Meaningful NDA

In response to my griping about the Corbis NDA, Paul points to to one of his non-chron bloggish entries. Excerpt:

When I'm at an early stage in developing a new business plan, I just write the following at the top of the plan:

"Confidentiality: Paul asks that you not show or tell anyone this idea without first calling him at 781-648-1500 to ask his OK. If you tell one person you trust, they will tell one person they trust, and so on. If this idea gets out too early, Paul's business could be ruined. Thanks."

This "NDA" actually builds trust rather than erodes it the way most do.

Queryster

I've taken a quick pass through Queryster.com, and I'm impressed. It's a metasearch site developed by a small team headed up by Jeff Kang. From an email from Jeff:

It's a team effort (a developer friend and myself) that made the Queryster Search Network. The objective is to make Web search easier and more fun. Also it would serve as a showcase for what we can do technically. We hope to turn our skills into a website development business.

Queryster has been online for two months now, and recently we have received a few positive feedbacks and suggestions for improvement. ...

Are we Sodom?

Bob Herbert's column today in the NY Times — "Bliss and Bigotry" — made me cry. It's a good column, but it did not provoke my sadness and anger so much as allow it. I keep surprising myself with how much the issue of gay marriage means to me. Every day I find it means more.

When I was a young a-hole in the '70s, my line of grad school patter said that homosexuality is an inferior form of love because the sex carries no risk. (Yeah, those were the days.) Homosexuals sex acts lack the existential possibility of creating new life, I'd maintain, affecting my best Norman Mailer-esque pose. This gave me sufficient cover for my homophobia even with my gay friends. But, as I became an older a-hole and saw those friends form relationships as loving as the best of my straight friends, I stopped spouting that particular form of stupidity. I shut up, and was a better person for it. Funny how often that works.

I thought my patter was cocktail-party interesting, but it was just a spin on the mainstream bigotry that pinned itself on the "promiscuity" of "the gay life style." No commitment. No love. Just sex sex sex.

So, now we have gay couples standing in line to foreswear promiscuity, to embrace commitment and love. But it turns out that it's not just their way of having sex that's unacceptable to us. Even their love isn't good enough.

Well, God damn a country that turns away love, that would diminish love, that would deny love. What purer gift could we be offered?

Aren't we commiting the very sin that brought God to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah? It sure wasn't because their citizens were just too deeply in love with one another.

History may give Bush a pass for his doctrine of preemptive war, because the country was traumatized by 9/11. It may chuckle ruefully at the brazenness of his oligarchical partisanship. But I do not think history will forgive George W. Bush's attempt to turn our Constitution against the love our children have for one another.

And if history will, I won't.

It's a shame that John Kerry is once again taking a position that's politically convenient. We could use a leader right now.

[Cross posted at Loose Democracy]

Woohoo!

I found out this morning that I've been offered a fellowship at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard. I start officially in July.

What a great opportunity! I'm thrilled.

Metaphotos of the Bettman Archive

I spent yesterday underground at the Bettman Archive, the "picture mine" as Dirck Halstead calls it in an excellent article. The Bettman is one of the largest and most important collections of photographs, 11 million all told. They were moved from Manhattan to a former limestone mine in Pennsylvania in 2001 on the recommendation of Henry Willhelm, an authority on preserving photographs, not just because the site has iron gates and armed guards but more importantly because there they can be kept at sub-zero temperatures. Willhelm — who I got to talk with yesterday — believes that the photographs, which had been deteriorating badly, will now last for thousands of years. And it's not just the photographs and negatives that were at risk: They are kept in paper sleeves that contains the metadata vital to finding and making sense of the images.

Bill Gates' Corbis company owns the archive. Gates is personally responsible for the decision to pack the archive into 19 semi trucks and move it to safety.

Here are some snaps.

The card catalog.

Ledger from 1926 listing entries in a sub-collection

The archive

Further back in the archive

Photo of Mussolini holding the "Sword of Islam," and a sleeve with the photo's metadata.

Babycakes

Ok, first read the warning label in the orange ellipse to be puzzled, if not outright disturbed. Then notice the little baby doll decorations and be relieved.

Passion memorabilia

How'd I miss this press release announcing that "Bob Siemon Designs is manufacturing and distributing officially licensed products for Mel Gibson's new film 'The Passion of the Christ'"? Available are lapel pins and pocket reminders that feature a "beautiful rendition of the Cross from the movie." At least they don't have a sticker across them saying, "As seen in Mel Gibson's 'The Passion'!"

Well, I suppose Mel has to make a buck somehow since the movie didn't have a lot of opportunities for product placements.

Two broken TLA's

1. GPS The GPS I rented from Avis for $10/day sucks. In the course of a 40 mile drive from the Pittsburgh airport to Butler PA, I got lost eight times.

The Avis GPS is a cell phone that audibly announces your turns and shows a graphic indicating which way you turn and how immediate the change is. That works ok once you get used to it. But the street data is terrible. It told me to take turns that don't exist and didn't tell me about road forkings that do exist.

A nice thing about the system: You can set your destination address not just by laboriously using the phone pad as a keypad, but also by calling a human operator will do it for you for free.

2. NDA I have many good things to say about Corbis, whose HQ I visited on Monday. It's a fascinating place, very much in the metadata business. I got to talk with some of their image cataloguers and the person responsible for their thesaurus of terms and concepts. Really interesting. (And thanks to Dov Schiff, an extraordinarily helpful PR guy.) That said, I almost didn't make it past the front door. When you sign in, you're given a non-disclosure form that is short and to the point: You are forbidden from sharing any proprietary information (ok) and anything you learn on site is considered proprietary (not ok). Since I was there to write about Corbis as part of a Wired article, how could I sign their agreement?

This isn't a case of overly-strict lawyering. It's overly-stupid lawyering. It's also very much contrary to the personal style of the half dozen people I met with, each of whom was friendly, open, personable, and eager to talk with real enthusiasm about what they do.

Unfortunate phrasing

Heard on "All Things Considered" this afternoon: A lobbyist for the junk food industry replies to the idea that his ads ought to be banned from kiddie TV shows by saying that that would embroil us in a "fruitless conversation" about what constitutes junk food.

Fruitless, indeed. Isn't that the point?

"When I said I was a uniter, not a divider, I assumed you'd understand I meant a heterosexual uniter"

Cross-posted at Loose Democracy:

If I were getting married today, I think I'd opt for a civil union instead. Limiting marriage to heterosexuals feels so arbitrary that it's, yes, weakening the institution for me.

I could argue in favor of my position, and you would hear nothing that you hadn't heard from others. But I don't think we change our minds about moral issues through argument...

More...

Fannie Mae

Mitch has a column at Red Herring alerting us to the Bush administration's opening shovel-loads in its undermining of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Yes, I'm confused by the issue also. That's why I'm recommending Mitch's column...

BloggerCon and echo chambers

I'm looking forward to the second BloggerCon.

In announcing it, Dave says he's going to ask each of the moderators to work "Nuking the Echo Chamber" into the discussion. Dave asks: "How do we methodically and systematically overcome the tendency for echo chambers to form and self-perpetuate?" I'm still stuck on the prior question: Are there echo chambers? Are they what we think they are? Are they common? Does their existence mean that participants have closed their minds, or are they conversations that serve a different, but legitimate, social purpose?

What I liked most about last year's BloggerCon was that it brought together a great bunch of people who shared an enthusiasm for blogging. A conference devoted to openly debating the topic "Blogs: Pro and Con" might also be useful, but it wouldn't diminish the value of BloggerCon. We believers need a chance to get together, too. Sure, BloggerCon permits contrary points of view, but it's distinguishable from the "Pro or Con" conference in tone and topic. And that's a good thing. BloggerCon helps build community and advance thought by letting us be passionate, without having to back off, argue for fundamental principles with which we already agree, and persuade others of the legitimacy of our enthusiasm.

That's exactly what many alleged "echo chambers" do. And it is not only a good thing but is a requirement for building social groups.

Dayglo Future

Some folks have started a futurist/singularity/cosmic sort of blog. I'm not much of a believer in the thought-is-software idea and have only achieved enlightment a couple of times in my life and then it came in the form of a pill, but the site is lively in the Bucky way and is full of colorful illustrations.

On the road, looking for photos

I'll be on the road through Wednesday, researching an article for Wired on how we end-users are going to find the snapshots we're looking for when we each have 25,000+ photos on our desktops.

I'm leaving tonight to visit Corbis on Monday. They have a few million photos, so they've given this issue some thought. I'm particularly interested in how they create and manage the taxonomies and other metadata.

Then, after traveling all day Tuesday, I'll spend most of Wednesday in the Iron Mountain hole in the ground where Corbis stores its prints and negatives.

The article is not about Corbis, though. Corbis, I hope, will give a way into some of the issues. I've already spoken with a bunch o' folks about what's going on in this field. If you know of someone I should talk with about how we're going to manage the oceans of digital photos we'll be storing, let me know...

Animatronic bees

Excuse me, but technically speaking, aren't bees animals and doesn't beeswax come from one end of the bee or another?

And while I'm on the topic, when the movie credits boast "No animals were harmed in the making of this movie," does that mean that they served only vegetarian food to the cast?

Tilting Diebold

Denounce.com updates the discovery that if you tilt Pepsi bottles just right, you can see if they're winners in the iTunes contest.

Salon article on echo chambers

Salon this morning is running an article of mine about the "echo chamber" meme, i.e., the idea that the Net encourages members of groups to listen only to their own opinions. I think it's a confused meme that diverts attention from the real echo chambers, beginning with the mainstream media.

And then there's the extreme case of a president who doesn't even read the newspapers:

I get briefed by Andy Card and Condi in the morning. They come in and tell me. ... I glance at the headlines just to kind of a flavor for what's moving. I rarely read the stories, and get briefed by people who are probably read the news themselves. ... And the best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world."

Joe Conason points out that maybe this is why the President thinks we invaded Iraq because Hussein wouldn't let inspectors in, that he (W) has been cutting discretionary spending more than Clinton did, and that his new budget "cuts the deficit in half in five years."

TheOnion is funny

Am I proud that I find this about Osama and this about razor blades funny? Nah. But I might as well admit that I sort of like this, too:

Iowa Resident Has Opinion Month Too Late
STORM LAKE, IA—Four weeks after the Iowa Democratic caucus, livestock farmer Darryl Welch, 48, expressed an informed opinion about the candidates Monday. "I like what John Edwards says about rebuilding international alliances to fight terror, but I think some of the programs he supports would mean higher taxes," Welch said Monday. "I wish I'd have said that to all those AP reporters, instead of telling them that I didn't know who I wanted to vote for yet." Unfortunately, Welch's opinions will not be relevant for another three years and 11 months.

Random acts of violets

Via BoingBoing comes this timely meme from a Twin Cities blog: Send a bouquet of flowers to one of the gay couples getting married in San Francisco. Flowers on the Bay will deliver your bouquet to a random couple. Anonymity seems to go both ways in this case, so it's suggested that cards say, "With love, from Boston, Massachusetts." "Call it The Big Gay Bouquet call it Flowers from the Heartland. Call it whatever you want, but help us get this off the ground. "

I called Flowers on the Bay (1 888 217 9119) but the line was busy. They just called back and recommended Mariner & Co. flowers at 800-797-7744. It'll cost you about $50.00. Mariner alone is doing 30-50 deliveries a day. "It's just fantastic," says the very nice woman at the store.

Scoble on corporate blogging

Scoble writes about his Corporate Weblog Manifesto. Good stuff. (Via Doc via Loic.)

Knowledge: One for all and all for one

Dan Gillmor points to a page that tells you how to figure out if your Pepsi bottle is a winner in the free iPod song contest. Says Dan:

Once upon a time, Pepsi would have reconciled itself to knowing that people in one or two communities were in on the design flaw. Now they have to know the news is everywhere.

And in a related story, Michael O'Connor Clarke provides all the answers you need to win a free trip to Florida. See you in Miami!

Public paranoia

The people re-creating the cultish game Paranoia (about which I know nothing) have a blog where they're talking about the process and the business.

Wireless Future Conference

I'm talking at the Wireless Future conference. Here comes the blurb:

Time is running out to register for the Wireless Future conference, which will be held March 12-16 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas. Explore the future of licensed and unlicensed wireless technology with such luminaries as Howard Rheingold (author of Smart Mobs), Kevin Werbach (organizer of Supernova and author of New America Foundation's Radio Revolution), Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the legendary Dave Hughes, David Weinberger (author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined, Dewayne Hendricks of Dandin Group, Joichi Ito of Neoteny, Ltd., Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury, John Quarterman and many more! This is a great conference for wireless entrepreneurs, business strategists, developers, inventors, creative thinkers and anyone else interested in the promise of mobile technology. Sponsored by Andrews Kruth, Metrowerks, Motion Computing, RockSteady Networks, The Futures Lab, Polycot Consulting, Austin Wireless Alliance and Ink PR. [Link to Wireless Future] [Direct Link to Registration - currently $225.00 for four days, includes access to South by Southwest Interactive programming.]

Quantitative thinking

There are interesting facts and ideas at this intro to Alfred Crosby's The Measure of Reality. For example, did you know:

Because Europe did not straddle the equator, and because old traditions dictated twelve hours for each day and each night, Europeans developed a system of unequal "accordion-pleated hours that puffed up and deflated" so as to ensure a dozen hours for each daytime and each nighttime, winter and summer.

The latest Shirky

A couple of pictures. Insert your "Awwwwwwww" here: _____________________.

Awwwwwwwwwww!

I'm on the radio today...

Here and Now is running an interview with me (I'm their tech commentator guy) today about GIS and mapping. It'll run in Boston at around 12:20, probably, on WBUR; the show is syndicated to 40+ NPR stations. You may be able to hear it on the Internet here or here.

Today I am a badhkin

From eagle-eyed Mike O'Dell comes this image, which he says is "pretty hard to explain."

No argument here.

Haunted electricity

While I was away at Emerging Tech, the electric company installed a special meter on our incoming line to see if the voltage is clean and sober. The guy left it there for three days.

When he picked it up, he told us that he'd have to do it again because the machine broke.

Coincidence? I think not....Bwahahahaha.

Meanwhile, I have now thrown out my bookshelf-style stereo system because it lost all bass and the remote stopped working; the tuner can only be tuned through the remote. (Yes, I did put in new batteries. And I did get a Mac.)

For those who care (= no one) I've replaced the stereo with a $25 set of Creative Labs speakers for my laptop which will now serve as my tuner as well as my CD player. Nice sound! (Ah, the benefits of middle aged hearing loss!)

Oats-based initiative

According to the side of the Cheerios box, if we send in $5, First Book will "give children from low-income familes the opportunity to own their first new books."

As school districts routinely ask parents to chip in to pay for the basic supplies the school needs, it's good to know that educating our children - a basic government service - is being outsourced to General Mills.

Look, I'm glad Cheerios is asking us to support a charity, and First Book seems to be a worthy group. I'm just not enough of a libertarian to prefer largesse to taxes when it comes to the government's basic obligations.

Post Conference Stress Syndrom

I took the red eye back from Emerging Tech Thursday night, napped a little on Friday but otherwise put in a full day, and have been asleep ever since with what appears to be a virus thingy. I even missed having a family lunch with Seth Gordon, which I had been looking forward to.

Here's a further indication of just how knocked out I've been: I haven't checked my email since Friday night.

I offer this final bit of evidence: On Saturday morning, I watched all of Chain Reaction, starring Keanu Reeves, my mind feverishly weaving in and out of the plot holes.

Cory loses yet more control

Cory has altered the Creative Commons license on Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom so that almost any non-commercial adaptation of it does not require his permission. If you want to turn it into a movie or republish it via skywriting, please go ahead.

BTW, you can read the text of Cory's talk at Emerging Tech here.

Speaking of Cory, I ran into him in the speakers room at Emerging Tech where he was throwing out a print-out of his speech. I randomly snagged a piece that turned out to be peculiarly relevant, so I had him sign it:

Click for full-size image

Spalding Gray, remembered in comments

It's one of those little mysteries of the Web, but a one-line blog entry of mine that does nothing but point to John Perry Barlow's moving memory of Spalding Gray has accreted a set of stories and tributes on my comment board that is quite remarkable.

Microsoft Patents XML Schemas

In response to my post about a Microsoft presentation at Emerging Tech, Bob "Professor" Morris points us to a Microsoft page that explains something important about its XML schema for Word, Excel, etc.:

Microsoft may have patents and/or patent applications that are necessary for you to license in order to make, sell, or distribute software programs that read or write files that comply with the Microsoft specifications for the Office Schemas.

So, Microsoft's patents prevent me from writing a program that reads a Word XML file? Wow, that's harsh.

And besides, isn't "schema" already a plural?

[etech] Peace, Love and XML

Don Box of Microsoft, responsible for Longhorn Indigo (communications tech for building Web services, or "the SOAP messaging stack" that Don works on), is talking about how Microsoft is going to support standards, really this time. He says the following:

WordML, the current Word format, is optimal if you're a Word author, but is unusable if you are trying to do interesting XML-y things with it, like write an app to process it. It's designed to work well for Word. When Microsoft shipped it, people had a normal, human, emotional reaction: They hated it. Microsoft said that it didn't expect you to author it, only to process it.

[A whole bunch of stuff I don't understand it, and then:] We will be able to extend the Microsoft file system by providing our own schema. (Marc Cantor calls out that this is "really coolio, dude.") "This isn't just about the API. This is about data extensibility," says Don.

Indigo is about "service-orientation" rather than object orientation. "We don't want you to run .Net on your Linux box."

[More stuff I didn't understand. I'm not complaining, mind you.]

[Since I am obviously in over my head - feel free to explain it to me - I should perhaps report that both Bob Frankston and Marc Canter, off line, were favorably impressed with the direction Don sketched.]

Kerry scandal

I have an idea! Let's all get together and not care!

[etech] Don Norman keynote

Don's new book is Emotional Design.

He uses lots of photos, so the following minimalist representation will not have the, um, emotional impact of his talk.

People have emotional reactions to, and relationships with, products. Positive examples: A tiny Sony camera and Mini Cooper.

We have two information processes: Cognition (understanding the world) and emotion (judges the world). There are three levels: Visceral (biological and pre-wired), behavioral, and reflective.

Bottled water is their bottles. A Perrier bottle is emotional. A cheap plastic one is behavioral. Those fancy blue bottles appeal to us viscerally.

The 1961 Jaguar E-type (the one in the MOMA) is designed viscerally.

Remote controls (channel clickers) are behavioral remote controls. He recommends the Harmony controller that doesn't tell you "control your DVD" but "watch a movie."

The car seat controllers that look like seats are behavioral design.

Hummers are reflective design, although their ads are visceral.

How dress is usually reflective design.

We often neglect sound in design.

People either hate or love the Apple iMac. "That's a sign of great design."

He tells us about the last two chapters of his book because people don't like them.

The Honda robot looks like a person and there's no reason for it. Robots ought to look like what they're designed to do.

The Roomba is visceral in that it doesn't fall off cliffs. But it's called a robot primarily for marketing reasons. Don's coffee maker is more of a robot - cost $1,000, has more motors in it than Roomba. and is smarter. It just doesn't move. Robots will evolve by being connected to others, e.g., coffee maker connected to pantry and to dishwasher. There will have to be a mobile robot to connect them. That robot needs boredom and frustrated, a "weak method" for getting out of problems we wouldn't have anticipated: "I'm stuck in a corner" so I'm frustrated, or "I'm sitting in front of the coffee machine for 20 minutes," so I'm bored and will go find something else to do.

Q: What about Amori's "uncanny valley"

A: The question is what your robot ought to look like. Coffee makers ought to look like coffee makers. Amori says that the more it looks like a person, the more unnerving it is. When it looks like a person but doesn't act like one, there's a valley and we hate it.

When I say "put emotions in machines," I'm not saying we should put real human emotions. We should put in emotional systems appropriate to the machine. [He's not thinking about machines feeling things, but rather having control systems that function the way emotional systems do.]

Q: [Mark Canter] Pure text or drop shadows and bevels?

A: It depends on the function. BTW: "Jakob Nielsen in his private life likes beautiful things."

[Great talk. Provided a vocabulary for talking about an area of life, presented via great visual examples and a humble manner.]

[etech] People-to-People (Microsoft)

Lily Cheng from Microsoft Research is talking about how people represent themselves on line.

The closer the friends, the fuzzier they want the representations.

We need to make social tools fluid enough to account for the way people's lives change.

We need easy access to friends and people important to us. We want sponatenous interactions.

Lily's group went to a mall and asked people to draw their social interactions, and gots lots of circles and lines. Microsoft studied this and built a "personal map" that clusters people based on who they send email to (TO and CC) and how frequently. The system knows who is related to whom based on their interactions. Then Lily's group mapped all the distribution lists at Microsoft, clustered around the inquiring individual; the app lets you see how to get to person C through person B.

Another presenter (missed his name) shows an app (Koala?) that shows me details about the people in my social network.

Will people use this, Lily asks. What effect would it have? Would it make people feel more connected? They're going to do some research...

It's a Shirky girl!

The rumor going around etech is that Clay and his wife are the parents of a girl! Woohoo! Mazel tov to the entire family. A world with more Shirkies is a better world for all of us.

[etech] FOAF

Dan Brickley is explaining Friend of a Friend. (I had a chance to talk with him about this yesterday in a hallway.) It's an XML standard that allows people to express information about themselves...the sorts of things you might say on your homepage. There are currently 2M FOAF descriptions in the world.

There are different styles of FOAF files. You can be very explicit about relationships: "Jane is my arch nemesis." But there's also a more implicit, evidence-based approach: Libby and I went to the same school and work for the same organization. ("I lean toward this one," says Dan.)

Here's a paragraph from the official FOAF FAQ:

FOAF provides conventions for saying the sorts of things that you might say in your homepage ('My name is...', 'I work for ...', 'I'm interested in ...', 'I live near ...', 'I'm pictured in these photos...', 'I write in this weblog...'), but in a way that is easy for computers to process. Since computers are pretty dumb, and can't read human languages, we provide simplistic FOAF descriptions, to help them answer questions such as 'Show me pictures of Weblog authors interested in ... who live near here', 'Show me recent articles written by people at this meeting', 'Is this person vegetarian?'. FOAF is a 'Semantic Web' project, which is an effort to make the Web easier for machines to help us navigate.

As Dan said recently on his blog: "A purpose of FOAF is to engineer more coincidences in the world."

"We're on the border of going mainstream." The social, legal and pricacy issues need serious attention, says Dan.

Now Edd Dumbill is talking about FoafBot. I had trouble hearing him because I'm in the back, but apparently it provides IRC channels with information gained by spidering FOAF files. Cool.

[etech] Mobile Life (keynote)

Pertti Korhonen from Nokia is talking about the effect of mobile computing.

What do we need to unleash the potential? We need to simplify the user experience of rich environments, for example by bringing touch into the picture: Point and touch your mobile device. He touches his mobile device to a book. It makes a connection to an RFID tag. Now it can open a web site, push an app to his device, or it can push info to his peers.

Two ways of getting to super mobile devices: Try to shrink a PC or try to grow the simple mobile device to enable the new apps. Nokia likes the second approach.

We want personalization: Playing with ringing tones, new covers, etc. "We need to extend and encourage this type of human creativity." [Could have used some exciting examples. ]

We are looking at how people want to share information. P2P is in the mainstream.

He shows Modish: Mobile distribution and sharing. It works with GPS radio and BlueTooth. Create groups. Capture. Publish.

His most important message today: Openness. Open interfaces and open standards to insure that the maximum amount of innovation can take place. Globally agreed Internet standards making their way to cellphones. Nokia builds on top of Symbian. They have a platform on top of Symbian designed for designing apps and UIs.

This year they will ship 100M devices with Java . "That's a lot of sockets." Java is "the prime end-to-end platform we want to support." They also support Python.

Example of an innovative app: Photoblogging. 400,000 tools and docs are downloaded every month — quite an active developer community.

He demos a simple program that navigates weather info.

We need to start a lively conversation with Internet experts about what to do to enable groups.

Q: It's great that Nokia isn't openness and innovation, but the carriers aren't. Can use your influence to explain to them the importance of open standards? [applause]

Q: Your developer tools are generally Microsoft only. How about Linux and the Mac? [applause]

A: We'll be releasing new tools. We think it's important not to be single-platform.

Internet technology will enable integration across domains. IPv6 is important, too, because it will enable device-to-device addressing will be possible, making P2P possible.

Q: How about DRM?

A: It's important that we put DRM in. The field has been fragmented, but we think it'll come together.

(Overall, he's made an impressive case for Nokia's commitment to openness.)

[The incredibly helpful Greg Elin ("He gives and gives and gives..."), sitting next to me, is more impressed with this talk than I am. He's hearing that the rest of the world forms the same personal relationship with their phones that we in this room (and in this country to some extent) form with our PCs.]

[etech] Marc Smith keynote

[etech] Marc Smith Marc Smith is a Microsoft researcher who last year gave a winning talk about NetScan, software that aggregates tons of interesting data about usenet discussions. Now he's talking about well, not sure yet. But he's funny and interesting, in a Jeff Goldblum-y way.

Not all groups are groups. Groups should be people who know one another and are treated roughly as equals. Much of what's on line is more like civic associations like the Shriners. Like such groups, most members in online groups don't do anything beyond showing up once or twice. They are "places," Virtual "Schelling Points" (i.e., places in a landscape you might naturally go to meet).

Yhprum's Law: Systems that shouldn't work sometimes do. E.g., eBay's reputation system. [Ironically, Smith misspells Yhprum.]

What sort of furniture do you need in these social places? Ostrum's design principles for groups: Boundaries matter. ("Don't give me seamless computing. Seams, please.") Groups need to monitor their members' behavior. Groups need a graduated system of sanctions. [And others I didn't catch.]

Smith studies UseNet. It's a 23-year-old "standing structure for conversation." 240M messages in '03. 8.5 unique identities. 151,000 newsgroups. About 50,000 are very active. Mark's group tracks metadata about UseNet. He goes through the presentation I saw and liked at eTech last year.

The new mice are almost upon he says: Handheld devices that allow us to click on things. They read tags and get info off the Web. "Every object has a story to tell." [Also from last year.]

He's touting NTag, an e-ID tag system I used at Pop!Tech. He's more excited about it than I was.

His sytem is called "AURA." [See last year's blog.] Your cellphone becomes a mouse and the label becomes as big as cyberspace. Anyone with an opposing view can attach a message to the object.

AURA is about to launch a public annotation repository. Marc describes the benefits of resolution services that can aggregate data and annotations.

What's up with world of ends?

Hits on World of Ends, a page Doc and I posted months and months ago, today are going through the roof - 70,000 today so far, and 10,000 in the past 45 minutes. I doubt this is a coincidence.

Anyone know who linked to us? Must be a hell of an A-Lister! [Later] Answer: BoingBoing.

[etech] Liz Lawley: Breaking out of the boy's club

Liz is one of the founders of Misbehaving.net, among other things. Subtitle: "How diversifying your team can expand your market."

There's a flawed premise behind most efforts to sell to women: Women aren't involved in the development of the product. E.g., early voice recognition systems were calibrated to men's voices. And video conference systems were designed to focus on whoever is talking, so now women can't be seen and can't be heard. Seatbelts and airbags were designed for men, and women and children are killed by them.

Who has been really successful in making products that survived the dot-com bust? Anil suggested that it wasn't coincidental that the two major blogging products (Blogger.com, Movable Type) had significant influence by women (Meg Hourihan and Mena Trott) during their development. Other examples: Dokomo, The Sims, eBay, Microsoft Wollop, Microsoft Research. (Purple Moon, Liz says, failed because it tried to make products only for girls, and thus didn't get the balance right.)

Liz noticed that there are whole bunch of women who work for O'Reilly. "I think that may have a lot to do with why their product line has been so successful."

"If you can build a place that women love, the guys will show up. the reeverse is not true." Tom Melchior.

By changing the requirements, you can diversify your workplace. Liz recommends Unlocking the Club House. She says that prior experience is a poor predictor of success in a job. Far more important is commitment. Don't just look for hardcore programmers. Look for people who really care about your product.

[Unattributed remarks came from people who's names I didn't get]

Q: When women ask me if they should go into technical fields, I say absolutely not. Once you're 35, it's almost impossible to be employed any more. It has more to do with being old than being female.

A: (David Sifnoraty) Those employers are idiots.

A: (Anil) Sounds like saying all the good jobs are going to India. You have to fight for your career.

A: Programming is actually a very appealing job, with flexible hours, work from home, etc.

A: (Meg) I loved my computer but I had no interest in taking computer courses. I would have been interested in a couse in building stuff by doing, not in "Advanced C++."

Liz says that there is a developing area of academic study that's much more focused on project-based learning, human-computer-interface classes, etc.

Marc Canter: And there's a disproprotionate number of women in marketing and pr.

Q: (Cory Doctorow) How do we get there?

A: (Liz) Re-think the qualifications for jobs. Look for ways for people to move across the borders.

Meg: When you hire one woman, it gets easier to hire more. Women geeks know other women geeks.

A: And have women interview your candidates.

A: And make your requirements in things that men programmers often are bad at, such as good social skills, writing skills.

Q: (Tom) "Softening" the requirements sounds patronizing.

A: (Liz) I don't mean making them easier. I mean focusing on different things.

(Anil) Making the requirements stricter can help. E.g., saying you won't hire dysfunctional communicators really weeds 'em out.

(Lily) People tend to hire people like themselves. You have to work at trying to balance your teams.

(Judith) If you're in a large organization, look within it.

(Me) When men are alone, we tend to be complete pigs.

(Marc) I agree.

There are "shoutocracies." I don't know how to respond.

(Liz) We do a terrible job of highlighting the women who are out there.

[etech] Technorati

Dave Sifry, another of my heroes, is listing some of Technorati's stats: 1.6M sources, a new weblog every 8 seconds, the index updated within 7 mins of a posting. [I'm here even though I alsoreally wanted to see Eric Boabeau's talk] [Damn! My first draft of this put this badly! I left the "also" out of the previous sentence. I'm here because Technorati is so damn cool and interesting. And so is Eric.]

Dave shows a hack he created last night: A list of the top products discussed in the last 24 hours. He has us post to our blogs about it to see how quickly our links show up in Technorati. Answer: Three minutes.

"Everyone talks about the power law. I said, Fuck it, I have the data." He charted Technorati ranking against the number of inbound links. "All the power laws says is that when it's easy for anybody to publish, by its very nature, you're going to have a curve with a relatively small number of things that are well-linked by a lot of people." What's really interesting is the tail. Even #100,000 has five inbound links. "This is an inclusive community. Not everyone has to be on the A-List for this to be an effective medium."

This page charts Technorati ranking against the total number of inbound links for people who have that ranking. [No, I don't understand that.] The aggregate number of links down the curve greatly outweighs the number of the top 100. There are a lot more little clusters than big clusters.

"How can we help people use this service in new and creative ways? Everytime we come out with a major HTML feature, we'll come out with an XML API as well, free for non-commmercial use." Dave lists some hacks that have been done: Joi Ito gets IM/SMS notificatiosn of new links. Movable Type plugins. Threading on weblog reads (newsmonster, newsgator, blosxom).

If you want your stuff indexed fast, use the high-priority indexer: http://www.tefchnorati.com/pinger.

Future: Open reviews (RVW format). Subscribe to keywords.

Dave describes a way to get notified whenever a blog you care about is updated, by combining notification, IM and RSS. In his example, we see, on Technorati, Dave's blogroll with notifications of updates. "This is part of making the blog reading experience more conversational."

Vote links (an idea from Kevin Marks) lets you add a tag ("vote=") inside the link that says that the vote is 0,1, or -1. This lets you link to someone you dislike without implicitly giving them more authority.

Technorati is also aware of geoURLs.

[etech] iRobot

Helen Greiner, iRobot president and cofounder, is giving a commercial. She shows an ad. She tells us her company is hot. She tells us that her company's robotic vacuums (Roombas) pick up more dirt than conventional vacuums and cost less than the competitors. The only topic of technical interest she touches on is how Roombas escape from tricky areas of houses.

In her demo of the vacuum, she actually sprinkles crumbs on the floor, like every door-to-door vacuum sales person in history. Oy veh.

Vacuum robots are just the tip of the iceberg, she says. [Let's hope so.] The deep change with robotic systems is: "Sensing tied through intelligent algorithms to action." Her robots respond to the world, not a model of the world. [Interesting — very Rodney Brooks — but a trivial example. The Roomba vacuum is like a bumpercar that sucks.] In the future: They'll respond to voice and will find their own power to recharge. [Yawn.]

I left and missed the last half hour. In the hallway, I got to talk with Bob Frankston and Micah Sifry. Very cool.

[etech] Tim's keynote

[I'm at the O'Reilly Emerging Tech Conf in San Diego for the next three days. Keynote MP3s here. Conference wiki. Digital Democracy MP3s.]

Tim O'Reilly, who is one of my heroes, is giving his welcoming keynote. He says the aim of O'Reilly is to change the world by letting the world know about what the techies are up to. But he does more. Communities just happen around Tim. Of course, they don't "just happen" at all.

Tim's going to talk about what's on his radar.

When he asks who uses Linux, about 30% of the hands go up (surprisingly few!). 100% of hands go up when he asks who uses Google and Amazon. His point: Since Google and Amazon run on Linux, we're all Linux users. "The Internet is the platform."

Key principle: Harness the power of the user community. E.g., Amazon has "features" contributed by users (LinkMania) whereas Barnes & Noble doesn't. MapQuest hasn't achieved an Amazon-like dominance because it doesn't have any social software aspects; eTech is running a collaborative mapping workshop. "How the real and the virtual interpenetrate will be huge!" [Cool. I just wrote an issue of Esther Dyson's newsletter on exactly this point. I feel so validated!]

Tim's hot on social software. He points to the Dean campaign but ppokes fun at Orkut where 50 people he don't know are waiting to hear if Tim will be their friend.

He likes WordSpy as a "view of pop culture." It lists the first use of new words. E.g., "blujejacking": stealing someone's BlueTooth connection.

iPod is on Tim's radar because it pulls together so many trends. "Here's an application that from the gitgo was conceived as a multi-device app." Rich client front end on PCs, Rendezvous-enabled, big back end...(Rendezvous lets you llisten to music on the machine of anyone on your LAN.) But there's no "architecture of participation" in iPod. And Apple distributes its features unevenly: Buddy lists are in iChat but not in iTunes.

Also on his radar:L Network-enabled market research. We can figure out what the servers are telling us: Microsoft NetScan, Technorati, Alexa. He's found that Google AdWords are good predictors of book sales. He's found, btw, that 23$ of OS books are about Mac, far larger than its market share. "Maybe this is the OS Enthusiasm Index." [Or it's the Novel OS Index or the OS Difficulty Index.]

Hacking is on Tim's radar. E.g., FirstMile in Cambodia picks up email from offline villages. Tim's seeing more hardware hacking. E.g., the Segway has been underhyped in some ways. "It brings computers into the real world."

Software is becoming commoditized, he said, but the contributions of users and participants is not (Amazon vs. B&N). (I like time's "architecture of participation" phrase. Someone send it to WordSpy!)

Gone blogging

First, sorry my site was down for much of the day. This one apparently wasn't my fault...something went wrong with my most excellent host. It happens.

Also, I seem to have lost maybe 500 emails during the outage. If you sent me some, the chances are very strong you are a spammer, in which case, go to hell. But, for the other 2 of you, if you don't hear from me within a couple of hours, could you please resend? Thx.

I spent most of the day traveling to San Diego for the Digital Democracy Teach-In and then Emerging Technology. So, I'll be blogging over at my e-political blog at Corante. At the top of the column to the right are the titles of the blogs I enter there, although the updating is a bit erratic.

Poppa's got a brand new Mac

Well, Poppa has a used G4 from MacResQ.

So, after installing OS X (by the way, what's with the Black Muslim naming scheme?) as easily as XP, I took the machine over to my father-in-law's to teach him how to use it. The results were mixed.

Keep in mind that my father-in-law only wants to do two things: Pick up email and check on a stock price. This is the low end of the computer stress test, but it turns out that it has its own challenges.

Much of the success of the project was invisible to Grandpa, which is how it should be. For example, the Mac found and installed his HP printer without even being asked to look for it. Lor' bless USB. Likewise, the trackball — from the Linux box I'd given him that replaced the Windows machine that kept crashing — worked as easily as one would expect.

Grandpa took to Sherlock right away. We loaded in a few stock symbols, and it's perfect for him. I wouldn't be surprised if he explored some of the other pages as well.

The dock at the bottom worked better for Grandpa than the Windows' task bar ever did, and that's important because windowed machines are essentially confusing: If you're not comfortable with stacked windows, the 3D cues aren't enough. Grandpa had trouble switching among windows in Windows in part because he task bar goes for efficiency, truncating names to fit more programs in. But programs sitting in the Mac's dock are clearly labeled and have, large flashy graphic representations — a deerstalker and magnifier for Sherlock, a postage stamp for email. Grandpa had no trouble switching among windows by clicking on the dock. So, score one for the Mac!

On the other hand, the minimize button that causes a program to be sucked into the right hand corner (sorry, I don't know the Mac argot) was somewhere between confusing and terrifying, so we skipped it. For Grandpa, it's better that all the windows be in a single state: open, big, and ready to go.

There were little inconsistencies that had me apologizing for the Mac's design, though. For example, I had confidently told Grandpa that he could remember which button closes a window because not only was it red, but when you mouse over it, an X shows up. (Why isn't the X there all the time?) Within minutes, though, we'd come across an X-less red button and a red button that had a dot in the center. Where are the GUI fascists when you need them?

I also couldn't figure out how to get the spell checker to accept my father-in-law's email address as a legit word. I'd click on the right menu choice, but it would only accept the part before or after the at sign, toggling the other side. Small annoyance.

I had trouble with the address book. I ended up inadvertently creating a couple of "NoName" entries. This is probably because I couldn't figure out how to tell it that I was done entering contact info except by clicking on the "+" to create a new one. Well, I didn't want to create a new one. I just wanted to say "I'm done!" with the old one. This is a place where the Mac seems to have opted for efficiency at the expense of explicitness.

Nits nits nits. But here's the big problem: Email and Web pages repeatedly broke.

The very first email message we looked at had an attachment. When I clicked on it, I was told that it can't be viewed, and I was given instructions for downloading a plugin. The plugin didn't work either, although it did open a bunch of windows with icons, instructions, warnings and technobabble. The second message had a link to a video. To demonstrate the Mac's multimedia proficiency, I clicked on it. Same drill.

Now, because I've been using a computer for a while, I know that the document didn't open because it was a Word file and the video didn't play because it's (apparently) a Windows media file. [See Note 1 below before you go MacBallistic on me.] But:

1. The Mac handled these problems gracelessly. Had I not been there, Grandpa would have had to reboot just to clear the screen of the posters telling him that he's paying the price for adopting a minority technology.

2. From Grandpa's point of view, it doesn't matter whose fault it is. The fact is that the Mac isn't letting him do what he got a computer to do.

3. Worse, when he makes a mistake, it digitally throws up — same as XP and Linux — without giving him a clear, one-button way to say "Ok, I understand. Skip it. Pretend I never asked." Instead, I'm going to have to get on the phone and direct him to the right red buttons — some with X's and some without — to clear the debris off his screen.

So, overall so far: Assuming the Mac is as stable as I expect, it's the right OS for Grandpa. I got tired of reinstalling Windows, and desktop Linux (Mandrake and RedHat) is too unstable and too hard to do simple things with. But it is by no means the straightforward, simple machine that makes computing as easy as falling off a blog for a novice user like Grandpa.

NOTE 1: Because I'm a moron, the OS X disks I bought over eBay are in fact for an Ibook or an IMac or an IPod or some other over-branded Mac product. OS X seems to be doing fine, but the system restoration disks don't run. So, it's possible that there's some default set of products I'm missing that would solve the Windows doc and media problem. If not, then I assume that buying AppleWorks to view Word files will do the trick. All advice gratefully accepted, as usual. And a big wet kiss to all of you who have been so helpful so far. Thank you!

NOTE 2: Grandpa sometmes reads this blog, so pretend you like me.

Croaked phone

Oh no! The Frog Phone seems to be down! Maybe 1-888-31-FROGS (1-888-313-7647) only works in Canada...

Exit the MATRIX

Jane Black at Businessweek Online reports that more than half of the states that signed up for the MATRIX law-enforcement database have quit it. The Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange lets the police draw on multiple databases to create instant dossiers on, well, anyone they want. Here are Jane's conclusions:

There's no doubt that MATRIX raises privacy red flags, though after an extensive briefing by the Florida Law Enforcement Dept., which is spearheading the project, I believe that it's little more than an efficient way to query multiple databases.

The real furor over MATRIX demonstrates something much more important — and surprising: Privacy advocates have gained a lot of ground in the two years since September 11. And the pendulum is swinging back in their favor.

12 minutes on the value of the unspoken

I just stumbled across an 12-minute video talk I did for Vignette last spring on the value of ambiguity, messiness and the unspoken. I just watched it and I agree with myself, even 7 months later.

Got a Mac, so shut up already

I just installed OS X on the used G4 I bought for my father-in-law. Having installed Windows scores of times — probably more than a 100 in my lifetime — and having installed Linux a few times with mixed success, I was interested in how the Mac would do.

Answer: Pretty durn easy. As easy as Windows XP, and definitely easier than Red Hat or Mandrake.

And then the fun began.

The UI effects are real crowd-pleasers. It matters to me that the droplets of water play catch as you wait for something to install. Let's not say I'm superficial. Let's just say I'm attuned to visual payfulness. (Also, I'm easily amused. It's a gift.)

I love the built-in Bayesian filtering in the email client. It beats the integration of Outlook and Popfile to bits.

Sherlock is so cool that it seems like a proof of concept, not the functional app that it is.

And I've just started kicking it around. I expect to find even more to like.

Of course, I still have things to whine about. For example:

The installation disk doesn't tell you to hold down the c key in order to get the machine to boot from the CD

Windows XP gets you hooked up to the Internet without throwing DHCP/proxy gobbledygook in your face.

The Mac registration process doesn't give you enough choices and doesn't let you opt out of questions such as "What are you going to use your Mac for?" Annoying.

The one-button mouse still feels like a really bad idea to me.

There's only one corner you can drag on a Mac window to resize it. There's no way to size a window up or left, only down and right. Or am I missing something obvious?

Internet Explorer has already crashed. I was checking a stock quote at www.tse.com and the window simply disappeared on me. (I hadn't yet discovered Safari. Now I have.)

The real test: Will my father-in-law take to it like a cat takes to a one-button mouse, or will he come down with a case of the eensy little gotchas?

Blogging over at Many2Many

It's official! I've been added to the august team of bloggers over at Many2Many. where social software issues and implications are discussed. I'm honored.

See Ralph Not Run

Ralph Nader is showing signs of leaning heavily towards running again. If, like me, you think that that would be a bad thing in the current context, you can send a message to his exploratory committee at info@naderexplore04.org. There's also a site set up to urge him to support the Democratic candidate so that Bush won't get reelected.

Orkut Follies

Michael O'Connor Clarke is writing funnily (here and here) about the foibles of Orkut.

His Monopoly card reminds me of a fake screen capture I used when talking about Artificial Social Networks (ASN) such as Orkut.

Click for larger view

Just in case it's not obvious, the point is that you can't get over ASNs' inherent binary nature by adding more binary choices. That is, the problem isn't just that the choices are too precise; the problem is also that the choices are necessarily explicit. Social relationships depend on being implicit, hidden, dark and unspoken.

The Semantic Earth

I spent all of December and half of January working on an article for Esther Dyson's Release 1.0. Man, did I learn a lot, including that Esther and Christina Koukkos are uniquely demanding yet patient editors.

The article's just come out. Here's the abstract:

Every business in the world is headquartered on earth. Every employee works somewhere. Every customer is at some location at every moment. Every product is delivered to some spot and every service is performed at some coordinates. Every transaction involves at least one place and usually more than one. And yet, until recently, businesses have systematically managed location information only for processes directly concerned with moving people and goods. Why has the literal common ground of business been largely absent from business applications?

The answer is obvious: Integrating information about locations - beyond including an address field in your customer database - has required specialized skills and a budget that often was larger than the potential benefits of such a project. And now we are integrating not just information about locations, but information into locations: PCs and PDAs and other user or sensor devices are aware of where they are and what surrounds them, often receiving local information in realtime and giving feedback. Location is more complex than simple longitude and latitude in a database, involving a world full of objects, people and processes that are moving around relative to one another and to the earth, referred to in terms that humans understand quite precisely but that can be impossible for computers to parse. Therefore, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have been stuck where information retrieval was in the early '90s: a technology that could have transformative effects if only it didn’t require high priests to build and maintain it.

The problems of the GIS industry are so tough precisely because the earth is so simple. The earth is a wet rock. We inhabit it with meaning. Whether those meanings are discovered, invented or revealed, they are dependent on us. You see that dependency clearly in the diversity of maps we draw. Maps can be inconsistent and contradictory in every aspect - what objects we see, at what scale we draw them, where we etch the boundaries, which words we use as labels - because our human projects are inconsistent and contradictory. There is no more hope for a single, universal map than there is for a single, universal language, because the thing we are mapping - the earth - has no language, no culture and no projects of its own. It is too real for that. All its meanings are attributed.

The GIS industry is now breaking out of its box. The technology, data representation, economics and security-driven needs for real-time geographic information are coming together. Businesses are becoming location-aware, making existing processes more efficient and enabling new processes and new relationships to emerge.

But something even bigger is happening.

Thanks to the constellation of technology that enables digital networks to be laid over the places of the earth, wherever we are we will be able to hear the human conversation that has occurred about that place - the history that occurred there, the aesthetics to be savored, the commerce transpiring at that very moment, recommendations offered by strangers and friends. The mute places of the earth are being given voice, and the voices are, of course, ours. Meanwhile, the places themselves are becoming digitally alive and are noting our presence, too.

This is happening now. It is not just spawning innovative new businesses. It will change our most basic sense of what it means to be in a place.

Isenberg: WTF?

David Isenberg has posted more about his free-form gathering of interesting people. It's called WTF and it doesn't stand for anything yet.

Poetry blog

Pete the Beat who has been blogging his poems in my back pages (um, comments) has started his own blog, Beat Way Down. Here's how one entry begins :

The art of highballs and cocktails
cannot reach Mars on Main...

SuperBowl Note (Caution: Contains no gratuitous nudity)

My son and I went on a bonding trip to the supermarket a few minutes before the SuperBowl began — I think it's the only sports event we've ever watched, except for Olympic ice skating — and were amused to see that the salty snackfood shelves had been just about cleared out.

Of course, our glee was tempered by the fact that we were there to buy salty snackfoods.

Tom Hespos at Online Spin reports that each SuperBowl ad cost $2.3 million. Here's an extract:

TV ratings decline every year.

Media consumption habits continue to diversify, resulting in a fragmented landscape in which an increasing percentage of people are unlikely to ever be reached by incremental spending in TV.

Yet prices go up every year.

And TV continues to be the foundation of national advertising plans.

Alternative to Orkut

OnePotMeal announces a new Artificial Social Network for those of us griping about Orkut: Urkel.

Clear, precise...and problematic

Orkut embodies two of the weaknesses inherent in artificial social networks: it requires us to be clear and precise. Those are virtues when it comes to invoices and jury verdicts, but they are how real social networks are not built.

The precision shows up in the digital choices we're given: Is Phil your friend or not? If he is, is he one-star, two-star or three-star sexy? Choices you are not given include: (i) Sort of sexy. (ii) Could be sexy if he dressed better. (iii) If I were a woman, I think I'd find him sort of sexy if I went for that type and if he dressed better. So, exactly how many stars does that work out to?

Ah, but as several commenters on a previous blog entry pointed out, Orkut lets us write testimonials precisely to get around the over-precision of the yes-no rating system: We can write what we want and say what we can't say with 1-3 stars.

But, while testimonials need not be precise, they do try to make explicit something important about a relationship. Sometimes, of course, that's exactly what we need to do. And, if the testimonial system is working for you, fine. For some people in some situations it's going to be exactly what they need,

Nevertheless, you can only build a real social network by overcoming clarity and precision. Groups form by creating messy darkness. A team "bonds" as the relationships among the members become so tangly and ambiguous that the members can no longer sum one another up in a few words, much less by reference to their official roles. A mailing list becomes more than just a distribution channel when, over time, the participants learn enough about one another through the implicit body language of messages that their off-hand descriptions — "She's a curmudgeon" "He's a total geek" — feel inadequate. Our most important relationships — our family, for example — we can't fathom fully much less explain clearly. Groups become real through ambiguity, messiness, the implicit and the unspoken.

We can be somewhat precise and somewhat explicit about these real relationships, but there's a price to pay: Any clear and explicit description I gave you of my daughter would obscure more than it showed, and would have an effect on my relationship with her if she were to read it here.

Artificial Social Networks like Orkut get it backwards. They are built on explicit and precise declarations of relationship.

Does this mean they're worthless and doomed? Not at all, although I personally am finding Orkut to be all maintenance and no value. Humans are so doggedly social (hmm, something wrong with that sentence!) that we take every instance of proximity as an opportunity for relationship, and we overcome every obstacle to find someone else to care about: A line for tickets becomes a nonce encounter group if the movie is sold out, and even prisoners in solitary will tap on the walls to talk with someone they may never see. (BTW, what exactly is the baud rate for cell-wall tapping?) So, connect millions of us by digital lines that are clear and precise, and we'll figure out some way to overcome the system's limitations and bring it into genuine sociality. Something will emerge. We just can't tell what yet.

Cross-blogged at Many2Many

Now it's my monitor...

For the perverse enthusiasts of my hardware woes, you'll be happy to know that my one-year-old ViewSonic monitor has bitten the dust. It shimmies almost all the time and there are inch-wide vertical margins of fuzziness on either side of the beast. Also, it seems to me to run dark.

ViewSonic's customer support is excellent — 24/7 and efficient. (One beef: the tech supporters don't have access to the registration database, so you have to move 70 lbs. of dead weight to get at the serial number on the back.) So, now I'm off to Staples to get a box and packing materials.

Please note that the shimmying continues even though it's now plugged into an APC XS 1500 monster of a UPS that reports I'm only drawing 350 out of the 1,500 watts it can handle. And the UPS is plugged into one of the new 20 amp lines coming into my office.

Our electric supplier is going to check the voltage coming in. He is not bringing an exorcist with him. Yet.

Dean back on his game

I didn't see the Tim Russert interview of Dean, but I just read the transcript and it reminded me why I'm supporting the Gov.

Oh, sure, you'll find lots to throw in my face in that interview. But that's the point: Here's a guy who has actual beliefs.

Christopher Allen Sebastien Paquet in Orkut Jail

Christopher Allen Sebastien writes about how he got locked out of Orkut, possibly by alerting people to what he thought was a security hole (which turned out to be a UI defect). He shared a cell with Marc Canter.

On the must-read list about Orkut: Danah Boyd's rational rant.

Jon Stewart: America's Finest Journalist

Jeez, but the Daily Show with Jon Stewart has been good.

No other journal so effectively dismantles the self-contained, self-referential world within which American journalism operates. Want to see how journalists, with a stern gaze at the camera, position themselves above their interview subjects? Want to see how to keep asking a question until you get the answer you think is right? Want to see how the question becomes the text?

Plus, Stewart is one of the best serious interviewers around. He's done his homework and he asks the questions that I want asked. He's also damn funny.

I'm sure I'm over-enthusiastic about the show because it's becoming clearer to me than ever that the myth of objectivity has become metastatic. Both the left and the right hate the media because, since content can't be objective, all that remains is an increasingly mannered form. I know I've been slow to accepting this realization, which makes it even more depressing. On the positive side, it makes The Daily Show funnier to me.

(There are video clips here.)

Don's miss Stewart's "interview" with Dean. I laughed out loud. (Unfortunately, the online version doesn't contain the out-takes shown on the show where we get to see Dean reading the voice overs.)

There's an anti-Kerry Flash here that I think does what it sets out to do.