Hands, not just wallets

A number of commenters are looking for ways they can lend a helping hand beyond opening their wallets. Some are willing to travel to the affected areas, live in tents, and pitch in. Does anyone know of any groups willing to take them up on their offer?

Here's Peter Kaminski on that very question. And a tsunami aid blog. (Thanks for the links go to Staci Kramer, who has more on donation sites.)

Blogging the climate

RealClimate.org defines its purpose this way:

RealClimate is a commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists for the interested public and journalists. We aim to provide a quick response to developing stories and provide the context sometimes missing in mainstream commentary. The discussion here is restricted to scientific topics and will not get involved in any political or economic implications of the science.

Inevitably, because this is a blog with a voice and a point of view, the discussion is far from dry, with entries such as these:

George Will-misled and misleading
How do we know that recent CO2 increases are due to human activities?
Fox News gets it wrong

This is engaged, passionate science. Cool. [Thanks to Hanan Cohen for the link.]

The US's shameful response

...both on a per capita basis and as a percentage of the nation's wealth, America's emergency relief in Asia and development aid to poor countries actually ranks at the bottom of the list of developed nations...

...As of yesterday, the amount the United States has pledged is eclipsed by the $96 million promised by Britain, a country with one-fifth the population, and by the $75 million vowed by Sweden, which amounts to $8.40 for each of its 9 million people. Denmark's pledge of $15.6 million amounts to roughly $2.90 per capita.

The US donation is 12 cents per capita.

So says an article in the Boston Globe. We have donated what we spend in five hours in Iraq.

Let's call our representatives (Congress, Senate) and to see if we can aim high and beat Sweden by pledging $3 billion. And here's a tip: If your Congressperson or Senator is a Republican, tell him/her that donating lots of money is a crucial tactic in the war against terror. It's no joke.

[Congressional offices seem to be closed today. Sigh.]

Biggest Cognitive-Emotional Distance Award

And the winner is: The Boston Globe for today headlining the plight of tsunami victims and, three inches away, running this teaser at the top of the page:

The article, on the front page of Living/Arts, relates the heart-breaking story of Blake Conney who drunk-dialed her old boyfriend and gave him a chicken recipe. Should she have deleted his name from her cellphone? The decision is, as the teaser promises, agonizing.

[Thanks to our daughter Leah for pointing this out.]

Trusted merchants

I got an email from a stranger asking where he should donate money for tsunami victims. I sent him the urls to the donation pages up at Amazon and Google. I didn't send him to Wikipedia. Apparently, for this type of information I trust a top-down source more than a bottom-up one.

Wikipedia does its best to discourage trust on this topic, and appropriately so:

Due to its open and collaborative nature, Wikipedia cannot guarantee the veracity of outside links or the absence of possible scams involving charities, thus the potential danger of fraud exists. In particular, please beware of organizations that have names similar to those of well-known aid agencies.

In a situation like this - especially since I'm responding to a stranger - I want a source whose intentions I trust 100% and whose research I can trust to be responsible. I trust Amazon because I trust Jeff Bezos. I trust Google because overall they've shown themselves to be interested in making the world a better place. (We can argue about the exceptions later.)

I find institutions to be much more trustworthy than individuals in this regard. If a friend told me I ought to contribute to Bob's Missionary because they're do such great tsunami relief work, the tie between my friend and Bob would have to be tight - almost first-hand - before I'd donate.

Reliance on branded authorities leads to more money going to the Big Brand philanthropies at the expense of smaller, more local efforts that may be more efficient and effective. But in a big world that has tricksters and con artists, trusted institutions can be a necessary intermediary.

FWIW, we gave to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent; I didn't do "due diligence." We routinely give to Oxfam, but I didn't know how well set up they were for dealing with this particular disaster. We like Oxfam because of its programs for long-term, sustainable development of local resources - water projects, etc.

As Frank Paynter points out in a comment, CharityWatch provides info about charities.

I also trust MoveOn.org in this type of situation, and they've just sent an email suggesting that we give to Oxfam, which is already one of my very favorite organizations:

Our friends at Oxfam are already scrambling on the front lines to fight off starvation and disease -- and beginning to rebuild. Because Oxfam has worked for years with grassroots groups in the hardest hit areas, they were able to mobilize local leadership to help survivors immediately after the tsunami hit. And Oxfam will be there for the long-term, helping communities recover and regain their ability to meet basic needs. Oxfam needs to raise $5 million immediately to provide safe water, sanitation, food, shelter, and clothing to 36,000 families in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and India. Your contribution can make this possible.

You can give through MoveOn or directly through Oxfam.

Blumenthal's insider baseball: It's all neocons, all the time

Sidney Blumenthal in Salon marshalls the recent hirings and firings as evidence that Bush is thoroughly purging the administration of those who counseled caution in Iraq. Here are the opening lines:

The transition to President Bush's second term, filled with backstage betrayals, plots and pathologies, would make for an excellent chapter of "I, Claudius." To begin with, I have learned from numerous sources, including several people close to Brent Scowcroft, that Bush has unceremoniously and without public acknowledgment dumped Scowcroft, his father's closest associate and friend, as chairman of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. The elder Bush's national security advisor was the last remnant of traditional Republican realism permitted to exist within the administration...

We are witnessing the construction of the protypical echo chamber. Too bad the fate of the earth is in its hands.

Help with an article on the fate of trees...

I have agreed to write the February issue of Esther Dyson's Release 1.0, and I sure could use your help.

The topic is something like: What's up with taxonomic trees? We used to think that they represented the actual shape of knowledge. Now we generally recognize that they're "just" tools. So, how are they doing as tools? Are they as important as ever? What new ways are they being used? What's being used in their place? How are they being modified to make them more useful? Is it true that they're being used less frequently for browsing? Are ontologies subsuming/replacing them? Etc.

I'm particularly interested in vendors who build trees for customers (software and services), vendors with new approaches, and businesses that have either recently created a large taxonomic tree or who have recently decided to go in another direction.

If you can help, please either post in the comments or send an email to me (self@evident.com) with "trees" in the subject line.

Thanks!

The Red and Blue Book narratives

As Rayne points out in comments to my blog post on the administration's support of torture, to many Americans the events look very different. America harbors duelling narratives.

The Blue Book's narrative is a story of creeping fascism in which the torturing of captives and suspects is just Chapter One. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are Kristallnacht and the invasion of Iraq is the invasion of the Rhineland — not in their moral equivalences, which are impossible to calibrate perfectly, but as harbingers: We should be awoken by them as the Germans were not.

The Red Book's narrative looks at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo as signs of the seriousness of the threat facing us, and as indications that we are at last taking up the task of leadership we've avoided for too long. Our foes treat people far worse than we do, and to stop them we have to shed the crippling moral relativism that has been 20th Century liberalism's legacy.

The Blue Book sees recent events as steps towards a totalitarian state in which all rights are sacrificed in the name of homeland security. The Red Book sees a world of bright new democracies that drastically narrow the terrorists' freedom to operate.

The Blue Book fears a policy of appeasement being applied internally, so it wants to draw an early line. ("First they came for the Jews and I said nothing...") The Red Book thinks we are now emerging from an international policy of appeasement, so it's happy to see the old lines erased.

The Blue Book worries about America becoming Germany. The Red Book worries about America becoming France.

I am, of course, over-simplifying. But narratives are more stubborn than facts because narratives give facts their relevancy and meaning. I wonder if there is a narrative we can agree on that will get us past our differences.

I am not hopeful. But if a politician were to write such a narrative, I'd vote for her...

Santa Clara Democratic blog - Life in the party!

Apparently no one told the Santa Clara Democratic Party that it's supposed to lick Bush's ankles and roll over to have its belly scratched. The blog is feisty the way an opposition party should be. Elisa Camahort, who writes it, is keeping a day-by-day count-up of Bush's outrages. Good, partisan stuff - livelier and more frequent than the DNC's Kicking Ass blog.

Donate the inaugural money

JHopper writes in the comments to a post about where to donate:

We would like to suggest that the people of the United States innundate the White House, Republican Party, etc. to demand that they donate the $40 million they are planning to spend on the Bush 2nd term inaugural. It is only RIGHT the our rich nation and the rich contributors do this.

What a powerful symbol that would be. The original $15M we pledged was shamefully low, even when we thought "only" 25,000 people had died. Now apparently we have added another $20M. I want my government to do more.(And, yes, I have made a donation to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.)

Most over-packed item in history

Here is the package of nubbins for my Thinkpad — the little red eraser-thingies — IBM sent me, shown about actual size:

Here is the package it came in: The plastic bag, in a foamy bag, packed in a basket of shock-protective cardboard in a box about a foot square.

Tsunami relief

JonL forwards this tsunami relief site: http://tsunamihelp.blogspot.com/

"Pure Entrepreneurs"

Scott Kirsner has a good piece in the Boston Globe appreciating "pure entrepreneurs" who go ahead and build stuff without asking for funding or permission. One of those he cites is my friend Pito Salas who is creating BlogBridge, an aggregator with lots of potential, currently in alpha. He also points to Paul Cosway who is working on what sounds like a very cool, portable Internet radio, called "Radeo." And he interviews Dan Bricklin and Bill Warner (Avid).

Three cheers for pure entrepreneurs!

BTW, I don't know Paul Cosway, but I can attest that Pito Salas is not "loopy" (which Scott meant in an affectionate way).

[Note: I am on BlogBridge's board of advisors.]

Greensboro leads

Terry Heaton interviews Ed Cone about the newspaper-sponsored local blogging community.

When everything is known

While poking around for blogs reporting on the tsunami, I came across Mr. Brown's in Singapore. He reports that the police called a friend to say that they'd caught the guy who stole his anonymous cashcard. Except the friend hadn't reported the card lost. Mr. Brown figures that the police triangulated against the transponder in the friend's car. He writes:

I don't know whether to be happy we have an efficient police force that can return your stolen goods to you even if you did not make a police report, or be terrified at the thought that nothing escapes the Eye of Sauron.

I've been poking around Mr. Brown's site. There's a whole bunch of good writing there - technological but also personal and even intimate, without being overwhelming. Here's a piece about his autistic daughter. And here's a translation of a short story that's being circulated in Chinese.

Not every metaphor works

Does the Web have seasons? Discuss amongst yourselves...

Smoking gun has Wolfowitz's fingerprints, but he wasn't the one pointing it

My fellow Americans, in our name our government is torturing people scooped up indiscriminately — some were turned in for a bounty, not much of a guarantee of guilt. You and I are chaining them into a fetal position for 24 hours or more without food or water, letting them shit themselves. You and I are threatening people with vicious dogs. You and I are letting them roast in unventilated cells. And then there's this: "I saw another detainee sitting on the floor of the interview room with an Israeli flag draped around him, loud music being played, and a strobe light flashing." Is this some Clockwork Orange technique to make triple sure they hate Israel?

Now the Boston Globe reports that an FBI email says that Paul Wolfowitz approved Defense Department personnel impersonating the FBI so the DoD could avoid blame. And, freed of accountability, the torture began. Wolfowitz should be ashamed, fired and tried, not necessarily in that order.

But there's little reason to think that this un-American buck stops with Wolfowitz. Another email refers to an executive order signed by President Bush directly authorizing torture.

Impeach Bush.

(The documents were released thanks to requests by the ACLU. Don't forget to renew your membership for the new year.)

The Real You: Pick One

Worthwhile Magazine, for whom Halley, Tom Peters and I (among others) blog, has posted a PDF of my column for their premiere issue.

Added Bonus: You get to see my "I Hate Being Photographed" face!

Google Suggest implemented for dictionary

Gavi Narra notes in a comment to my entry on Google Suggest that s/he has implemented it for a public-domain dictionary and has posted how it works. It works darn well! Gavi notes: "[A] connection is being opened for every keystroke and is not a good idea...Google Suggest is probably running by having all the suggestion words in main memory and a custom webserver that does nothing else."

Barlow's round 1

JP Barlow recounts his day in court, on trial for threatening to blow up an airliner with a few grams of pot smuggled in an Ibuprofen bottle. danah weighs in with her own account of the drama.

Ostensive definition of a geek

You want to know what "geek" means? This is from a discussion board about MythTV:

I found MythTV, Freevo, and WebVCR+ all far too complicated to setup, so I created my own PVR. It is written in C and does not require a separate database process (such as MySQL) to be running. Despite this, it is very fast (faster than any interpreted language can be) and it has a full-featured GNOME front end.

It can be found at http://furioustv.sourceforge.net/

MythTV

In anticipation of Tivo's presenting ads while we fast forward, I'm looking into building (or buying?) a MythTV, an open source project that turns a linux box into a Tivo++. We love Tivo, but MythTV looks much better. (We're also going to try to buy our next TV before the Broadcast Flag goes into effect in July 1, 2005.)

I find myself amazingly confused, however. For example, the EFF says that PC TV tuners will record HDTV off of over-the-air broadcasts but not off of cable boxes. That sounds crazy...crazy like the FCC. (Tivo also doesn't record HDTV, except through some deal with DirecTV.) Will going the MythTV route lock me out of recording HDTV if and when commercial recorders enable it? Will the free source of programming information, zap2it.com, continue as free or is there a reasonable likelihood that we'll be locked out of access? Does someone sell ready-to-run MythTV boxes? Alternatively, since it seems that there's a CD with linux and MythTV sw ready-to-install, is there a list of exactly the right hw I can just go out and buy without having to make choices beyond how large a hard drive and whether I want a white or black case? (MySetTopBox is pretty good at this.) Just a few of a zillion questions. And I won't be starting this immediately since I have been unable to extirpate entirely my sense of priorities.

Some initial links:
MythTV home
Screenshots - mmmm!
Documentation
PVR Blog (personal vido recorder)
PVRBlog's MythTV how-to
MySetTopBox
Knoppmyth- MythTV on a CD
Support the EFF!

W isn't hungry

According to the NY Times, Bush has cut our contribution to global food aid by $100M. As Mathew Gross comments: "While he flushes billions into his war in Iraq and trillions into his senior-fleecing scheme. Nice man. Great moral values, there."

Links to gender discussions

Culture Cat has a list of blog entries that talk about gender issues in the blogosphere.

Moving MoveOn On

Chris Nolan publishes the second half of her critique of MoveOn.org at Personal Democracy. Lots of great information and an animosity I don't share. MoveOn isn't perfect, and if it were it still wouldn't revolutionize politics or create a new movement, but I count it as an important ally in our joint struggle. Anyway, the two-part series is well worth reading. (Part 1 is here.)

A moment for parents

With some trepidation, I've posted "Now Go To Damn Sleep," doggerel for the worn-out parent. Here's the beginning:

My angels, now, it's to your room
To dip into sleep's stream
And let your parents' life resume.
Fast forward to your dream.

What's that you say, my angels dear?
The day has not run out?
Tonight you just must-see ER?
And then the title bout?

Oh my dears, my little mites,
Walt Disney's themed your beds.
And if you're good and very quiet
I'll tell my day instead.

Oh, Mikey, Sal and Ted please hear
The story I have to tell
I love each one of you so dear
But you’ve made my life a ... well ....

After all, what could be better for the holidays than a little anti-child hostility?

Connecting two Linksys wifi access points

Paul English explains carefully how to set up two wifi access points if you need to cover a broader area...

He also has a nice appreciation of David Brudnoy, the long-time Boston-area radio talk show host who was opinionated without being stupid or obnoxious. I only heard him a few times, but his movie reviews were the best thing in the Boston Tab newsweekly.

"We are authors of each other"

Doc said that, and he's right.

SNL Talent Delta

Q: Which host of Saturday Night Live exhibited the biggest gap between his/her talent and his/her performance on SNL?

A: Robert De Niro. Twice.

Was the Kerry campaign netty enough?

Fascinating back and forth over at Kos. Kos calls Zack Exley, who was in charge of Kerry's Net campaign, "an idiot." Zack is anything but an idiot. He's a good guy personally who has spent most of his life working fulltime for his political beliefs. I respect him, and am grateful for what he did using the Net to do traditional things, like raise money. I am certainly more of a believer than he is in the power of p2p politics, but of course campaigns also have to get the offline basics rights; just ask Howard Dean the day after Iowa.

Zack posts a spirited defense in which he vows allegiance to the Internet vision, so long as it's not seen as a replacement for the traditional tasks. Who could argue? And does anyone disagree that the Kerry campaign would have done better if it had also let loose the dogs of the Web?

Here's a response by kmthurman with a long discussion thread.

Ultra-niche marketing

TrackCap.com trackpoint.com sells nothing but the nibs, nubbins, caps or whatever you call them for the IBM ThinkPad Trackpoint - you know, the little sticky-uppy thing between the G and H on Thinkpads. $10 for 2, so maybe they're doing ok, especially since you can get 6 for $10 from IBM. (Shipping is free at both places.)

Trackpoint.com also sell screws for the IBM Ultrabay at a buck each, so apparently they're branching out. Radical.

Hemispheric Google

Google's logo today features playful polar bears. I assume that if you come to Google from the southern hemisphere, it doesn't have a winter theme, but I don't know how to check...

The long tail's long lead

Chris Anderson has signed with Hyperion (Random House in the UK) to do a book about The Long Tail, and has started a blog devoted to it. (The long tail is the social effect of the Web apart from the hit-heavy, glamorous side of it.)

Delicious comment threads

This makes my head hurt - indirection makes me sweat - but I think that Michael Lenczner is proposing a way to use del.icio.us not only to track the comments we leave on people's blogs, but to bundle together different people's comments into one RSS feed so that you can see, for example, where all of the contributors to Many2Many are commenting.

But, I got this wrong in several rounds of correspondence, so I'm pretty sure I've gotten it wrong again; I am user but not a power user of del.icio.us. Read Michael's blog entry to get the straight scoop (and to get the scoop straight).

Citation finder

Copyscape finds pages that repeat phrases you used on your page. It bills itself first as a way of tracking down the nogoodniks who are plagiarising your valuable content, but the page also mentions its non-violent egosurfing capabilities. [Thanks to Dave Rogers for pointing this out. He found it in Ian Poynter's newsletter.]

Pigeon view

Here's an odd idea. The Urban Eyes proposal by by Marcus Kirsch (UK) and Jussi Angesleva (Ireland) would feed pigeons tiny RFID transmitters embedded in bird seed. When a transmitting pigeon passed close enough to one of the CCTV cameras watching the streets, the camera would transmit a video image to the Urban Eyes server. You would then see how the city looked to a particular pigeon in the 12 hours between ingestion and excretion.

This won third prize in the Fused Space contest. The winning project proposed setting up light sticks on a small Swedish island; lights would be lit when people visited an online memorial for the dead. (I think.)

[Thanks to We Make Money Not Art for the info.]

Least deserved narcissism award

The award for the most narcissistic performance by a recognized actor in a real movie, where the aforementioned narcissism is completely undeserved is ....

...Mickey Rourke, after plastic surgery that pulled his face back so tight that it stretched his nose holes, in The Last Outlaw.

(FWIW, I discovered this while lying awake with jetlag at 2:30 am. I may never sleep again.)

Invert that benefit!

BlogExplosion is designed to boost traffic to your site by funneling members there according to how many members' sites you visit. I've been playing with it for the opposite reason: It randomly shows me blogs I probably wouldn't have found otherwise.

In their latest newsletter to members, they list the following feature enhancement:

List blogs by country

The directory got an update so that you can now list blogs by country too. This makes it much easier to locate those blogs from the same region as you.

Ack! Isn't this feature more valuable as a way of finding blogs that aren't from the same region? That's really what I'm looking for.

Mainstream noticing podcasting

The front page of the Boston Globe has a good article on podcasting by Peter J. Howe, a staff writer — they didn't farm this out to one of their (excellent) tech writers. Peter writes:

If Internet-based weblogs turned everyone into a potential newspaper columnist, and digital cameras let them become photojournalists, podcasting is promising to let everyone with a microphone and a computer become a radio commentator.

After the fold, he gets to what the effect podcasting will have on broadcasting: With the ability to mix home-grown creations with an increasing choice of mainstream offerings, we'll get program allegiance, not channel allegiance.

[Note: The Globe link will break in a day or two.]

Gaming for peace, sort of

Interesting article by Di Luo in Computer Gaming world about the government using games not to recruit and train for war (e.g., America's Army) but to teach more peaceful tactics. Tactical Language Learning System and Virtual Environment Cultural Training for Operational Readiness teach cultural sensitivity. The former is built on the Unreal engine and the latter uses the LithTech engine that brought us so much gamey fun in No One Lives Forever and Tron. For example, VECTOR players learn to understand other cultures' body language, and also get extra points for head shots.

The article also reports that the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict has created A Force More Powerful that's designed "to train activists in the planning and tactics needed to bring about political change." There's some great stuff on the ICNC page reminding us how successful organized non-violence has been. It makes you wonder what we could have done in Iraq if we had been more imaginative.

Singapore overview

Puhlease! I was there for three days. The only overview I'm entitled to was from the airplane when we took off, and on that basis I can report that Singapore is mainly cloudy.

Now I'm back in the Newark airport, waiting for the flight to Boston. Is there a longer commercial flight than Singapore-Newark? I'm glad to be home, eager to see my family, and would love to find a way to go back to Singapore someday soon.

Dan Gillmor interview

The international version of OhMyNews has a terrific interview with Dan Gillmor about his plans and the future of news. (Thanks to Joi for the link.)

Indexing TV

From a Bilnkx press release:

blinkx is the first search engine to make such TV programs fully searchable on demand. Because blinkx captures and indexes the entire video stream directly from the television, consumers can get straight to the exact clip they want. blinkx TV can be accessed at http://www.blinkx.tv/

Blinkx says it "captures and indexes video streams across news, sports and entertainment programming from 22 channels, including Fox News, ESPN and Biography."

I haven't had a chance to try it, and I'm in the air all day (= 24 hours from takeoff till final landing) today...

Thursday in Singapore

I spent from 9-5 leading a workshop on "conversational marketing." Forty-three participants from a variety of industries. And, because irony is the basic law of the universe, I went on so long that I cut into the time we slated to spend in an Open Space exercise, facilitated by Edgar Tan, with Patrick Lambe in the wings. The Open Space went very, very well: Strangers engaged in open-ended, organically directed conversations. As for my long talky part, lord knows how it went.

Now I'm going to meet James Seng for dinner. We've only met in the bit sense, so I'm looking forward to this.

The reappearance of Green Spot

When I was a boy, during the summers in Great Barrington, Mass., my mother used to take us to the Green Spot bottling plant in town where Maybe 40 years ago, they shut down the plant and that was the end of Green Spot for us.

This afternoon in Singapore, at a food stall in Little India, I drank a can of Green Spot. It's the same oddly-named, non-carbonated orange drink. The can says it was made in Thailand under the authority of Green Spot International. It seems that, somehow, Green Spot left Great Barrington and landed in Asia.

Ealy globalization? A soft drink whose boot heels went a-wanderin'? Or a Twilight Zone episode in which objects from my childhood reappear in Singapore like the pilots returned by the aliens at the end of Close Encounters?

(A little more info about Green Spot. Another Green Spot reminiscence.)

Wednesday in Singapore

Ah, sleep! Amazing what a full night of it can do. For example, it turned my exhaustion into sleepiness.

I work up early and re-wrote my presentation, as I inevitably do before a speech. I'm at the first International Conference on Knowledge Management, a truly international gathering of practitioners and academics. I, of course, am neither, so of course they had me keynote it. Nevertheless, it seemed to go well.

I bugged out at 11 to see if I could see just a little more of the city. After a quick cab ride, I was in Little India, the streets and alleys of which are lined with shops. Compared with Chinatown (look, I'm awkward too about these appellations, but that's what these sections are called), more of the stores in Little India seemed aimed at residents. I'm a sucker for Indian colors and the smells; I'd love to go back to India someday.

I stopped for lunch at a shiny Indian vegetarian restaurant and had a curry marsala dosa — a big, light 'n' crispy crepe filled with delicious spicy meat substitute. If you find yourself in Little India, give it a try: Ananda Bhavan is the restaurant's name. And tell 'em I sent you! Of course, they won't have the slightest idea what you're talking about.

I came back to the conference just as it was beginning its afternoon session, an "open space" exercise in which people sign up for topics and others cluster around them. It worked out very well. In the sessions and in the hallways I had a bunch of interesting conversations with people from all over about the limits and virtues of KM. Given that the phrase was "KM" was created ten years ago with a daring amount of vacuousness, it's filled itself in quite nicely.

When it was over, I asked the concierge for a vegetarian restaurant. He told me to walk down Orchard Street until I came to the Orchard Mall and then go upstairs where there was a Chinese veggie restaurant. Unfortunately, Orchard Street is lined with malls, and I never found the restaurant. But I was glad to be out on the street at 8pm. It seemed like the entire population of Singapore had decided to take a stroll. I wandered in an out of malls until I stumbled upon a veggie stall in a food court where I had a dreadful "half chicken" with cold baked beans and a few fries. To tell you the truth, my stomach isn't feeling so good at the moment. It'll pass. Of course, I'm not exactly which orifice it's going to pass through, but my guess is that you'd rather not know.

Tomorrow I lead a full day workshop on "conversational marketing." I have 165 slides to go through. Pity us all.

Death to Peterson

There are something like 15,000 murders every year in the United States. Why is this the one that is headline news for months? I just don't understand it.

Singapore noon

On the advice of my host, I took a taxi to the Indian Temple in Chinatown, a plain building crowned by a colorful pyramid of sculptures of gods. The streets around it are lined with little open-front shops selling tourist junk. After wandering in and out of dozens, I bought my son a present (he's reading this so I can't say what) and almost got the bargaining thing right: It was marked $8 (= US$4.80), I offered $5, she said $7, and I lost my nerve so we didn't complete the dance that was destined to end at $6. I don't like bargaining because the differential means so much less to me than to the vendor, but it feels rude not to.

I more than made up for it an Indian shop where I bought two items at full price. They didn't give an inch even as I initially walked out of the store. They must have had me pegged as an American.

By the way, the going rate for USB cables at the electronics stores in Chinatown ranges from US$18 to US$32 — that last price actually made me laugh out loud. At a tiny sidewalk Internet cafe and electronic parts booth a few blocks away, the young man who sold me a replacement mouse told me that the real price is US$3. He as out of them, so I'm still looking.

Perhaps I should feel foolish wasting my time shopping instead of seeing sights, but, well, shopping in the streets is fun. I get to touch cloths, smell restaurants, hear parents quiet their children, and talk with Singaporeans. I'm a tourist, so whatever I do is going to be touristy.

After a couple of hours, I stopped at a modern sidewalk restaurant that advertised a vegetarian version of mee siam, which for all I know means "On sale," "snake pee," or "Warning: Condemned by the Singapore Board of Health." Whatever it means, it turned out to be a delicious bowl of sweet 'n' peppery broth, noodles, tofu and a sliced egg. I came into the store sweating enough to grow grass wherever I walked and left with children splashing through my mist as if I were an open hydrant. But mmmmm, spicy good!

Note to travelers: When in Singapore, always say yes to orange juice.

I decided to head towards the colonial area of the city, as recommended by www.fodors.com. It was just a few blocks over, but it's much further if you first go in the wrong direction for over half a mile. I have the innate sense of direction of a 5-legged spider and am retarded about reading maps, so I wandered and circled and got lost yet again. I saw many indistinguishable financial and official blocks, or maybe just the same ones over and over, punctuated by tiny shops with aisles too small for the likes of me — it's possible I'm the fattest person in Singapore — and restaurants serving parts of animals I didn't even know animals had; apparently every chicken contains a snake as part of it. Live and learn.

By now the sky had cleared and the sun was crisping my duck-like skin to a rotisserie orange. Should have remembered the sunblock. I have noticed that many Singaporeans avoid the sun on the streets; there are even some parasols around. Not me. I rely on my big floppy hat that completes the image of me as a lumbering, careless American.

I finally made it to the colonial section — some pretty buildings and very little life on the street. So, I took a cab back to the hotel where I collapsed like dirty laundry, an assortment of twitches shaped like a man. In a couple of hours, I'll join my host for dinner.

It was a thoroughly enoyable 4.5 hours walking in Singapore.

Morning in Singapore

Let's see. I left Boston on Sunday at 6, and flew from Newark, NJ at 11pm. They served dinner at 12:30 AM (rice and spinach because heaven knows we vegetarians don't like to combine elemental foodstuffs into interesting new creations) and I "slept" from 1:30-7:30AM. For some reason, they didn't serve breakfast until 1:30pm on Monday, then at 5:30pm on Monday we landed here, except that it was 6:30AM on Tuesday.

I read the Sunday edition of a Singapore paper on the plane just to see what's up. There was almost no news about Singapore, except for the reality TV shows. Are things going that well here? Could be.

After retrieving my luggage from the ultra-modern, ultra-clean airport, I stepped into a taxicab. I don't know if it was incense, breakfast, or just my cabbie, but it smelled goooood. She's from Malaysia, but married a Singaporean and is now a citizen. She likes Singapore better because it's clean and safe. When I asked her what was the one place I should see as a tourist, she recommended Sentosa, which she described as a "fantasy island." I think I'm probably not going to do that; I have so little time here that I hate to squander it on fantasy.

Because I arrived so early, my room wasn't ready yet so I wandered around Orchard Street at 7:30AM. It's the Fifth Avenue of Singapore, except smaller, clean, and palm-tree festooned. Also, it's in Singapore.

I ate a breakfast I may regret at a tiny local place -- half-cooked eggs, tea, and delicious toast spread with something green and something yellow -- and came back to my room. I slept for an hour. Now it's 10:20AM.

Time to hit the street.

Auctioning off unused airport wifi access

I just paid $6.95 for a day of wifi access here in the Newark Airport. Nobody except Tom Hanks uses a full day of airport wifi access, do they? I wish I could sell off my unused hours. Someone want to set up a little airport market for buying and selling unusued capacity?

Pippa's world

AKMA documents Pippa's latest turning of the world into art. Very cool.

On my way to Singapore...

I'm in the lovely lounge at the Newark Airport, waiting for my 19-hour flight to Singapore. But my client put me into business class which looks pretty spiffy, so I'm not complaining. Besides, I get to go to Singapore.

I got here at 6pm from Boston, and waited until 7:15 for the Singapore Air counter to open. For half an hour, a crew of the young and beautiful (six women, two men ... and guess who was in charge! (Hint: He pees standing up)) put out poinsettias, stacked cards, and unrolled carpets, all without ever making eye contact with us. It was like watching a play get set up.

Anyway, unless business class includes magic air-blogging, don't expect to hear from me on Monday. Have a nice day on the planet while I'm up in the air.

BridgeBloggers

You may notice some new names in my blogroll to the left and a new gif next to some of them. The gif is supposed to be a backwards B and a forwards B with a bridge beteen them, standing for BridgeBloggers. During the planning of this weekend's Global Voices track at the Berkman Internet and Democracy conference, that was a working name for bloggers who are using their blogs to build bridges to other cultures and lands. So, I've taken it upon myself to stamp some of those names with the ugly gif I designed myself this morning.

Yes, all blogs are bridges in one sense or another, although I like Hoder's three metaphors: Windows, bridges and cafes. I've put the BB gif next to blogs that are consciously trying to build bridges and who were at yesterday's event. I'm open to discussion of the criterion. (I also don't have a good list of attendees yet.)

Meanwhile, a Global Voices blog has started up to discuss spreading blogs to give voice to the least heard parts of the world ... and ears so those voices can be heard.

[VBB] Manifesto writing

Joi Ito and Jim Moore are leading a discussion of what could be in a "manifesto for a better global conversation."

The first comment is that generally we care about our families and towns before we get to worrying about the world.

Alex Steffen from WorldChanging says that our goal should be to expand our notion of family.

Ethan says that we should start from the common ground: All of us are trying to reach out beyond where we are.

The conversation meanders a bit into more abstract topics. (I am guilty of contributing to it.) Ethan slaps it upside the head.

Next comment: Shame moves people to action.

Ethan: We should today form at least an informal group that believes that it's good for people to have voices, and those voices need to be heard. And we've heard today that we need tools.

Alex Steffen: This group believes: 1. in extending free speech, 2. that direct connection of people across boundaries is transformative; 3. that we're planetary citizens and probably agree in 95% of the issues.

Joi: We should have multiple media forums.

Someone: The group needs a champion.

Joi: In open projects, you always need a champion, and that champion can't leave until s/he finds the next champion.

HollywoodHill: The tools need to be vastly simplified.

Ethan: We need a name, an identity, a site, a sense of how we can help one another. We have general agreement about what needs to be done, but we're not ready to write a manifesto. People are saying that what matters are the projects we're working on and how we can help one another.

Ethan: We can continue this conversation at the GlobalVoices blog.

[The event thus takes a step toward becoming a "postmodern movement," which I think was Jim Moore's phrase.]

[VBB] Building an Online Campaign

At a lunchtime session, we're trying to come up with a plan for using the Internet to advance a campaign to keep afternoon schools open until 5, with additional tutoring available. It's a case study and an exercise, but grounded in reality.

It makes clear to me once again the difference between (1) using the Internet to organize a marketing campaign and (2) trying to light a fire on the Net. In this case, the polls show people support the idea, and the group knows who they need to talk with, so they only need to organize, not light a fire. Thus, the discussion turns to marketing and taglines.

Here's the rub. The two approaches are at odds. If you want to light a fire, say something interesting, but marketing is reassuring and thus tends to be boring.

(BTW interesting != controversial)

[VBB] BridgeBlogging

[This entry is in progress. I'll update it as the day proceeds.]

The part of the conference that most excites me is about to begin. Ethan Zuckerman, Rebecca MacKinnon and the Open Society Institute have created a track that has pulled together bloggers from around the world. The aim is to see what we all can do to help blogging spread, particularly in parts of the world where voices most need to be heard.

Ethan says that we're here today to talk about blogs as bridges, borrowing Hoder's metaphor from yesterday (blogs as windows that give you insight into someone's world, blogs as cafes where people can talk together, and blogs as bridges). There's something big happening, Ethan says.

We each introduce ourselves, all 60 of us. We are bloggers from Iran, Iraq, India, Kenya, China, Prague, Malaysia...as well as online activists and other bridge builders. This is a wonderfully diverse session.

Ethan: Our aim is to try to figure out how to be Hoder. "Hoder is to some extent responsible for why there are 75,000 Persian bloggers online."

Omar from Iraq talks about the importance of blogging as a way of routing around propaganda. Then he talks about how the open comments from around the world on his blog helped his nephew "If I visited America a year and a half ago, I would have felt llike a stranger. This time I feel like I'm with friends, and that is the greatest gift I can think of."

Mohammed from Iraq says that blogging is person-to-person. "Through blogging we can spread love, more than separate by hate." "The media just want to create hate. But I have a different story." He says that, for example, the newspapers play up an American soldier punching an Iraqi but don't say that people go up to American soldiers and shake their hands.

Q: Who can get access to the Net in Iraq?
A: Just about everyone.

Chalu Kim (China): Do you also blog in Persian?
A: No. But we're going to be talking about a Arabic language blogging tool today.
Rebecca: Big issue. Today we want to talk about how bridgebloggers can help bridge the translation gap.
Jeff Jarvis: It's important to do both. Writing in your language builds community. Translating gets the story out.

Blackfive says he's a military blogger. He never thought of himself as an activist, but his blog grew to include raising money for homecoming, wounded soldiers, and advocating for particular bills.

Q: How do we get a sense of what it's like to be in the military in this conflict?
Blackfive: That's a main reason people come to the site. Obvoiusly, bloggers can't give away "operational information." That's where the censorship comes in.

Jarvis: What stories do you have of blogs forming bonds?
Blackfive: Email and blogs have brought us closer together. There's a huge inter-service rivalry. Even within the services. So it's really important to get beyond that. There's not a lot of interaction between Iraqi bloggers and the military, but there is between Iraqi and American civilians.

Ethan: We're seeing a lot of bridging to Americans. Can we open up the conversation to be more international? Jeff, what's going on in Malaysia?

Jeff Ooi: Malaysia has given itself a mandate to enter the first world. Bloggers ask if their governance model is the right one. There are two blogging spheres in Malaysia, one written in our language and the others written in English. Blogs are aggregated at Petaling Street. "Blogging is not going to work if you have to do it alone. You have to hold the hands of the newcomers." Broadband penetration is only 1% but we're trying to do build bridges and renew the country.

Ory: What percent read from within your country?
Omar: Many of the people who read our blog from outside of Iraq are Iraqis.

Jeff: Malay bloggers don't get much notice because they're not googleable. [There's some discussion of why that's so.]

Q: The assumption with a bridge is that there are two level grounds. But that's not the same wth the Internet. Even if everyone has access in Iraq, I'm sure that's stratified by gender and education. in Iran, 3-4M out of 68M have access to the Internet. So, are blogs replicating the stratification?

Ethan: One of the obstacles to blogging in W. Africa is that there's great conversation on talk radio. But there's room for blogging as a way of recording stories for history.

Hoder: How about posting pre-revolution diaries so people can understand what had happened in the same places and same cities. [Great idea. I've been re-reading 1984 and one of the scariest bits is the way history is forced down the "memory hole."]

Omar: Both the media and blogs in Iraq are newborn. The Iraq media doesn't know that there are blogs.

Jeff: I was threatened with jail for something I blogged, and it helped that it was covered for 4 days on the front page of a leading newspaper.

Rebecca: We've seen Chinese bloggers blogging in English, and translating the English responses into Chinese, but the Chinese conversation that that engendered didn't get brought back into English.

Part II: Building a local blogosphere

Hoder:

You can only start a blogosphere in the local language. So, I wrote a simple step-by-step guide in Persian. I even included instructions on how to copy and paste using your mouse. A month later, we had 100 Persian weblogs, the number I thought we'd have in a year. [I've turned his narrative into a bulleted list.]

I made templates that were widely used.

At the same time, I was trying to keep my blogroll uptodate because at the beginning there has to be a place where people can find other blogs. Competition developed to see who had the most visitors. And it's important to support the new bloggers; if you don't promote them, link to them, introduce them, they'll die in a few days.

Also, people need tech help understanding things like trackbacks and RSS.

Then get some local celebrities to blog. Keep up with technical innovation.

Encourage developers to create local language apps.

Hoder is coming to think that blogs shouldn't be hosted in local countries if the regimes are repressive.

He says that the social ground must be ready forit to take off; the steps in another country might not work. His hypothesis is that the value change that happened among the young in Iran made it easier. Blogging is hip in Iran. It shows how self-expressive and tolerant the new generation has become. A sense of individuality is very important if blogging is going to take off.

India-Pakistan Blog (Dialog Now): The people who write there, mainly older people, don't have their own blogs. In some cultures, some people are more comfortable in a shared social space.

Ory says that the blogging community in Kenya is very small. She's returning in a couple of weeks and isn't sure she can give a successful "pitch" about why Kenyans should blog. Most are not comfortable with this form of individualistic Web presence. She's going to encourage more group blogging, like virtual insanity. The media is pretty open in Kenya, so that doesn't provide a spark for bloggers. [session still in session...]

Hoder has a page where we signed in.

Some of the blogs represented here (as I've rather randomly captured them):

IraqtheModel.blogspot.com
http://www.hoder.com/weblog/www.petalingstreet.orgwww.usj.com.my

Barlow in jail

Well, he's out now, but John Perry Barlow's account of his arrest for carrying controlled substances in the rights-free zones we call airports is a must-read. Here's one snippet that happens not to be part of the rollicking and terrifying narrative:

In general, the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security have been extremely unresponsive and have instructed Covenant Security to stonewall us as well. We have asked them whether they knew who I was when they searched my bag and whether my identity had any bearing on the exquisite granularity of their search methods. They've refused to answer on grounds of national security. We have asked them for the training manuals and search guidelines under which Covenant Security was operating. No dice. We asked whether their x-ray machines were tuned to identify drugs as well as explosives, a technical capacity some of these units possess. Sorry. That would be SSI (or Sensitive Security Information.) We have inquired whether Covenant Security had any incentive program which rewarded its employees for discovering evidence of illegal activity. Again, preserving the safety of all Americans prohibits a response. At one point, they were even insisting that it would be threat to national security if the Covenant Security employee who allegedly discovered the purported contraband were called upon to testify, thereby abrogating my constitutional right to confront my accuser, but they seem to have relented on this point.

JP is fighting this one. Here, in a roundabout way, is why I think it important that he win.

Last night, I wasd talking with a friend I love who said that he had been talking with Michael Turk, head of the Bush e-campaign. (Here and here on Turk.) My friend said that Turk said that the Bush blog had no commenting because they were afraid people would say things that would alienate Bush's fundamentalist supporters. My friend said, "I was impressed. I'd thought that they'd shut off comments because they were into command and control. But they had good, political reasons for doing so."

Of course they did. That's how command and control structures get put in place. Generally, someone doesn't say, "I favor control, so no comments!" Instead, there's a direct reason that can be debated by reasonable people, but behind it is the impulse to control, and ahead of it is a system that's locked down as tight as the bolts that stick your car seat to the frame.

In the same way, totalitarianism generally doesn't happen because people say, "Gosh, isn't totalitarianism great?" It happens through a series of steps that can be debated on their own grounds. The routine violation of privacy to prevent terrorism is one of those steps. Behind it is the idea that the dangers of the age justify the abrogation of each and every right of citizens. Ahead of it is a nation that values fear over freedom.

Fear the small steps.

[VBB] Jonathan Zittrain

JZ is giving a talk in his masterful way. I can't convey the humor and the graphics, but the basics of the idea are (sort of):

With a platform, you can't predict what people will do with it. that's what we got when PC's met the network. That enables tremendous freedom for people to innovate. He calls it "the generative Internet."

But innovation disrupts. Entrepreneurs who succeed at the platform (e.g., Microsoft) then want to close it off.

Now general purpose PC is giving way to devices that do something addictively well but not open to third party apps — Tivo, Blackberries, XBox.

The insecurity of the Internet will not stand. That's why we're seeing gated communities within the network. And the warning from XP that says that an app isn't certified will expand so that your computer (especially if it's your business' or the library's) simply won't run "insecure" apps. And won't we require licensing of sw developers so they can't produce apps that destroy entire industries?

The Net's getting closed, JZ says. We'll see a comeback of the "appliance" model: closed tech. The young nerd's need to tinker with stuff is under siege.

In the hopeful future, there's a unified Internet and the freedom to tinker. It's not just neutral in the middle but the endpoints are free also. (He points out how much damage you could do if you hacked the Microsoft auto-update server.)

It's about the experts vs. the amateurs, Jonathan concludes.

[VBB] US Election 2004

Zack Exley, Kerry e-Campaign

The Left criticizes the Kerry campaign for being too top-down. But we strove to go after results that would actually move the vote or get more volunteers on the ground in an organized program that would persuade voters and get our Kerry voters. And we also strove to get more money so we could run ads. We raised $122M online. The vast majority didn't come from discussion groups. We sent out emails, giving people reasons to give, or reasons to go volunteer. [Yeah, but IMO they should have let more air into the campaign. E.g., MeetUps are a great way to bring new voters into the campaign. This is an argument I have had with Zack more than once, and have lost every time.]

Dan Gillmor, newly self-unemployed

I'm horrified at how bad the media coverage of the campaign was.

We have used the Internet in campaigning, but we need to think about how we should use it for governance.

Interesting things are going on stemming from the notion that journalism is becoming a conversation. In the future, I hope we see much more of people throughout campaign coverage. I want to see prominent wikis in campaigns that cover every issue so we can get a deeper understanding of what candidates believe.

Sunshine Hillygus, Harvard

I'm going to play the role of curmudgeon and point to unintended consequences.

First, the Net has removed some hurdles to participation, but only for those who are politically motivated and interested. [Really? Scott Heiferman said that said 50% of meetup attendees were new to politics.] Also, the Net increases class bias in the electorate because you have to have a computer and interest.

Second, it increases polarization. People reinforce what they believe. And the anonymity lets you profess more extreme views.

Third, the Net has contributed the pressure on the mainstream media to produce faster, more scandalous, lower cost news. They are pressured to report on things that have not been verified.

Chuck DeFeo, e-campaign manager for Bush-Cheney

Our campaign was 1:1 marketing, viral marketing. [The electorate isn't a market!] We were most interested in building community in geographic space. E.g., "Parties for the President," modeled a lot off of what MeetUp did. These were like MeetUps in your home. And our "Walk the Vote" and "Neighbor to Neighbor" programs. When you signed up, we pinpointed undecided voters near you. In a typical campaign, you're bused to a part of town where you don't know anyone. Instead, you could do it on your own time, talking to your neighbors. That's a much more powerful statement. This helps to build networks of people for future elections, including local ones.

Q: Why did the Bush campaign turn off international access to their web site?

Chuck: In the final weeks, it was more important to get our message out to the electorate.

[A ruckus occurs because Chuck won't say why allowing international access would prevent American access. Zack says, "He doesn't want to say it, but they were hacked." Chuck denies it, but won't answer why they shut off access. Dan asks if they were afraid of a denial of service attack. Chuck repeats the same canned phrase. It was bullshit.]

Chuck: We had three missions: Raise money, get out Bush's message, and empower our constituency.

[Zack lightly refers to that last mission as "hippie."]

Q: Has the Net helped make the mainstream media's coverage so dreadful?

Dan: The Net worries me because the news cycle is all the time. That puts pressure on the press to report fast but not well. I think the public service side of journalism is beginning to be abandoned. I don't know how to fix this.

[Overall, what happened here was generally true of the day. This was a panel of fascinating people made less interesting because of the panel format. Too many panels! Not enough hallway time. I think I'm just not cut out for panels. But, tomorrow, it's all open discussion. Looking forward to it. (Jarvis on the same topic.)]

[VBB] South Korea

Oh Yeon-ho, , of South Korea's OhMyNews

The Internet started in America for military purposes, but citizen journalism started in Korea.

Ohmynews is the citizen-journal of S. Korea. He talks about how it affected the 2002 election. There are now 35,000 citizen reporters who submit 150-200 posts a day. [No, not each.] They are paid only a little bit — $20 if it's a big story. Readers can also comment on articles. Versioning of content encourages paid subscriptions.

Why in Korea? Because there's resentment of the media monopoly, because broadband penetration is high (75%), it's highly networkedsocially, and the young folks are open minded, liberal and activist. It hasn't happened in Japan because Korean youths are more activist.

OhMyNews is a child of the marriage of technology and democracy.

Stephen Ward, Oxford Internet Institute

Why aren't there more S. Koreas?

1. Because politicians are risk averse. And change is happening outside the parties.

2. The culture of politicians — they're ingrained a f2f culture.

3. There are party rules that make it difficult

Rebecca MacKinnon, Berkman

The biggest influence of the Net will be in emerging democracies such as S. Korea. Philippines, too, where SMS text messaging brought down the president, which it's unlikely to do in the US.

The Net also gives voice to the powerless in controlled environments. The problem is that you can't go from voice to action. You can't use MeetUp because the police will find you.

OhMyNews doesn't claim to be objective in the way the Times does. OhMyNews is lefty. For example, there was a dispute between Korea and China, and OhMyNews set up a special section titled "Chinese Hegemon." OhMyNews counterbalances Korea's traditionally conservative media.

Jeff Ooi, Malaysian blogger

[He talks about the difficulties faced by Malaysian bloggers. I missed it. Sorry!]

Q: Esther Dyson: What does this do to objectivity and our expectations of the media?

Oh: The mainstream media is jealous of what we have done. Citizen reporters are asked to write under their own name, with a social security number and phone number so they can check. Copyeditors do fact-checking. We ask our citizen journalists not to follow wthe style of professional journalists; write in your own style.

Rebecca: Transparency helps with the objectivity issue.

Rebecca: Cellphone may have an impact on politics in repressive countries.

Oh: I went to N. Korea and was able to connect to the Internet by making an international call through China. Maybe someday N. Korean citizens will be able to contribute to OhMyNews.

Jay Rosen: Pretty soon we'll be able to say to journalist, "Oh, you're not really bloggers."

Google Suggest

As you type, the Google Suggests beta suggests completions based on how many hits there are for each possible fulfillment.

At PA it suggests "Paris Hilton" and at PAM it suggests "Pamela Anderson," so clearly the technology works.

Here's the script that makes it work. I think.

[VBB] Scott Heiferman (MeetUp), keynote

MeetUp's have doubled in the past three months. They've built MeetUp 2.0, allowing MeetUps to have official moderators.

Scott founded MeetUp after reading "Joining one group cuts your odds of dying over the next year in half" in Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone.

The Net is enabling a new type of associations, different from unions, parties., etc. The new ones are local, persistent, with card-carrying members and advocates.

The Internet isn't about changing the world. It's about saving the world.

[As Susan Crawford says on the IRC: Yay optimism.]

Robert Putnam, author of Bowling alone, replies. We have "privatized leisure time." Now we've been having the debate on the Net's effect on communities for 15-20 years. It's more interesting to ask how the Net can be used not to create some fictional ["fictional"???] commnity online but real face-to-face communities.

By far the evangelical Protestant movement is the best organized in the country. It's the biggest counter-trend to the isolation I described in Bowlling Alone. MeetUp groups don't have the intensity or commitment and social support of the "cellular church" model.

[VBB] Business panel

Tod Cohen, eBay

[eBay is the main sponsor of this event.] eBay tries to live by simple values: Most people are good, etc.

In the 3rd quarter, there were 348M listings. The total goods and services traded in the 3rd Q was $3.8B. The largest category by values is automobiles, $10.7B. 54% of the business is in the US. 12M registered users in Germany. There are 56M PayPal members. 2.4B feedback comments.

The question for the panel: What can politics learn from business with regard to the Net?

Esther Dyson

[She's on the MeetUp board and was chair of ICANN.] "You learn from mistakes, and I learned a huge amount at ICANN."

A lot of the utopian stuff you hear on line — "We're going to create a global village" — is implausible, to put it politely.

In business, you can get rid of the customers you don't like. You don't need to follow due process beyond staying within the law. Government can't do that. That's why government is so ponderous and slow. The Dean and Kerry campaigns failed to enlarge the market; they were talking to themselves and they weren't listening. In politics, you want someone with convictions and courage, but who listens so s/he can explain her/his views more effectively. the Net needs to be used more as a listening tool.

Debora Spar, Harvard Business School

The bubble taught us that the Net didn't suspend the law of gravity. You need to have a business plan that involves selling stuff. "And I suspect the same is true in politics: Yes, there are many things we can do differently, but we haven't suspended the basic laws of human interaction."

Conclusions for politics: Don't forget the basics. And what are the ways of putting together communities of interest? And business and politics are different: Business is about controlling info and politics is about disseminating info.

Esther: eBay is political. It changes how people view themselves in relationship to institutions. When you see yourself empowered in one sphere, you see it in other spheres.

[The fact that we can use the same "models" to discuss politics and business should, IMO, be taken as a sign of despair and deep cynicism.]

Jonathan Zuck, Association for Competitive Technology

"I don't care about politics." Politics is a little bit ridiculous if it's taken as an end unto itself. He's a sw developer. In politics you have a three-legged stool: voters, money, and substance. In that order.

Businesses can take on a life of their own. Look at Craigslist.org. And now it's happening in politics. But, if people see the promise not coming to fruition, they may recede back into their Barcaloungers.

Craig Newmark, Craigslist.org

[He's introduced as "customer service representative and founder."]

I grew up with a pocket protector. I'm going to ignore the topic of a business plan or model because we have neither. Experience and instinct are more reliable. Craig supports "nerd values."

"What's working for us is that we seem to be run by a moral compass. We're trying to do what's right for people based initially on our own values, but the community pretty much drives us. For example, when we were thinking about charging, we asked the community what we should charge for, and they said charge people who otherwise would be paying for the service. We're not pious about this."

This is one of the most uncomfortable things I've ever said but the Golden Rule is really what people want from businesses and politics. Nothing fancy, just being fair, trying to level the playing field, and treating every one with respect. I've never said this before but we try to be righteous.

I spend most of my time doing customer service. Maybe that's the equivalent of government service. This is dull as dirt. How does this apply to politics? There's a lot of talk about moral values. There's something real there. People want to be treated fairly. Work hard, play fair and you'll get ahead. But in politics, people can be scammed by the talk. A lesson we learn from customer service is to genuinely engage with people all the time.

[I'm a huge fan of Craig and what he's built, or, more exactly, what he's enabled to arise.]

Q: Is the Net culture value free?

Esther: It fosters openness. Reputation systems find the bad apples and lead the rest to behave better.

Craig: People are eager to behave well.

Jonathan: People are basically passive. They'll go online and just read. [Jarvis is shaking his head a few rows ahead of me.]

Esther: Governments should generally keep their hands off. Peer-to-peer governance is better.

Q: (Ina Steiner, AuctionBytes): What can governments learn from companies like eBay?

Jonathan: The entrenched middleman is the main barrier to ecommerce. I'm not that interested in having politics learn from business, but maybe the lesson is: You entrenched middlemen? Your jobs are at risk, too. Let's hope they get displaced from politics.

Esther: A lot of governance mechanisms will come from outside the government, so we have to build an ecosystem of things that work together. And don't rely on the authorities for everything.

[VBB] Citizenship

The Berkman Center's conference on the internet and democracy begins with a panel on "Citizenship."

Tom Sander, Kennedy School of Gov't

Tom is studying MeetUp.com. They sat in on 40 MeetUps in 8 communities and interviewed people. They found that MeetUp is not a young person's phenomenon. Attendees tended to have more education than normal. There's a high turnover rate, which is not a good way to build trust. Nevertheless, about 30% of attendees meet up with other attendees outside of MeetUp.

Kerry MeetUps attracted 10-15x the number of people who came to Bush MeetUps. [And then the Kerry campaign stopped supporting MeetUp.] The political MeetUps tended to be larger and to have a clear leader. And they spent a loss less time socializing than at other MeetUps. The Kerry campaign at its peak hade 2/3s the attendees that Dean did at his. Maybe this is because MeetUp is more useful in the early stages of a campaign. Also, the Dean campaign was better at letting ideas and blogs from the grassroots filter up into public view.

Pippa Norris, Kennedy School

She has researched the effect of e-voting from the home or office in the UK. In Britain, they've experimented with doing this through phone, Palms, Interent, teletext TV, etc. This should be compared with Oregon where everything was done through the mail. The British method is more convenient, can overcome social exclusion ("My kid was sick that day," "Too hard to get my wheelchair down the stairs"), and streamline the administration of elections.

In May 03, the UK tried 59 pilot studies involving 6M people casting real ballots. The results showed that voting by mail incrased voter turnout while e-voting was at best mixed. Young people didn't vote whether it was postal, email or mixed. The older population really liked the postal voting. Gender, age and class were significant variables.

Conclusion: All-postal ballots are afar more effective than e-voting at boosting turnout. The Internet has more effect on other aspects of the election process.

[Pretty damn interesting. Jarvis says her pdf is here.]

Hossein Derkkhshan (Hoder)

70% of Iran is under 30 years old. 5-7M Iranian citizens are on the Net. There are about 75,000 active weblogs in Persian. The result is the Internet is the most trusted medium among Iranians.

He gives metaphors for understanding what's hapenning. First, blogs are windows. You can see into Iran and see how deeply the Iranian people have changed, how open and more tolerant they are. Second, blogs are bridges. It can even bridge parents and children. Even the VP of Iran blogs, a nd promotes blogging as the best tool for understandiing what's going on. Women bloggers have been invited to official ceremonies as representatives of their generation. The hardliners have blogs, also. And blogs are cafes, places where discussions happen that otherwise wouldn't be allowed to happen.

The Internet has made the hardliners in charge so angry that they're cracking down on political websites. They're filtering them out. They've developed conspiracy theories to support their agendas, e.g., the bloggers are funded and managed by the CIA.

[Hoder is explaining exactly why for so many of us, the Internet is the medium of hope.]

QA

Lolita Jackson, pres of a NY Republican activist group: Do political meetups do better in areas where the people feel a bit under siege?

Tom: I haven't researched it.

Jarvis: What can we do to help, Hoder?

Hoder: The world could help us a lot. Localized, free technology. Education. We need to increase access. E.g., millions in Iran have access to satellite TV. It would be revolutionary if the same tech could be used to provide Net access.

Jordan Pollack (Brandeis): WRT e-voting, people have to trust that the medium has not been undermined. [A totally off-topic editorial interjection: Jordan has created a micro version of backgammon, called Nannon.]

Pippa: There are a number of factors, including trust. We need to do more research.

Zack Exley (Kerry campaign, ex-MoveOn.org): We took the links to MeetUp off the Kerry site because we were switching to our own version. When we did it corresponds with when Tom saw the dropoff. Why do you, Tom, consider MeetUp's stickiness to be low? Compared to what?

Q: Is the Net narrowing us or broadening us?

Hoder: Few people are able to consistently read opinions that are opposed to theirs.

Dan leaving the Merc

Dan Gillmor blogs that he's leaving the san Jose Mercury News in order to start a citizen-journalism project.

This is a big deal. Dan is one of the most respected journalists around, a man of perfect integrity and great vision. And guts. Something exciting is in the wind.

[VBB] Backchannel

Joi, who's in the room, has set up a chat channel for the Berkman conference: harvardbits at irc.freenode.net. See you there.

Conference "coverage"

I'm at the Berkman Center's conference on the internet and democracy, and will be "covering" it. Except that I feel no obligation to report on everything that goes on. I write about what's interesting to me and what I think might be interesting to you.

When I'm live-blogging, I attempt to give the gist of what's being said, keeping as true to the particular words as is useful. If I'm quoting exactly, I put quotes around it. Otherwise, I'm gisting. Remarks in brackets are editorial comments.

The conference is being webcast here. Because you need a Harvard account to use the wifi, I don't know if there will be a backchannel.

MovableType not finding CSS

[VBB] Last night reduced

Reduced Version of last night:

Michael Turk: The Internet is great for getting your message out.

Joe Trippi: The Internet is great for enabling people to connect with one another.

Reduced Reduced Version

Turk: Messages.

Trippi: Conversations.

Reduced Reduced Reduced Version

Tu: !

Tr: ?

[VBB] Votes, Bits and Bytes: Will the Internet Draft the Next President?

At the John f. Kennedy Forum at the John f. Kennedy School of Government, the Berkman Center is kicking off it's conference on the Internet and politics. A couple of dramatic statements came out at this first event...

The moderator, journalist Kathleen Matthews, begins by saying that some think the Internet is a useful tool and others think it will change everything. She introduces Joe Trippi (head Deaniac) and Michael Turk, e-campaign director for Bush/Cheney who "marshalled 7.5m e-activists". She says they should talk in sound bites, which she unfortunately twice refers to as "blogspeak." [Jeff Jarvis, behind me, whispers, "She obviously doesn't read Rosen." And I want to tell her, "Don't confuse being interesting with speaking in sound bites.]

Q: Trippi, you say the revolution won't be televised. What do you mean by that?

Trippi: TV is a passive medium. In 2003, the question was whether people would get past sending email to one another and go out an organize in the community. That was a huge sea-change. What this was about is Americans learning to trust strangers again. A community of trust gets built on the Net. No one would put their name address on a telephone pole saying come talk with me about politics, but that's just what people were doing on the Internet.

Q: For a hundred years, your party would sponsor your little league team, and on election day you'd be given a little money and you'd walk around and get out the vote. Then it became big media buys on TV. In the 2004 campaign, what was new?

Turk: Viral marketing. People at house parties pass along the messages of the campaign. That's one reason there was more interest in the campaign.

Q: And it was easier for people to contribute.

Turk: Yes, but we were more interested in getting the volunteer base communicating and spreading the message. [Politics as "message passing." I hate it. Democracy is not marketing.]

Trippi: The Net is making a lot of the standard powers of politics more irrelevant. People weren't taking their cues from the party leaders. The Net let the message be spread, but it was people talking with their friends and neighbors and co-workers that enabled us to grow. Meetup.com was important.

Q: You also gave people marching orders on the Dean web site...

Trippi: We asked people to talk about Dean with a friend and get them to sign up. But people responded with their own ideas and creativity. People knew they owned a portion of the campaign, if not all of it.

Q: Wasn't the Dean campaign almost anarchy with no hierarchy?

Trippi: We started with 432 people. All insurgent campaigns have that lack of command and control.

Turk: Because we were a presidential campaign, we couldn't do some things that a challenger could do ... some of the cartoons going around on the Net wouldn't make it onto our site. We used the Internet to organize and coordinate, e.g., download the maps of where people should go canvass.

Trippi: We put up lists of undecideds for Dean supporters to write letters to. 135,000 letters were written to them, but we only wrote 95,000, so we know that the Kerry or Clark campaigns were coming onto our site and downloading names.

Q: What happened to Dean in Iowa?

Trippi: We were well organized. But the Iowa tape in which Dean denigrated the caucuses dropped us ten points overnight in our own polling. When Dean told an Iowan to sit down so Dean could speak, we lost another 5 points. (Trippi recounts his blunder on Crossfire in which he intimated that Carter was going to endorse Dean.) The campaign made a bunch of errors that devoured our support.

Q: In this campaign $1.5B was spent on advertising. What will happen when everyone can block out ads? And will the Internet be where this advertising happens?

Turk: There will lots of advertising on the Internet. There's something very compelling about video.

Q: How are you going to communicate with voters in 2008?

Trippi: In 2000, you couldn't have predicted 2004. Same thing with 2008. My guess? The Dean campaign was running video on our site, 24 hours a day. At first we wondered how we'd ever feed it. It was a headache at first. But then all over the country, people started creating their own video, running a camera in a coffee shop where Howard was eating. My favorite was a student right before an event telling Dean that he was skipping exams for this. Howard turned from presidential candidate to father...We decided which ones to post, but there was an explosion of creativity.

Q: Will we just have aggregated party channels covering the conventions?

Turk: You look at RSS feeds, and news aggregators ... you create your own channel.

Trippi: I think email will be supplanted by RSS feeds as the way the average citizen gets informatoin about the campaign. I think the blogosphere is here to stay. The press keeps looking at these blogs that are getting the huge traffic, but that's not where the story is. It's in the long tail. Think about 4.5M blogs averaging 10 readers. That's 45M readers. There's no way to stop that or control that.

Q: How do you see the credibility of the blogs expanding?

Turk: You'll see more stories like Rathergate. The depths of experience represented by those blogs is just amazing. The blogger who uncovered the forgeries was more of an expert than the expert CBS had hired.

Q: What about the problem of blogs spreading misinformation and not having a self-correcting mechanism for days?

Trippi: With blogs??? The interesting thing about the blogosphere is that the average blogger gets called on it immediately. The blogosphere and the Internet are incredibly self-policing. In one sense, the Internet is only surfacing the rumors that have always spread; we just didn't know they were spreading. The mainstream media have the responsibility of looking into these rumors, e.g., that Bush stole the Ohio election. It's a healthy thing that the Web bubbles those sorts of rumors up.

Audience participation:

Jeff Jarvis: This national campaign stuff is really cute, but isn't it really going to matter at the local level?

Trippi: It's already having a huge impact at the local level. And lots of people have learned that they can use this tool to get involved in their democracy. I'm really excited about what's going to happen.

Bill Bates: Is the Internet bringing us a deeper understading of the issues, or shallower?

Turk: It depends on the next four years. How much of 2004 was the pop cutural coverage as opposed to community involvement.

Allison: [I couldn't fully hear her question about the media.]

Kathleen (Moderator): In newsooms, they're checking the blogs, just as print reporters watch cable news. News is more of a conversation. News consumers are also producers.

Trippi: When reporters were embedded in Iraq so that we only got one flavor of coverage, there was only one place to go: the blogosphere.

Kathleen: It's a shift in the power structure of the media. And politics.

Q: How do you balance the need to focus on a controlled message and the emphasis on grassroots opinions?

Trippi: If you have the answer, we want you as chair of the Democratic Party. We need to let the people's voices speak and let the message emerge.

Q: Digital divide? Is using the Internet for politics just white guys talking to white guys?

Turk: It also brings in the activists.

Trippi: Don't think about the Internet as the age of information but as the age of empowerment.

Jay Rosen: This year, a more interesting narrative was that some people in politics still practice control and some who believe in de-control. This was a war in the Democratic party. It was probably there in the Republican party as well. That's one way of rewriting the story of the campaign. Looking forward, you have all these people in politics whose career is tied up in control of story, money, news, etc. If the Net is really going to de-control all that, then what happens to this class?

Turk: Every article we saw about the e-campaign was "The Bush campaign is all about control." But there was no feeling of that internally. There are lots of people who don't mind bowling alone, who don't want to be part of a communal structure. [Stowe Boyd, sitting next to me, mutters, "That's preposterous."] We never told a volunteer that they had to make ten calls. We gave them tools so that they could spread the message of the campaign. [NO MORE MESSAGES! Please.]

Trippi: Up until this election, there was no where for the urge to reform to go. Both parties continue to slap down reform and not get that this is about recognizing that there is an urge to participate and urge to reform. One party — probably the Democrats — will go to the way of the Whigs. [Whoa, Nelly! Don't go telling the truth!]

Q: Will the Internet strengthen the two party system?

Trippi: The parties are already becoming irrelevant. The Democratic Party beats the Republicans only in contributions above $1M. You can't have that and withstand the pressure from below for reform. Someone is going to run an independent campaign and wreak havoc on the parties.

[Turk talks about marketing and passing messages. Trippi talks about people talking and conversing. OTOH, Bush won and Dean lost.]

Public waves

Glenn Fleishman comments on my blogging of Jeff Jarvis' interlineal rant against the FCC's Michael Powell's op ed in the NY Times. Glenn gets all reasonable and raises a key question:

is there a line that shouldn't be crossed on air and on TV? That is, full-front nudity: yes/no? All obscenities: yes/no? Horrible violence: yes/no?

If the answer is no even provisionally, then you have to have objective standards and a body set up to help determine and enforce those standards.

If not, then, in the words of Marge Simpson in 2020, "You know, Fox turned into a hardcore sex channel so gradually, I didn't even notice. Yeesh!"

[Note: I'm pretty sure what I say in the following is wrong. Unfortunately, it's not wrong in interesting ways.]

As long as the "air waves" are licensed by the federal government — which I hope won't be for all that long (see here and here, too) — then I'm not going to take the absolutist free speech position. IMO, there are lines that public broadcasters should not cross. Otherwise, I'd have to say that I think it's fine if all the licensed broadcasters showed nothing but __________ (fill in the blank with whatever you think is bad bad content, e.g., Nazi propaganda, Playboy after Dark, Three's Company re-runs, etc. ). I don't mind the government exercising some control over what can be put over public "air waves" or on billboards in the public air. So, yes, I'm "merely" disagreeing over where to draw the line. I just don't see anything "merely" about it.

So, for me the problem with the Janet Jackson fine wasn't that all censorship is wrong. Rather, fining CBS so much money was ludicrous and inconsistent. I mean, broadcast TV is endlessly smutty. From blowjobs to taking it up the ass to dildos to how to remove semen from your grandmother's dentures, there isn't a joke that isn't made on mainstream TV. And the jokes depend on the fact that this material is supposedly not suitable for TV. The jokes work by titillating us. So, why the big fine for showing a couple of square millimeters of Janet Jackson's nipple? Why not even a nod toward the bottomless violence on TV? And why bow to the relative handful of people who complained?

In other words, I'm your basic namby-pamby liberal. But I disagree with the larger master narrative at work among many who think as I do. That narrative says that an unregulated market will tend towards coarseness and vulgarity: If the licensed broadcasters had no controls over acceptable content, they would escalate — tit for tat, so to speak — towards on-screen sex and violence, driving out all other content, if only because shock garners attention, and today's shock is tomorrow's been-there-saw-that.

I think that master narrative is probably wrong. In the unregulated world of cable TV, we get the realistic language of The Sopranos, the child-safe snot-based Nickelodeon, some science channels, and dickless softcore porn at 11 pm. As everyone has noticed, we also get 10x the innovation and 3x the quality compared with what comes over the public air waves. Cable's relatively unregulated market has tended towards increased quality, not a race to the bottom.

And yet, so long as the licensed broadcasters have any claim to being the free, common denominator of mass communications in this country, I think it reasonable to expect them to enable the public to regulate their own viewing regimes. People shouldn't routinely stumble across stuff that outrages their moral sensibilities. That means that if you spin the dial, you should feel confident that although your children may see a woman mounting a horse, they will not come across a snippet of the vice versa. If you enjoy Will and Grace's faux sauciness, you should nevertheless feel confident that you're not going to come back from commercial to see Jack wiping cum off his chin. And if you're watching the SuperBowl and think that breasts are immoral, you shouldn't have to worry that you're going to be flashed during the halftime special. (On the other hand, if you're CBS, you probably didn't even need to be told that that was inappropriate, much less be fined mass quantities.)

Who decides this? Ultimately the licensing agency, but only as a last resort. And in proportion. And using published guidelines and common sense — There's a difference between "Fuck! I can't feel my legs, Private Ryan!" and "Fuck me harder with your privates, Ryan!"

The strictly Libertarian view is attractive theoretically. But we don't live in a theoretical world. Also, many Libertarians undervalue the role of the community in favor of the individual. I disagree. Communities are real and are valuable. Unfortunately, the USA is not a community, so applying community standards is difficult. Nevertheless, I'm pretty certain that videos of people blowing their pets shouldn't be broadcast at 8pm on America's Favorite Home Videos, and any theory that says otherwise I'm willing to declare a failed theory.

I'm actually pretty conflicted by this topic. (Hence the length of this post.) I recognize the argument that because cable has turned out well — a range of programming suitable for different tastes and a self-rating system more finely detailed than that for movies — maybe deregulating the content of the public airwaves would work out the same. And if the licensed networks were all we had, I'd be more concerned. But, broadcast TV is so bad and most of the country has better alternatives. So, I'm inclined to say: Keep broadcast TV relatively safe and let it suck itself to death.

So long as FCC is in the business of licensing spectrum, it probably also has to worry about content. But it should worry a lot less and a lot better.

Jarvis v. Powell

Jeff Jarvis rebuts sentence by sentence Michael Powell's defense of the FCC's First Amendment restrictions.

For me, it's enough to know that the moment most re-played by TiVo owners during the SuperBowl was the flash of J. Jackson's nipple, the very image Powell is protecting us from.

Jon Udell on the passive-aggressive Semantic Web

He doesn't call it that, but his column in InfoWorld, "Bootstrapping the Semantic Web" makes a fascinating point. At a site that aggregates info about people

... I show up as executive editor of Byte Magazine and contributor to Linux Magazine. And while those were once accurate descriptions of me, I have never been a member of Blue Titan's board of advisors, and I am not the inventor of RSS.

...

Semantic-Web naysayers think people and organizations can't be bothered to assert machine-readable facts about themselves. And, today, that is undoubtedly true. But when others assert facts about you -- as they increasingly will -- the tide could begin to turn. Individual acts of self-defense may ultimately combine to bootstrap the semantic Web.

Free newsletters

Getcha free Berkman newsletters heah! They're a mix of announcements of events and substantial briefings on projects in which various Berkpeople are engaged.

Worms for Christmas

This worm farm comes personally recommended to me. Thought you might want to know.

Going to Singapore

I'm leaving for Singapore on Sunday, arriving Tuesday morning. I'm keynoting the International Conference on Knowledge Management on Wednesday morning and giving a full day workshop on "conversational marketing" (I seem to have written an article on the topic here) at the Singapore Institute of Management. I leave on Friday morning. That doesn't give me a lot of time for seeing the sights. Heck, it doesn't leave me a lot of time for changing my underwear.

Any suggestions for things to do, not to do, to buy, to try? Any mistakes I'm bound to make when it comes to cultural differences?

David Reed, tonight!

Just a reminder: Tonight, David "End-to-End" Reed is the guest speaker at the discussion series I'm leading...and you're invited.

How many "scobles" are there in "weinberger"?

Not that it matters, but InfoWorld thinks I'm Scoble. Don't they understand that if they're going to confuse me with someone, they're supposed to confuse me with Dave Winer? Dave Winer, David Weinberger, see, they're sort of close. Robert Scoble, David Weinberger, not so close. Hey, InfoWorld, get your mistakes right, will you?!

David Reed at the Berkman on Wednesday

Good news! David P. Reed is going to be the guest speaker at the series I'm leading at the Berkman Center on Wednesday. This is from the blurb for the event:

The Social Effect of Architecture

David Reed is a co-author of the seminal paper on the "End-to-End" architecture of the Net, the creator of what's now called Reed's Law that locates the value of the Internet in its ability to enable groups to form, and is a leading proponent of Open Spectrum research. Series host David Weinberger will interview Dr. Reed about what effect the technical architure of the Internet has on its social uses, leaving plenty of time for open discussion. Note: This will not be a technical session and is likely to range over the many topics Dr. Reed studies.

It's open to the public, so come on by, tomorrow (Wed.) 6-7:15pm at the Berkman Center at the Baker House, 1587 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge. Here's a campus map. Pizza is served.

Dean of the Democrats

Here's how Tim Grieve's excellent article at Salon starts:

Harry Reid says Democrats have to "swallow their pride" and move toward the middle. Harry Reid says he admires Antonin Scalia's "brilliance" and could imagine voting to confirm him as chief justice of the United States. Harry Reid says he'd rather "dance" with George W. Bush than "fight" him.

Harry Reid says: "I'm the face of the Democratic Party today."

Harry Reid may be right. For a party that came within 119,000 Ohio votes of ousting a sitting president in a time of war, the Democrats are sounding awfully defeated these days. There's talk of making the most of long-term minority status, of compromising on judicial appointments and "moral issues" like the rights of gay couples and women — Reid, the Democrats' new Senate leader, is anti-choice — and of trying to figure out some way to outflank the Republicans from the red-state right.

And then there's Howard Dean.

The national Democrat Party incumbents may not like Dean, but they should understand that if the party continues to refuse to stand for Democratic values, then it will alienate so much of its base that the Democrats will lose in '08.

As for me, well, with Reid as Senate Leader, I'm one rightwing Democrat away from joining a third party.

Zippy coincidence

Mark "Too Much Time on His Hands" Dionne writes, with reference to the zip code map:

Once upon a time my zip code and my social security number both started with the same three digits.

How many people have exactly the same SS number and (nine digit) zip?

I'm no mathematician — as I'm about to prove — but aren't the odds of having them match 1 in 999,999,999? With a US population of 300,000,000, wouldn't the odds of there being a current match be about 0.3?

Now, since I've never gotten a fact or a simple mathematical equation right, please enjoy yourself explaining how wrong I've gone. It's on me!

Whose space is it?

Microsoft's Michael Connolly writes about Microsoft Spaces' policy on censoring content. In order to make the site "appropriate" - and there's a world of values buried in that word! - Spaces is not allowing the use of certain words in the URL you choose, the name of your blog or the headlines you write. You can, however, use all the nasty words you want in the body of your blog. Fucking A!

I understand why Microsoft doesn't want casual visitors to be bombarded with blogs with dirty names. And it's not such an unreasonable restriction (although the language it's couched in is scary), especially if you're aiming at cutting down on the excessive profanity, not eliminating it entirely. Nevertheless, there are times when a blog entry just isn't the same if you can't give it the headline "Fuck Bush!!!!!" Believe me.

It might help if Microsoft started calling it by its real name. It's not "filtering." It's "censoring." Filtering is when a content's properties are used to move it into one of various buckets. Censoring is when you kill content. In fact, fitering would be a better solution for Spaces: Let each of us set the degree of profanity we're willing to tolerate, and filter out the headlines and blog titles that fail the test.

Filter, don't censor.

[I got to this via Scoble who by honestly criticizing Microsoft makes Microsoft look good.]

AllaireTV

Scott Kirsner points to the loads of creativity the Boston area is applying to the TV tech. (The link will break soon.) Of special interest:

Jeremy Allaire's new company. In the mid-1990s, Allaire's first company, Allaire Corp., helped to simplify the process of building and maintaining a website. Last year, Allaire joined the Cambridge venture capital firm General Catalyst as technologist-in-residence. Now, he's starting a company with backing from General Catalyst. He won't say much, but he's interested in what he calls the democratization of video. "We have this situation where the number of people who can produce video programming is poised to explode, with inexpensive digital cameras and editing tools, and the existing distribution systems can't support it," he says. "You can't have 100,000 people producing shows for cable television. The only thing that can support it is the Internet." We're all familiar with the Internet of text. Coming soon: the Internet of video.

The world's largest whaaat?

The beta of QuackTrack, from the folks at BlogShares, says it's

The world's largest blog index
330,000 links to 85,000 blogs in a thousand categories

It may be an excellent site (it was running very slow this morning) but they really ought to check the numbers at technorati (4,900,199), before making such claims. [Thanks to Troy Worman for the link.]

Why I can't join MSN Spaces

I'd like to join in the commentary about MSN spaces, but two things keep me from getting past the home page.

First, I'd have to open a Passport account to join. Once Microsoft dropped its attempt to make Passport a worldwide digital ID standard I lost my rational reasons for refusing to participate. Now all I have are my irrational reasons, but they seem to be doing the trick.

Second, I'm uncomfortable with the imagery it uses on its home page.

Pretty girls making kissy-face? Please!

Zip codes made fun!

This map by Ben Fry is cooler than it seems at first. Type z to toggle zoom. Type in a zip code. Backspace to delete numbers. Hold down the shift key and type in new numbers. Oooh! The quantitative display of numbers! Or the qualitative display of quantitative numbers. Anyway: Ooooh, zip codes!

D'Souza on authenticity

ToTheSource has sent out a brief essay by Dinesh D'Souza that gives some insight into the conservative majority's point of view. I find myself agreeing with much of it, but then feel dismay and disappointment as D'Souza swerves, betraying a contempt for those with whom he disagrees. (I can't find the essay online — what's up with that, ToTheSource?)

He quickly traces the historical/philosophical roots of the notion that morality is grounded in following one's inner voice. In his narrative, our inner voice gets increasingly removed from the larger, outer voice:

Augustine contends that God is the lamp that illuminates the inner soul. Rousseau broke with Augustine by severing this connection between the inner voice and any external authority. For Rousseau the inner voice is the sovereign and final authority.

This is the moral code that we have inherited today...

D'Souza avoids the easy rant against the "imperial self" (although the term gives away his attitude towards it):

...We are wrong to dismiss this as a mere affirmation of selfishness, a rejection of morality. It is a massive shift in the source of morality — away from the external order, toward the inner self. Nor should the new code be understood as relativism or nihilism. It does not affirm that "anything goes.," It insists that the inner voice is morally authoritative and should be followed without question.

Yes, it isn't "anything goes," but the imperial self is still non-moral. Imagine that when we're born, we "imprint" on the third person we see and believe that morality consists in being true to #3. That's not "Anything goes, but it's not moral. So, why is doing whatever #1 says any more moral than doing what the random #3 says? But D'Souza doesn't draw that conclusion. Instead, he proffers what at first sounds like respect for this alternative view of morality:

I do not believe that this new ethic of the Imperial Self can be completely uprooted, as some people who bemoan the decline of the old moral consensus would like to do. But I am also concerned with the moral danger of conceding final moral authority to the Imperial Self. Human nature is flawed and the "voice within" is sometimes unreliable and sometimes wrong. As Immanuel Kant warned, "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."

Perhaps a more practical goal is to contain, and perhaps to roll back, some of the excesses of the new ethic of authenticity. This involves a recovered sense of the moral sources that continue to inform our moral self-understanding, sources that can be found in our religious and ethical traditions but which have disappeared from our public debate. The urgent task at hand is to recognize the power of the new ethic of authenticity while steering it toward something higher, to ennoble the self by directing it toward the good.

There's a bunch of signs and signals going on here. On the one hand, we have the imperial selves. D'Souza has made it clear earlier in the article who they are, for the imperial self:

...was first adopted by intellectuals and artists in England, France, and the United States. These elite groups, of the kind that dominated the Parisian café, the Bloomsbury society in England, and Greenwich Village in the United States, have been living according to the bohemian code for a long time. What changed in the 1960s is that these values, once confined to small enclaves in society, now became part of the social mainstream.

Then we have the traditionalists who "bemoan" the decline of the "old moral consensus." Think: The preaching Christians who chastise and berate on the channels you skip over. D'Souza is distancing himself from them.

Then there are the moderns like D'Souza who recognize that ideas have histories and who adapt to modern practicalities. These moderns recognize that you can't reform hippies; they're always going to insist on "doing their own thing." They're too far gone to ever become truly moral the way D'Souza is. The best you can do is try to redirect the inner light to better moral goals.

There's arrogance there. It's one thing to think that following one's inner light is only accidentally moral — like happening to imprint on a moral #3 — and another to recommend dealing with those who hold such a view as if they were children.

And there's also some pernicious line-drawing by which only those who believe in a particular "external moral order" get to count as moral:

One can no longer make a public appeal to the external moral code. The Clinton sex scandals were clear proof of this: some Americans considered his actions morally scandalous, but others thought it was no big deal.

Say wha'? Many of us who thought that Clinton's adulterous blow jobs and lies about said blow jobs were not enough of a big deal to impeach him but still think adultery and lying are morally wrong. Thinking that MonicaGate was blown out of proportion (so to speak) by a right wing that was lying in wait doesn't mean that one forsaken all external moral codes.

In fact, here surfaces the danger of D'Souza's view: External moral codes disagree in theory and in application. With the Clinton example, D'Souza reveals that he's playing a game of shirts vs. skins in which those who do not believe in a particular moral code are bohemian hippies who immorally follow their own "inner light." But the real game is that we have skins of many colors and shirts of many stripes that desperately need to figure out how to share a planet. That can't be done with either of the positions D'Souza gives us: Follow your inner lighters can't do it because they have no way to mediate disputes with inner lights that point elsewhere. Eternal moral coders can't do it unless they accept that they don't have a lock on what that their external authority (um, G-d) says.

D'Souza's compromise is phony. Doing an end run around someone's immorality does morality a disservice.

By the way, D'Souza's notion that our "religious and ethical traditions" have "disappeared from our public debate" is a hoot. Was D'Souza away during the recent election year?

Thanks, Adam!

Adam Kalsey of Pheedo volunteered to help me through my recent MovableType upgrade spasm. Comments were showing up in the "pending approval" pile even though I'd configured MT to not require moderation. He talked me through installing the upgrade to MT-Blacklist (Jay Allen's commentspam-fightin' superhero). When that didn't do the trick, Adam figured out that although I'd renamed the old MT-Blacklist files, I hadn't renamed the extensions; MT was still loading mt_blacklist_old.pl because it loads anything with a .pl extension. Thus, MT was using a version of Blacklist that didn't know about moderation, screwing up MT. I deleted the old Blacklist files and now my blog accepts comments.

Thank you, Adam, for your time and your expertise. And it was great to have a chance to talk with you outside of a textbox.

Comments are down. Help?

UPDATE: Comments are not down. Comments work. If you find they don't, please let me know: evident.com is the domain and self is the address.

Progress, but here's the latest problem: You can enter a comment. The system acts like everything is ok. But your comment doesn't show up . I do see it in the editing interface, though. Any thoughts? If so, you'll have to email them to me: self@evident.com.

Comments are down because I upgraded to MovableType 3.1 and apparently I have MTArchive set to an undisclosed location. I can't find where the variable is set. If you know, could you please send email to self@evident.com. Thanks.

Nope. The archive path is right. The problem is that all of the comments now have ".static" appended to their name. I'd still be happy to have your email-ed help, though...

Minor Santa

You don't have to be Christian to get a kick out of Minor Santa, an MP3 with vocals by O'Reilly's Sarah Winge. All you have to be is really tired of the Top Ten Yuletide loop echoing in every mall and many of our skulls. It was recorded in '96 but I just heard it; we Jews aren't as up on the Christmas ditties as we should be...

Podcasting, hierarchies, new blogs and raw envy

I have an article on the political implications of podcasting at Personal Democracy. It's mainly about what podcasting is, and then it does the predictable political speculation. There's a terrific article on the same topic at CampaignAudit.org

And while I'm plugging me, over at Worthwhile I just posted a couple of paragraphs about some really interesting work being done by Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps on mapping business hierarchies.

And if it's ok for me not to talk about myself for one brief instant, I'm enjoying Ayelet Waldman's Bad Mother blog (thanks to Liz for the link)

Ayelet points to a terrific essay about writer's envy by Kathryn Chetkovich. Why, just yesterday I muttered a curse about yet another author whose talent turns me crayon-y green. Oh, it's a long list alright. Chetkovich's essay is especially interesting to me because she refracts the topic through her position as a woman.

Ethan in Egypt

Ethan Zuckerman is in Egypt. Ok, technically he was in Egypt, but he waited until he left before posting about it. He connects the looseness of cab-ride protocols with the scary human rights environment.

Google numbers

From an article by Matt Loney at ZDNet:

* Over four billion Web pages, each an average of 10KB, all fully indexed

* Up to 2,000 PCs in a cluster

* Over 30 clusters

* 104 interface languages including Klingon and Tagalog

* One petabyte of data in a cluster -- so much that hard disk error rates of 10-15 begin to be a real issue

* Sustained transfer rates of 2Gbps in a cluster

* An expectation that two machines will fail every day in each of the larger clusters

* No complete system failure since February 2000

And that was before they boosted the page count to over 8 billion. (Thanks to Hart Hooton for the link.)

Chief Raging Officer

Would you make someone named RageBoy your Chief Blogging Officer? Look, fellas, you went into this with your eyes open. When the sick bastard turns on you, you'll have no one to blame but yourself.

In short, congratulations! The blog is - rather brilliantly - not about HighBeam, the sponsor. It's about Chris burrowing into ideas he's interested in, incorporating information found via HighBeam. So, we get to watch over Chris' shoulder as he works on his next book, which has nothing to do with his sponsor. HighBeam shines the more brightly by being reflected through Chris' interests.

Why do we blog?

Frank asks. A bunch of us answer. It seems to boil down to: What a cool way to hang out together!

Dumb HTML question

With Firefox (but not IE), the text of some of my blog entries show up properly as Verdana and dark brown, while others use the Firefox default font and color. I can't see a difference in the source. For examtple, the previous entry, Truth, Objectivity and Mitch is wrong while the next entry, Berkman Web of Ideas, is right. (This occurs on my blog's main page, not on the page the permalink takes you to.) What's the obvious thing that I'm missing?

Here's Tim Bray's quick response:

The first step in making display problems go away is fixing obvious markup problems. Check out the w3 validator and it reveals a host of problems, many of which can be fixed by fiddling the <!DOCTYPE> so it knows this is XML, for example steal the one I use: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC '-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN' 'http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd'>

But it also reveals a bunch of real problems, "slign=" where you mean "align=" and a ton of others. If you can make these go away not only will you be a cool, hip, standards-compliant kinda guy, but then your style issues will become comprehensible by mere mortals. Which currently they're not.

There are also some useful suggestions in the comments to this post. I've done some fiddling and I've gotten the number of errors down to under 500. Woohoo! Most are not in the template, although the template sure has plenty. In fact, it has so many that I've given up trying to make it compliant.

Besides, I prefer unassertive browsers to rigid standards. (OTOH, if my code were valid, I wouldn't be having the problem that started this thread.)

Truth, objectivity and Mitch

Fascinating post today by Mitch Ratcliffe on a topic near and dear to me: facts, news and Wikipedia. Here's a snippet from his concluding paragraphs:

If WikiNews editors acted as a peer-review committee and called out shortcomings in fact-checking or the accuracy of facts, this could be a powerful enhancement to multiple versions of events that helped the reader decide for themselves what actually happened. But reducing a report to a single version, especially based on contributions from people who were not actually there to record the event, is of questionable value.

It's a long-ish, thoughtful post and I wish I didn't have meetings all day so I could respond instead of just linking. I haven't sorted out my thinking very well about these topics, as Urs Gasser pointed out to me yesterday, and Mitch's post is helpful. (BTW, thank you, Urs.)

Berkman Web of Ideas tonight: What's ours on the Web?

Just a reminder that tonight I'm leading a session at the Harvard Berkman Center on the question "What's ours on the Web?" It's about why some sites feel like ours and others don't, and what this might tell us about what an "us" means. I'm going to try to post more about that this afternoon.

I wrote a bit about it here, and got some excellent comments. Peter Merholz took issue with the premise here.

The session is 6-7:15pm at the Baker House, 1587 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge. Here's a campus map. All are invited and pizza is served.