receives each morning, but also his own feeling.

And here's a snipped from Jay:

It cannot be the case that one-to-many man is destined to run campaigns forever. (And when the fall comes it will be swift and total, like the collapse of the system that threw Havel in jail.)

It cannot be the case that insulting the citizen's intelligence ("Joe-vember to Remember") is the smart way to go. (Once someone demonstrates that definitively, we will marvel at how long the premise held.)

But don't be satisfied with snippets! It's a damn fine piece.

Rick Klau, well-known Deaniac, has a report that's partisan yet open-minded and observant, about the Jefferson Jackson Day Dinner where most of the Democratic candidates showed up. (Telling detail: It took 43 buses to bring the Dean supporters in; the campaign had to get a parade permit just to let them to roll in.)

Old white guy's reproductive rights

Peter Kaminski runs the Reuters photo of Bush signing the "partial birth" abortion ban. It is striking, as Pete says, because all the on-lookers at this photo opp are dignified old white men. Hey, thanks, guys!

Pete's also got some cogent comments on the bill.

Send Back Your MP3s

Here's a site that every youngster who's ever downloaded an illegal MP3 must visit. It changed my life. I think it just might change yours.

Dave's concerned that someone might take this idea seriously even though the site is scrupulously careful to give only absurd instructions on how to do what it satirically suggests. (Let me emphatically agree with him: Yes, sending mp3s through the mail would be a hideous and stupid waste of bits.) I like his counter idea of cutting up your CDs and sending them back to the record companies, though. But I need 'em for backup!

Every 8 seconds

Dave Sifry of Technorati writes:

Right now, we're adding 8,000-9,000 new weblogs every day, not counting the 1.2 Million weblogs we already are tracking. That means that on average, a brand new weblog is created every 11 seconds. We're also seeing about 100,000 weblogs update every day as well, which means that on average, a weblog is updated every 0.86 seconds.

Every 0.86 seconds?? Man, I'm really going to have to step up my pace!

(Thanks, Dave, for providing such an outstanding service to us all.)

e-Zohar

At last! The Zohar is online! As it is writ (on the Web page):

Ever since it emerged mysteriously in Castile, Spain toward the end of the 13th century, the Zohar has enthralled, confounded, challenged, and enraptured readers. Composed mostly in lyrical Aramaic, the Zohar is a mosaic of Bible, medieval homily, spiritual fantasy, and imaginative commentary, or midrash, on the Torah written in the form of a mystical novel. In it a group of rabbis wander through the hills of Galilee, discovering and sharing secrets of Torah: at times they interpret the actions of biblical figures, and at other times, they take center stage themselves through their adventures on the road and their encounters with various astonishing characters.

Joseph Zitt, in an email message, explains:

In creating the translation, [Daniel C.] Matt and his crew worked with a large number of manuscripts and previous printings of the Zohar to put together a close-to-definitive edition of the original Aramaic text. Instead of publishing the Aramaic text on paper, they have put it up online as PDF files... In fact, they have each volume up *twice*, once in simple text format, and once with the emendations of the standard printed text underlined. There is also an introduction explaining how and why they were put together, and pointing to the sources.

My Aramaic is a little rusty (that is, I used to know how to spell "Aramaic" with confidence but now I have to look it up), but it is definitely very cool to see the Lit Web get lit up a little bit more.

Writing letters for Dean

Halley wonders if the letter-writing event I'm hosting is still on for this Tuesday.

And how! It's at 7pm and if you're in the Boston area and feel like coming by to write letters to undecided voters in Iowa about why you're supporting Dean, you're invited. Send me an email for the details.

West Wing Better?

Good discussion this morning on NPR's Weekend Edition about whether The West Wing has improved this season after the departure of creator and genius Adam Sorkin.

I think it has. I thought the conclusion of the opening episodes featuring the fabulous John Goodman was strong when it turned out [SPOILER AHEAD] that Josh's fears about Republican abuses were in fact just projections of his own overly-political worldview. The inklings of a legitimate opposition strengthen the show.

On the other hand, the melodramatic split between the president and the first lady seems pretty contrived to me. And there was one moment that Sorkin would never ever have allowed in: Josh stopping a cab so he can yell to the Capitol dome: "You wanna piece of me?" Just plain embarrassing.

Fun with Stats: Double Your Displeasure

In an otherwise balanced article on Linux's challenge to Windows, InformationWeek runs the following two charts:

Notice, however, that the Windows chart scales horizontally up to 80 while the Linux chart only manages to get its concerns up to 40.

I love Jay Allen

His Movable Type plugin found and removed 457 comment spams in my past 1,000 posts. It's free, it's easy, it's nice lookin'. Gotta love that ol' Web.

Guest blogging at Corante

I'm guest blogging at Corante Many2Many. E.g., I just posted something about why connected democracy is even better than participatory democracy. Feel free to swing on by, y'all.

Telco Power

Here's a fantastic new energy source that could just mean the end of our energy woes! (Thanks to Mike O'Dell for the link.)

Fantasy Veepstakes

Pretend for the moment that Howard Dean wins the nomination. Who would be his most interesting choice for running mate? (Note: Reality need not impinge on this decision, although we should perhaps limit ourselves to living, non-fictitious human American citizens.)

John McCain? He's a straight talkin' kinda guy and he's got the military hero vote sewn up.

Ross Perot? He's a straight-talkin' kinda guy and he's got the vague and confused vote sewn up. Also, he's shorter than Dean.

Al Franken? I've been reading Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them and he's got my vote.

Martin Sheen? Best arrest record in America.

Oprah? Not just name recognition but single name recognition.

And my number one choice for Dean's Fantasy VP:

Natalie Maines. She's Dixie. She's a Chick. What more could you want in a VP?

Separate thread: Which blogger would make the best VP?

Doc Searls? Elections are conversations, dude.

Chris Locke? He's already mastered the "hiding in an undisclosed location" bit.

DBetsy Devine? She writes her own material, she wants to be PHP when she grows up, and "Dean and Devine" makes a hell of a bumpersticker.

Misbehaving? Why have just one VP when you can make history?

Is the VoIP fix in?

David Isenberg wonders out loud if the FCC has already made up its mind how to regulate Voice over IP and is rushing it through with only a show of open public comment.

VoIP is a huge threat to the existing telcos. Guess which way the FCC will lean if left to itself?

Shel Israel blogs about the Gates Foundation

Shel Israel of Conferenza and ItSeemsToMe has started blogging with a piece praising the Gates Foundation and wondering why more people don't think well of it.

Is it true that people don't think well of the Foundation? Shel's evidence is that the speaker at Pop!Tech from the Foundation wasn't rated all that highly. I was at Pop!Tech and I rated her an 8 out of 10 not because I don't like Gates or his Foundation but because I thought the presentation itself was good but not great.

I was initially skeptical about the Foundation but I've been mightily impressed with it ever since. So, of course I assume everyone else is, too. Ah, the Data Point of One. Welcome to the blogosphere, Shel!

Grid Blogging

Ashley Benigno writes:

I've been thinking of ways of developing distributed collaborative projects and came up with the following idea: grid blogging - which I imagine as being a group of bloggers tackling a specific topic on a specific day/time.

The first grid blogging is set for December 1. It's an interesting idea and it'll be fun to see how the blogs then discuss the ideas they've plopped simultaneously into the blogosphere. But because the first topic is "brand," I'm unlikely to participate in this particular one. (Now, if it were Stewart Brand, it'd be different.) [Thanks to Hanan Cohen for the link.]

Shelley goes semantical

Shelley continues to write beautifully about the semantic web, as opposed to the Semantic Web.

The semantic web she describes is, to me, simply the Web. The Web's links are (with rare exception) semantic, i.e., meaningful. That's what makes the Web not an "information space" but a human place.

Liz has a useful list of bloggerini about Clay's article.

Are we semantic yet?

I'm about to agree with BurningBird (which I'm always happy to do since she's right so damn often) but in a way that neither of us is going to find very satisfying.

IMO, she's right to point out that something important has already begun:

My idea of semantic web is if I can look for a poem that uses a metaphor of bird as freedom, and get back poems that have bird as metaphor for freedom. But you know, I don't have to go everywhere in the web to look for this — if I could just do this at something like poets.org, or among the poetry weblogs I know, I'd be content.

I don't have to scour the complete world wide web today. I don't have to get every interpretation of every poem that has ever used bird as metaphor today. I can start with a small group of people convinced that this is the way to go. And eventually, other poetry fans, and high school sophmores, will also see the benefit of doing a little bit of extra work when putting that poem online, aided and abetted by helpful tools. It's from this tiny little acorn, big mother oaks grow.

Yes, over time we are developing schemas that make particular domains of discourse more useful, more searchable, more automatable. And, yes, over time we are hooking these together so that various domains can operate as something like a unified information space. We're not just doing this on the Web. Without anyone declaring a new standard, business cards started including email addresses and even referring to phone numbers as V, F and C without a single piece of legislation declaring that we do so. And we map domains all the time also, as when I ask you what "C" means on your card, and I say "Aha! We call ours mobiles, not cell phones!"

So, if the semantic web means only that we're learning to understand ourselves better on the Internet, or even that we often adopt similar terms and rhetoric, then, yes, the Web is constantly semantically webbing itself. And if the semantic web means that we are formally knitting together, in an ad hoc way, the various standards we're adopting, then, yes, the web is semantically webbing itself.

But, I don't think this is what most people mean by the Semantic Web. I think they have two other implications in mind.

First, they think that this semantic webbing process is going to continue until the Web is a single "information space." But we're not going to get close to that because ultimately the semantics of the Web is human language and understanding. And if we did get close, we'd pay a price for it: Repair manuals for aircraft are close to being a single information space because the manufacturers adopted a uniform DTD and a reduced language set. That's how it's done and it's not what any of us want the Web to become. [Actually, I'm not sure they ever did adopt a uniform DTD.]

Second, the proponents of the Semantic Web aren't simply cheering on the attempts to come up with useful domain-specific metadata standards (such as XBRL). We all like standards that help. But the supporters of the Semantic Web aren't saying simply, "Standards are good!" They are suggesting that when these standards are put together, they will form something more than their parts. They will be machine readable and we will see marvels of automation. But history has shown us that it's really hard to get domain-specific metadata to work together. Maybe this time it'll happen. Maybe. But that it's happened in this or that domain should not lead us to generalize about it happening generally.

So, I'm feeling whipsawed. Either the Semantic Web promises something grand and unifying and transformative or it refers to the growth of standards. If the former, it's not just implausible, IMO, but is actually based on an overestimation of the ability and desirability of disambiguating language. If the latter, Shelley's definitely right to lower-case it.

WikiTravel

The WikiTravel site looks like it may become as useful as the WikiPedia. (Thanks to Pete Kaminski for the link.)

American Dream?

''I lived the American dream,'' says Baglio, 70, whose last workday was Oct. 30. ''I would have never thought I'd last 45 years here.''

That's Louis Baglio speaking, as reported in an article by Johnny Diaz in the Boston Globe on Sunday. This guy cut hair for 45 years in downtown Boston and he thinks he lived the American dream! What a moron!

First, not only did he stay at the same job for his entire career, he only changed his place of employment twice. Even school kids know that if you want to ratchet your salary, you move from place to place. Sure, more than every two years and it looks like you are having problems focusing (i.e., you're a sexual harrasser), but three places in 45 years? Give me a break!

Then, with all of the haircutting franchises booming, this guy couldn't manage to sell out? He could have retired years ago. If he wanted to keep working, he could have become a haircutting consultant or a haircutting VC...you know, move up the value chain. But no, day after day, this schlub just keeps on snipping scissors around people's heads. Oh, and "conversing" with his customers. Yeah, that must have been interesting for 45 years!

Then, he admits that he couldn't weasel out of the Korean War as a corporal. There's two years of his life gone!

Sure, he bought his own shop and put a couple of kids through college, but if that's all it takes to live the American Dream, then, well, we'd better call in Andersen Consulting to do a dream audit because a few things are missing. Where's the Boxster? The second wife, the one who's into threesomes? The climb up the ladder? The second home and the the third? The years "lost" to cocaine? The personal trainer and the wine cellar? The guest shot on Saturday Night Live? Where's the retirement money so large that there's a whiff of scandal? Where are his enemies?

American Dream? Yeah...for losers!

[The Globe article is available for free today only.]

The Semantic Web and SGML

Frank thinks that Clay's fogged the issues around the Semantic Web. Frank points to places where the careful construction of industry metadata has resulted in integrated systems that work well.

I don't think Clay is arguing that all metadata is bad. Rather, he's saying that it doesn't scale. Yes, the insurance industry might be able to construct a taxonomy that works for it, but the Semantic Web goes beyond the local. It talks about how local taxonomies can automagically knit themselves together. The problem with the Semantic Web is, from my point of view, that it can't scale because taxonomies are tools, not descriptions, and thus don't knit real well.

We'ved been through this before with SGML. (I've been working on a long piece on SGML and the Semantic Web for months now.) We know how hard it is to come up with Document Type Definition (akin to a taxonomy) for industries and we don't have an expectation that they'll somehow knit themselves together into a universal DTD. For exactly the same reasons, the Semantic Web won't scale.

And the ironic thing is that even the desire to have a Semantic Web is a failure to learn from the failure of SGML to establish itself as a universal document standard...except in the form of HTML against which the Semantic Web is a reaction.

IMO.