Devastating image

DirectionsMag is running some 1m satellite photos of the devastation at Bam, Iran. The photo of the 2,000 year old citadel is astounding.

From an article found on the GIS Monitor site:

... the U.S. Geological Survey, working with Redlands-based ESRI, produced computer-generated maps that predicted mudslides could occur in the area of Waterman Canyon, where at least 13 people were killed when mud, trees and boulders flowed through a church camp. ...

San Bernardino County officials said they were not confident that the maps were precise enough to warrant sweeping evacuations.

Ideas for Social Software

Seconding Liz's linking to Matt Haughey's ideas for useful social software.

Matt suggests "Epinions + Friendster," which sounds a lot like a company that Paul English, Rick Levine and I tried to start a few years ago. Matt puts the problem well:

Last summer I moved to a town in a place far away from where I've spent the past few years, and one of the first problems I had to solve was finding the perfect everything. I quickly amassed a bunch of questions that took months of trial and error to answer through a network of new friends and neighbors. Where could I get a good haircut? Which one of the local dentists would be most understanding of my dental anxiety? Which store should I shop for food at if I want a lot of organic, natural, and meatless food? Are there any trustworthy mechanics in this town? Which one of the two Thai places is "the good one?" Where should I go for a nice night out here? Which theater plays the art house movies? Which one of the furniture stores should I trust with my money?

We bought the url WordOfMouth.com and set up shop in Boulder, CO. The initial idea was to provide a way for webs of friends to share information about local services like the ones Matt describes. You'd list which services you use, and rate, review and discuss them. You'd also be able to indicate who you know and trust, and join clusters of the like-minded. We hooked up with newspaper sites, integrating with their yellow page services. And then the company went broke. The newspapers loved the service so long as it was free to them. Getting them to pay was a whole 'nother issue.

I still think the initial idea is solid; hardly a day goes by that I couldn't put a service like that to some use.

Top Ten at BlogCritics

Here's a list of the various top ten lists posted at BlogCritics. That is, both this list and the entries on the list point to entries at BlogCritics. Oh, the hell with it.

Ken Camp on the World of Ends

Ken Camp, who sure knows networks, takes to task the article Doc and I wrote called World of Ends.

I'm on deadline and have only had time to skim it. It looks well reasoned. Some of what I saw takes us as saying something other than what we meant (which is very likely our fault). Some of it we may just be wrong about. I'm looking forward to a more leisurely read...

Jack the Sickert

Wanna read a bad book? Borrow a copy of Patricia Cornwell's Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed.

I like Cornwell enough to have read all (?) of her Scarpetta series even though I've been disappointed by each of them; often they have a good set-up but resolve the situation by the literary equivalent of running people over with trucks. Portrait of a Killer, though, pretty much just stinks.

In it, she "solves" the mystery of the Ripper murders. The killer was the artist Walter Sickert. Her evidence isn't just inconclusive, it's annoying. And her certainty — "Case Closed" — exhibits a character flaw that makes me feel uncomfortable in her authorial presence.

Her evidence? [SPOILER ALERT]

A few of the hundreds of letters supposedly sent by the Ripper to the press and police came from the same commercial paper mill as some letters from Sickert.

The mitochondrial DNA left on some of the Ripper letters is of the same type as some left on envelopes containing letters from Sickert; Cornwall says that 1% of the population has that particular type of DNA, although I've read that experts say that it could be as high as 10%.

Some of Sickert's artwork portrays violence and murder. Some show a dark circle around women's necks...although in the one example I've seen, it looks a lot like a necklace to me.

Sickert isn't known to have been elsewhere during the time of the murders.

I'm no historian and I'm not a Ripper buff, so I can't evaluate the facts she presents. (For that, see the first two links below.) But her methodology worries me. If a letter supposedly by the Ripper is written in a different hand, it's because Sickert was an artist. If a witness reports seeing a man at the scene who looked different than Sickert, it's because Sickert was an actor. If Ripper letters use the phrase "Ha ha," it must be because Sickert studied under Whistler who used to laugh "Ha ha." (No, I'm not making this up.) If there are misspellings in a letter, it's because Sickert was taunting the police; if there aren't, it's because Sickert was taunting the police.

Worse, the book is badly written all the way down to the sentence level. The constructions are awkward at the "This is the reason that..." level. The paragraphs are redundant. Entire chapters are superfluous. It is not a good book.

Case closed.

Links

Patricia Cornwell and Walter Sickert: A Primer By Stephen P. Ryder

A substantial book review by Joe Nickell in the Skeptical Inquirer

An account of a lecture Cornwall gave on the topic

ABC News' puff piece about Diane Sawyer's interview with Cornwall

Taxpayers vs. Citizens

Robert Herold of the Pacific Northwest Inlander has a good commentary on the semantics of "taxpayers" vs. "citizens." An excerpt:

Taxpayers are just full of anxiety. Citizens seek to participate in a constructive manner. Taxpayers seek always to reduce public life to a balance sheet. Citizens seek ways of broadening and deepening public life. Taxpayers, by definition, live in a private world, and they don't much like government penetrating that world. The word "taxes" symbolizes that penetration. Citizens seek life in the polis. Citizens live in a world of values, which, when agreed upon, determine how we will live.

(Thanks to Doug Hughes for the link.)

Jeff Jacoby is like Hitler...

...After all, both were born in the 20th Century.

I'm just trying to get into next year's round up of liberal hate speech. Man, he has a thin skin!

Order of Magnitude Quiz: Animals

How many animals raised on farms are killed for consumption in the US each year? Getting within an order of magnitude constitutes winning.

Reveal the answer by drag-selecting the seemingly blank space between the X's:

X ————8 billion ———— X

Veggie Prop

Bill Koslosky points to some clever vegetarian propaganda: The Meatrix. And he links to a less light-hearted commentary on meatiness: The defeat of legislation that would have required that "downed" animals be killed humanely and that would have prohibited their slaughter for human food.

Sure, people are suffering, too. But we ought to avoid inflicting unnecessary pain. (Go ahead, try to argue against that one!) I see no reason to think that we escape that moral obligation when it comes to non-human animals. The argument ought to be over what makes pain necessary and exactly what it means to avoid inflicting it. For the past 25 years or so, I've voted with my digestive system that eating factory-farmed meat fails that test. Hell, I wouldn't even eat a Republican.

Happy vegetarian new year to all my sentient animal friends!

Current Events Quiz

There's a somewhat amusing quiz about 2003's political events and statements over at Alternet.

Dean on the phone

Suppose Gov. Dean were to record a message like the following and make it available for download on the campaign Web site:

Hello. You've reached the home of ____[suitably long pause]_____. I'm Governor Howard Dean and these good folks are supporting our campaign to take back our country. That's why I approved this phone answering message. Now, here's the beep.

Hello. ____[suitably long pause]_____ have agreed to let me answer their phone. I'm Howard Dean and if you elect me president, I'll answer your phone, too. Now, here's the beep.

Hello. This is Howard Dean. ____[suitably long pause]_____ have agreed to let me answer their phone because they're busy on the Internet making new friends and building a grassroots organization that will take back our country in 2004. If you're not too embarrassed to still be using telephones, feel free to leave a message after the beep.

Hello. This is Howard Dean. ____[suitably long pause]_____ have agreed to let me answer their phone in order to try out an experiment in post-hypnotic suggestion. When you hear the beep, you will send $77 to my campaign and think I'm 6'2". Your eyes are getting tired ... so tired ... [beep]

How many FEC regulations would this break? How about canons of taste?

Wired's take on Dean

Gary Wolf's written a terrific article about the Nettiness of the Dean campaign. For example, he tells of a conversation with Joi Ito:

I contact him to ask if he thinks there's a difference between an emergent leader and an old-fashioned political opportunist. What does it take to lead a smart mob? Ito emails back an odd metaphor: "You're not a leader, you're a place. You're like a park or a garden. If it's comfortable and cool, people are attracted. Deanspace is not really about Dean. It's about us."

You should probably pair this article with Ed Cone's. Gary's is more concerned with the theoretical while Ed's takes you right into the cubes in the Dean HQ. Add in the NY Times Magazine article on the ethos of the campaign, and you have a pretty damn good picture of what's going on, what it feels like, and why it matters.

Sopranos Spoilers

I just posted at BlogCritics.org my guesses about how The Sopranos ends, including speculation about which characters don't make it out of the series alive.

Two signs that SCO is desperate

As SCO widens its arguments, the whiff of desperation is becoming a full-fledged stank. So, now the Gnu Public License itself violates copyright law? According to CEO Darl McBride, the GPL removes the profit motive from software development and the profit motive "underpins the constitutionality of the (U.S.) Copyright Act."

Here's Linus' reply:

"I'm a big believer in copyrights," Torvalds wrote in an e-mail interview. "Of all the intellectual property (laws), copyright ... is the only one that is expressly designed so that individual people can (and do) get them without having scads of lawyers on their side."

"If Darl McBride was in charge, he'd probably make marriage unconstitutional too, since clearly it de-emphasizes the commercial nature of normal human interaction, and probably is a major impediment to the commercial growth of prostitution," he wrote.

Another sign of desperation? When the CEO of SCO proudly says that hiring a famous lawyer — David Boies — raised the company's stock price from $1 to $14. Oh yeah, that's the type of sustainable competitive advantage you want to build your company on.

It's all about the docs

Jon Udell reports on the return of the document as the fundamental human unit of information.

Yeah, I'm paraphrasing wildly so don't blame Jon for the way I'm twisting his words. But he's right anyway.

Wise Cory

I'm fond of these words of wisdom from Cory:

The last twenty years were about technology. The next twenty years are about policy...

I have a special request to the toolmakers of 2004: stop making tools that magnify and multilply awkward social situations

An important note for 2004: stop trying to build an Internet without malefactors, parasites, freeriders and inefficiency.

See you next year, Cory. Or, more accurately: If you're Cory and you're reading this, then it is net year.

Mixed Seasons Greetings

Steve Himmer at One Pot [belly] Meal has an awesome greeting card on his site. Very Boston, even if it turns out not to have been snapped in Boston.

Emergent Democracy Forum

O'Reilly has just announced its Emergent Democracy Forum, sorta kinda part of the Emerging Technology conference. Looks like it could be good. (Disclosure: I'm on the organizing committee.)

Human Microsoft

The World Wide Media Exchange — a site collecting tens of thousands of amateur photos, arranged by location — sounds totally human. And it's a Microsoft site! For example, take a look at the press page and compare it to just about every other press page you've ever seen.

Bill Joy's email address

Does anyone have Bill Joy's email address? If so, could you please email it to me at self [A T] evident.com? I promise not to spam him. Thank you.

e-Intimacy

Good discussion of virtual sociality over at Misbehaving.net

DieBold, Die Die Die!

From Slashdot:

tassii writes "Looks like Diebold is in yet more trouble. In this article from Wired.com, an audit of the Diebold E-Voting machines revealed that the company installed uncertified software in all 17 counties that use its electronic voting equipment. While 14 counties used software that had been qualified by federal authorities but not certified by state authorities, three counties, including Los Angeles, used software that had never been certified by the state or qualified by federal authorities for use in any election. And in this article, Wired.com is reporting that at least five convicted felons secured management positions at a Diebold, including one who served time in a Washington state correctional facility for stealing money and tampering with computer files in a scheme that 'involved a high degree of sophistication and planning.'"

Link links

From Michael Daizman comes a link to EastGate, publishers of "serious" hyperlinked text.

And at ArtBrain you'll find an argument map, plotting a discussion in graphicalistic form.

Thirdly, Kevin Marks writes:

Also, you were looking for a bookmark manager a while back - have you seen http://del.icio.us yet? You add a button to your toolbar, and hit it when you want to bookmark a page - it goes instantly to their page where you can edit the name, type in keywords and a note. It goes into Joshua's backed up db, and you can get feeds back by keyword, day and person, html or rss, and even embed in a your blogroll

You can see it at work on Kevin's site.

McLuhan on Blogs

Mark at the McLuhan Program Home comments on Rebecca's piece in The Guardian about blogging (and my comments on her comments). Good stuff. I studied with McLuhan for a year as a grad student and found his core methodology capable of uncovering important truths, although it also can turn up lots of shards, and the occasional old broken button.

This just in from the universe...

NASA unveiled the first images from the $670 million Spitzer Space Telescope today, spectacular infrared glimpses of the optically-hidden heart of a distant galaxy, the dusty cradle of an infant solar system and a peek at heretofore unseen stars lurking inside a vast cloud of gas and dust.

From an article by William Harwood at SpaceFlight now.

Ligh blogging: Happy Bar Mitzvah

It'll be light blogging for me this weekend because it's our son's bar mitzvah. He's a seriously religious boy, um, man and this is a much more meaningful event than it was for me. At my bar mitzvah at our reform temple, I basically read a couple of lines of Torah and then announced I was accepting gifts. At the old-school orthodox shul my wife and son attend, he is entering the adult embrace of the community through observance and scholarship.

I couldn't be prouder of him.

Halley blogs about a different passage into adulthood: finding out that Santa isn't.

UI Flaws #2045 and 2046: Skype and Quicken

Sven just IM'ed me through Skype, the P2P telephony system. Sven seems like a nice enough guy, but I don't know him. He was just looking for someone to talk with. I was busy paying bills through Quicken and probably was brusquer than I intended. But what sort of IM system lets any and all of its 4M users ping you? Or do all IM systems lay you open to spontaneous global chatting? And if they all do, why don't I have more people pinging me? Is it my breath?

(Yeah yeah, I'm sure there's a way to turn this off in Skype. Can't I just complain about it irrationally?)

Then I went back to Quicken. I've been using it for 15 years and have gotten worse and worse at it. My Quicken work environment is so screwed up that it's beyond cleaning: I have uncleared checks from ten years ago, a bank balance that shows me to be $41,000 overdrawn, multiple entries for online payees that I can't figure out how to delete, and a column in the "Split" dialogue box labeled "Exp" that seems to be entirely undocumented. But that's not what I want to whine about.

It occurred to me that the way I've been entering deposits is probably wrong: I go to the registery and create a "deposit" line. It works, but it's totally inelegant. Surely the UI gives us a better way of doing it. So, I click on "Help" and type "deposit" into the index. What comes back is

If you receive payments for invoices or cash sales but don't deposit the payments directly into a bank account, you can set up an asset account such as Undeposited Funds and use it to track the cash and checks until you deposit them into your bank account.

Ok, but how do I make a deposit?

If you click on Contents > Finances > Entering transactions in the account register > How do I ... > Enter a basic transaction in the register, step 4 tells you: "In the Payee field, indicate who receives this payment or gives you this deposit." So the instructions are there, but buried and only slightly incomplete: It neglects to tell you that in the "Num" field you have to click on "Deposit."

Man, Quicken's documentation sucks.

Wanted: Scientists for Dean

David Isenberg and Bob Kopp of Scientists for Dean are looking for scientists who are ready to get behind the Governor. After all, this administration is bad news for science in this country. David and Bob are particularly searching for some scientifical leaders who would be willing to lend their credibility to the effort.

So, do you know a Nobel Prize winner — and not in one of them wussy humanities categories! — who'd be interested?

What a crappy present!

This is a funny site about downloading music, along the lines of SendThemBack.org.

Responding to eBay scum

A seller on eBay with many thousands of deals under its belt sold me an expensive graphics card. The tracking number they gave me didn't work and they didn't respond to 4 emails on the topic. The board arrived in a relatively timely way, however. Unfortunately, the board was Dead on Arrival - huge artifacts in graphical games. I notified them of that the day that it arrived since their return policy only gives you two days to let them know.

Four emails later, they haven't replied. Nothing. Not a word.

Two additional points: 1. I foolishly left them positive feedback while the board worked for the first couple of hours. 2. I've sent the board back to the manufacturer under warrantee.

Any suggestions about what I should do to let other eBayers know that LVCONSIGNMENTS is refusing to make good on the bad board they sent me?

Scrubbing the .gov

The Daily Mislead reports that the Washington Post is reporting that the Administration is removing from its sites statements that have later turned out to be untrue.

Specifically, on April 23, 2003, the president sent his top international aid official on national television to reassure the public that the cost of war and reconstruction in Iraq would be modest... But instead of admitting that he misled the nation about the cost of war, the president has allowed the State Department "to purge the comments by Natsios from the State Department's Web site. The transcript, and links to it, have vanished."

A Bush spokesman said the administration was forced to remove the statements because, "there was going to be a cost" charged by ABC for keeping the transcript on the government's site. But as the Post notes, "other government Web sites, including the State and Defense departments, routinely post interview transcripts, even from 'Nightline,'" and according to ABC News, "there is no cost."

All in good fun, I'm sure.

Dan Gillmor's got some excellent reportage that dives deep into this story.

Blood on blogs

My friend Rebecca Blood has a piece on blogs in The Guardian that tries to shift our enthusiasms about weblogs. I'm not entirely convinced by it.

She starts by saying that "no one really understands weblogs." Fair enough.

She then puts holes in those who have described weblogs in "outrageously overblown terms":

Enthusiasm abounds. Bloggers enjoy describing themselves as pioneers, though their ideas of innovation are sometimes suspect. "We are writing ourselves into existence," some ecstatically proclaim, as if Pepys and Boswell and the historic legions of their fellow journal-writers had never existed.

As the guy who said "We are writing ourselves into existence," I should maybe point out that I didn't say that this was the first time we've ever done so. But I do believe that the Web is a new public space and weblogs enable us — all of us, not just the Pepyses and Boswells among us — to construct public selves in that space. So, what's not new: Creating public selves. What is new: Doing so in this new public space and doing so primarily via written text, as opposed to via speech, writings, body language, clothing, etc. (On the other hand, I proudly admit to being way too enthusiastic about the Web and blogging.)

Then Rebecca dismisses those who "can conceive of weblogs only in terms of their own experience." "A weblog is something fundamentally new," she writes, and "those who try to define the phenomenon in terms of current institutions are completely missing the point." (But if weblogs are something so fundamentally new that they bear no resemblance to current institutions, then why is the enthusiasm overblown? Aren't we indeed pioneers?)

Then Rebecca explains the thing that she says no one has understood: Weblogs are, she says, "participatory media," as opposed to either "passive news consumption" or broadcasting. Definitely, but I don't think that's enough to explain the thing that no one understands, that "no one can quite put their finger on..." We've had participatory media before — letter writing, CB radio, radio talk shows — but there's something distinctive about the blogging form of participatory media. IMO, to see what's distinctive about them, we should look at stuff like: their conversational nature, the way their dailyness requires anticipatory forgiveness of lapses in typing and thought, their embracing of the distinctiveness of voice, and, yes, the way blogs create public selves. That sort of thing. Of course, that's really just to say that I would have written a different article than Rebecca, not a very useful comment.

Then she ends on terms that seem as overblown as the ones she criticizes:

...weblogs have changed personal publishing so profoundly that the old rules no longer apply. We are at the beginning of a new age of online publishing - and I predict that this generation of online pamphleteers is just the first wave.

Online pampleteers? I don't want to make too much of this phrase since Rebecca had to wrap up somehow and probably didn't want to say "participatory media" again. But pamphlets??

So, the take away is, I think: The enthusiasm for blogging is misplaced. Blogs are in fact a new form, called participatory media, that will change online publishing forever.

If I got that right, then I respectfully disagree with Rebecca; I think "participatory media," while useful, takes us only some of the way towards understanding blogs. But I certainly agree that we haven't understood blogging yet. That's precisely why we should be encouraging a diversity of enthusiasms.

Blood on blogs

My friend Rebecca Blood has a piece on blogs in The Guardian that tries to shift our enthusiasms about weblogs. I'm not entirely convinced by it.

She starts by saying that "no one really understands weblogs." Fair enough.

She then puts holes in those who have described weblogs in "outrageously overblown terms":

Enthusiasm abounds. Bloggers enjoy describing themselves as pioneers, though their ideas of innovation are sometimes suspect. "We are writing ourselves into existence," some ecstatically proclaim, as if Pepys and Boswell and the historic legions of their fellow journal-writers had never existed.

As the guy who said "We are writing ourselves into existence," I should maybe point out that I didn't say that this was the first time we've ever done so. But I do believe that the Web is a new public space and weblogs enable us — all of us, not just the Pepyses and Boswells among us — to construct public selves in that space. So, what's not new: Creating public selves. What is new: Doing so in this new public space and doing so primarily via written text, as opposed to via speech, writings, body language, clothing, etc. (On the other hand, I proudly admit to being way too enthusiastic about the Web and blogging.)

Then Rebecca dismisses those who "can conceive of weblogs only in terms of their own experience." "A weblog is something fundamentally new," she writes, and "those who try to define the phenomenon in terms of current institutions are completely missing the point." (But if weblogs are something so fundamentally new that they bear no resemblance to current institutions, then why is the enthusiasm overblown? Aren't we indeed pioneers?)

Then Rebecca explains the thing that she says no one has understood: Weblogs are, she says, "participatory media," as opposed to either "passive news consumption" or broadcasting. Definitely, but I don't think that's enough to explain the thing that no one understands, that "no one can quite put their finger on..." We've had participatory media before — letter writing, CB radio, radio talk shows — but there's something distinctive about the blogging form of participatory media. IMO, to see what's distinctive about them, we should look at stuff like: their conversational nature, the way their dailyness requires anticipatory forgiveness of lapses in typing and thought, their embracing of the distinctiveness of voice, and, yes, the way blogs create public selves. That sort of thing. Of course, that's really just to say that I would have written a different article than Rebecca, not a very useful comment.

Then she ends on terms that seem as overblown as the ones she criticizes:

...weblogs have changed personal publishing so profoundly that the old rules no longer apply. We are at the beginning of a new age of online publishing - and I predict that this generation of online pamphleteers is just the first wave.

Online pampleteers? I don't want to make too much of this phrase since Rebecca had to wrap up somehow and probably didn't want to say "participatory media" again. But pamphlets??

So, the take away is, I think: The enthusiasm for blogging is misplaced. Blogs are in fact a new form, called participatory media, that will change online publishing forever.

If I got that right, then I respectfully disagree with Rebecca; I think "participatory media," while useful, takes us only some of the way towards understanding blogs. But I certainly agree that we haven't understood blogging yet. That's precisely why we should be encouraging a diversity of enthusiasms.

Nine stories

The fabulous Jay Rosen is doing his bit to pry open the narrative bear trap clamped around the legs of journalists — nine ways you could cover the election campaign without once using the language of sports or show biz. What a concept(s)!

Governance by citizenry

How are we going to implement in governance the Net-based citizen involvement that the campaign has initiated? Here's one idea.

Let's say you care about the e-voting scandal that's just waiting to happen. So, you go to your Senator's site. There you find a "Citizen-to-Citizen" (C2C) page that lists the current issues constituents are discussing. A search for "e-voting" turns up nothing, so you are now prompted to create a C2C group on the topic. You write up your description of the problem and include some supporting links. Automatically, a new space is created with its own page and with the sort of collaborative capabilities were coming to expect: shared library, email archive, threaded discussion, maybe a MeetUp link, etc. Anyone who cares about the issue can find your space and join the conversation. (People can also register as caring about the issue without having to participate in the issue space.)

The site automatically reports metrics so that the most popular issues are surfaced. The Senator sees that there's been a lot of activity in the e-voting issue space, votes to ban e-voting machines that don't have some type of acceptable audit capability, and our democracy is saved. It's just that simple!

Forget the implementation details. What I like about this ideas is its focus on connecting citizens who share interests, rather than on tabulating polls or instant ballots. It's a way, potentially, of handling the scaling issues that turn citizens into data points. Democracy is a conversation, after all.

(This idea was sparked by conversations with Jock Gill and Britt Blaser, neither of whom should be assumed to agree with it.)

Competition as a four letter word

An article in the Boston Globe (the link dies tomorrow) by Keith Reed reports that Song, Delta's budget branch, is installing high-end entertainment systems on its planes. JetBlue is about to start serving the same market:

Yet neither carrier will admit that they are headed toward direct competition on price or amenities here, even as they head for a duel of one-upmanship with their entertainment offerings.

"It isn't that Song and JetBlue are coming into Boston to compete," said Tim Mapes, Song's managing director of marketing. "We're simply making sure that we've got a mix of products that people want.

Since when is it bad for companies to admit that they're competing? Because competition implies a finite market? Whom do they think they're kidding? Or did the hippies finally win?

The David-Centric Universe

Apparently it's all about me today. I've been paynted — you know, Frank Paynter's long-form interview. (Please ignore the boxed testimonials. I've asked Frank to remove them.)

Audio interview with moi

You can listen to Doug Kaye's interview of me at the ITConversations site. I pontificate about the Dean campaign and e-democracy.

Levy on the Death of the Internet

Steven Levy in Newsweek has an excellent and scary column on why Big Forces want to lock down the Internet and how they're doing so under the guise of "trusted computing" and other industry efforts.

Here's the John Walker he talks about. And Jon Husband points us to this Paul Hughes piece on VoIP's challenge to the telcos.

Eric is pissed by the Levy article. I really disagree with Eric's argument that DRM, "trusted computing," et al. are neutral technologies because they can be used for good or evil.

Well, sure, you could mug someone by threatening him with a hypodermic full of polio vaccine, but if we look at the technology and the context into which it's being introduced, I'm willing to say that polio vaccine is good and DRM et al. is (not nearly as unambiguously) bad.

Whether I'm right or wrong about DRM et al., I'll still argue that we need to discuss the likely moral/social impact of technologies. Discuss and act. In fact, I like Eric's closing: "Wanna do something about it? Great. Start a company. Write a program. Come up with a business plan." (And for those of who write: Write something!)

Phenomenal Photos

Some jaw-dropping scientifical photos here, suitable for framing.

Dean's Foreign Policy Speech

Here. Heavy on what's actually need to make this country more secure -- read it and tell me that you don't think it's a more sensible program than what we've got now.

Also, $30B over 4 years to fight AIDS globally.

Sims Scandal

Donna at Copyfight aggregates info about how the philosopher Peter Ludlow managed to get banished from the Sims Online server by raking virtual muck. And Farhad Manjoo has an article in Salon that lays out the issues.

AKMA goes Hollywood

They've applied the pancake makeup and have told him to wrangle his observations about Derrida down to a 7-second sound bite. Next stop: "AKMA to block," on The H'wood Squares.

(And we all wish his father well...)

Coffee on PowerPoint

Peter Coffee in eWeek meditates on what PowerPoint is doing to us. He begins with Edward Tufte's piece on how PowerPoint misled the assessment of the risk to the shuttle Columbia. Peter writes:

Bad presentations result from people learning to write with a model of "topic sentence, body, conclusion," instead of a journalistic model of "lead (conclusion), significance, supporting details."

Peter says that although media "don't just transmit facts; they alter both selection and emphasis, creating different realities in the process," PowerPoint isn't solely to blame for the bad presentations done with it. In fact, he says, PowerPoint helps you communicate more effectively if you have something "useful" to say and exposes you as a ninny if you don't.

But the notion that there is a single right way to do a presentation, and it just happens to be the way journalists tell stories, is surely an overstatement. For example, dramatic narratives have been known to work as an organizing principle. Narratives work differently than standard journalistic articles. For one thing, while journalists begin with the conclusion, narratives think some conclusions can only be understood by watching how they unfold from the beginning. Hamlet written as a newspaper article might not work as well:

Carnage in the Court!

Elsinore — The castle was littered with bodies, including that of the King, Queen and the Prince, apparently as the result of a fencing match that got out of hand. Reports attributed the outburst alternatively to a conspiracy by Hamlet to avenge his father, a conspiracy by the King to put down a usurper, Ophelia's brother's desire to avenge her suicide, or bad fish.

On the other hand Hamlet done in PowerPoints (by Brian Millar) also loses a little something. Which proves once again that while there's no one right way to do something, there are lots of wrong ways.

I was robbed!

My Motorola cell phone robbed me! According to the rules I know, my 18 (3,5,K) beat the dealer's 15 (A,2,2,9,A). Yet the phone claimed that the dealer won, depriving me of those precious ... well, it's a matter of honor!

Dealer's hand is on top, mine on bottom.

Tony Goodson is the first to point out, in the comments to this blog entry, that if the dealer gets 5 cards, s/he beats you no matter who has the high hand. And I lived in Atlantic City for five years!

Driving Directions Sites

For an article I'm writing, I'm looking for sites that provide driving directions. They should either be major and obvious, such as Mapquest, Rand McNally and MapPoint or they should be really interesting.

I'm interested in general mass market mapping sites, also.

Any suggestions?

"We got him."

Good. He's a very very bad man who should rot in jail for the rest of his life.

If, as we all hope, this ends the insurgency — the image of Saddam cowering like a rat in a cellar has got to be discouraging to his supporters, but I suppose it depends on how much the insurgency is pro-Saddam as opposed to anti-US-presence — it neutralizes Iraq as a political issue in the US. And then as the daily reports are dominated by news from Saddam's trial about just how bad a person he was, being opposed to the war is going to look like a moral error.

But just for the record: Our president systematically lied to us in order to get us to go to war; we were told we were in imminent danger when we were not. We went in without a plan for getting out or realistic expectations about what we were letting ourselves in for. We have sold the official looting rights to the administration's closest friends. It all was a cynical distraction from the failure of our war on terrorism. Our unilateralism sets a dangerous precedent and makes us less safe. And we will not know even if the ends justifed the means for years when the ultimate fate of Iraq and the region is clearer.

Nevertheless: We got him! Woohoo!

Here's Gov. Dean's comment on the capture.

Dave raises some good questions.

Don't shake the snow globe

Oh, go ahead...

Guess whose computer is broken?

Yes, friends, my PC is broken again. The motherboard (Asus P4P800 Deluxe) I put in this summer suddenly lost its onboard audio and NIC. The audio revived when I reinstalled the drivers but nothing seems to be bringing back the NIC. Further, my spare PCI NIC reports the same problem: the drivers install but the system says that it cannot be started. I have flashed my BIOS and it says that the onboard services are enabled. (When I replaced the motherboard this summer, the network capability shorted out within hours and I had to replace the replacement. Hmmm.)

I've also noted occasional raster problems since the networking problems happened. ..little flickers of instability.

It feels like a surge problem, but it's plugged into a Back-UPS Pro 650 which ought to be enough to keep its electrical diet healthy. Might it be the internal power supply? It, too, is only 6 months old and pumps some hefty wattage, although I don't recall how much.

Consider also that I go through hard drives the way other people go through socks. I get about 1.5 years out of 'em before they grind to a halt. This is true not only of my desktop machine but also my laptop, which is plugged into a plain old surge protector, not the UPS. Am I just in a Bermuda Triangle of computing?

[Two notes: 1. Yes, I am a backup fanatic. Multiple backups every night. 2. The first person who tells me to "Get a Mac" will receive a stinking fish head in the mail, COD. Yes, a cod COD.] [Note: I will admit that that's a very long line.]

UI Worst Practice #1065: Company-Centric Metadata

When you install a program in Windows, it will (with rare exception) install itself into the Program Files directory. Many programs first create a folder for themselves named after the company that developed the application, so "The Blow Up the Baddies Game" game gets installed into a folder called "Universal Gaming Corporation."

Similarly, grocery stores cluster cereals by manufacturer, not by type: Post Corn Flakes is many boxes removed from General Mills Corn Flakes. Not only does this make it hard to find some flavors — where exactly are the Post Toastie Apple Swirl Cluster Bombettes? — it also makes it harder to compare prices.

At the New England Mobile Book Fair, a huge warehouse of books that's not in the least mobile, books are shelved by publisher.

Dare I point out that the user/customer who thinks about her applications by development house, cereals by manufacturer, or books by publisher is rare indeed.

My new bumpersticker:

Think it'll catch on?

Blaser on Morris on Lydon on Dean

Here's Britt's pithy summary of Dick Morris' interview with Chris Lydon:

He's saying that the Dean campaign is Netscape and the Republicans are Microsoft. Done deal. Next question.

The rest of Britt's analysis of Morris is well worth reading, too.

Tom Peters live

Tom Peters was in town to talk about his new book, Re-Imagine, that "walks the walk" when it comes to arguing that business ought to be in technicolor, not black and white.

I've been a fan of his since I first entered the business world with the academic's prejudice that business must be boring and the people must be not as smart as the ones in academics. Hah! As I used to say, what academics believe about businesspeople is false about businesspeople but true of academics. Peters' books, starting with In Search of Excellence, helped open my eyes to that, for he painted a vision of business that said human values work.

He's always surprising. Last night, in response to a question, he expressed enthusiasm for self-help books. They're all good he said. Surely, objected someone in the audience, many are a total waste of time. Not so, said Tom. If for the price of a book you can get a single idea, the book is worth it. His larger point was that these self-help people, with their peculiarly American call to re-invent ourselves, are the heirs of Emerson. (Take that!, Chris Lydon :) .

Blog of the Month, or what?

I've been notified that Joho has received The Blog Site's first Blog of the Month award. I assume that it's a joke, a scam or a typo, but well, here's the plaque:

Premature E-Regulation

Jeff Pulver writes that the FCC is on the verge of skipping those pesky public comments in its haste to regulate Voice over IP:

it is incredibly disappointing and dismaying to me that the federal government—or states, for that matter—would even consider applying traditional phone regulations to any type of Internet communications at this early stage. Instead, they should reaffirm the longstanding U.S. policy of keeping information and Internet services unregulated—especially as technologies mature and broader phone policies are reformed.

Kevin Werbach (thanks for the link!) writes in an email:

As I said at the FCC VOIP hearing last week, the real issue is the transformation from the Internet as a subset of telecom to telecom as a subset of the Internet. That means treating voice as an application that can run on any platform, not as the platform itself. The regulatory status of VOIP is just the tip of the iceberg.