You can download Cory Doctorow's just-released book, Eastern Standard Tribe, which is published under a Creative Commons license. Sez Cory:

Here's the deal: I don't believe that there's any market-demand for teasers or for "Digital Rights Management" technology: none of you woke up this morning and said, "Damn, I wish there was a way I could get less of the books I enjoy and a way I could do less with them once I have them." My goal here is to figure out what people actually want out of electronically delivered text, and so I'm giving this novel to you in three open and flexible formats with an invitation:

Convert these files to any "e-book" or text format you want, and send them to me, along with a note telling me what reader it's intended for and I will add it to this page.

Here's the book description from Amazon:

Art is a member of the Eastern Standard Tribe, a secret society bound together by a sleep schedule. Around the world, those who wake and sleep on East Coast time find common cause with one another, cooperating, conspiring, to help each other out, coordinated by a global network of Wi-Fi, instant messaging, ubiquitous computing, and a shared love of Manhattan-style bagels.
Or perhaps not. Art is, after all, in the nuthouse. He was put there by a conspiracy of his friends and loved ones, fellow travelers from EST hidden in the bowels of Greenwich Mean Time, spies masquerading as management consultants who strive to mire Europe in oatmeal-thick bureaucracy.
Eastern Standard Tribe is a story of madness and betrayal, of society after the End of Geography, of the intangible factors that define us as a species, as a tribe, as individuals. Scathing, bitter, and funny, EST examines the immutable truths of time, of sunrise and sunset of societies smashed and rebuilt in the storm of instant, ubiquitous communication.

Joi Ito describes his lunch conversation with Seth Lloyd, an MIT Professor who is also associated with the Santa Fe institute and the study of complex systems. He's proposed a feasible design for a quantum computer. The lunch discussion was more about economics.

Seth pointed out that if you are struggling to survive in a tough environment, eating fatty and sweet foods and conserving your energy are probably good things. When you have enough food, sitting around eating sweets on the couch suddenly becomes detrimental. Is there an equivalent to this with money? I believe that free markets and democracy are great things and are the foundation of civilization and progress. I believe that efficiency and greed play a big role in creating healthy economies. Having said that, I do not believe that just because we have free markets and democracies, that people will be happy or that we will have peace. My question is, at what point, if any, do you have too much money? At what point is greed pointless and destructive? Can countries and economies become addicted to economic growth or become financially obese?

They also talked about physics:

Seth explained that historically, physicists have always talked a lot about energy and the conservation of energy. Energy changed form, but there was always the same amount. They later found that you would lose a bit of energy over time and they attributed this to entropy. Recently, people have realized that entropy is sort of randomized molecules and looks a lot like information. Seth explained that the whole universe could be viewed as a big huge computer and you could apply information theory on physics and vice versa.

Discussions like this suggest that we're beginning to grasp more of the mystery, yet the political and spiritual realities of the 21st century feel reactionary and unsatisfactory, as though we're resisting transformation. Joi's discussion with Seth raises questions - few answers so far.

(Mean while John Shirley will release a book about Gurdjieff in March. Gurdjieff saw our ordinary state of consciousness as sleeping, at least he used sleep as a metaphor for a lack of real awareness of our state and our condition. (Students of Gurdjieff will probably take issue with my simplistic rendering of one small part of this thinking, but I hope my interpretation is not too far off.)

Stay awake!

Tim O'Reilly: changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators.

Introducing Joe Trippi as "the Edison of the movement. But we're not sure yet whether he found the right filament." Trippi's background: both politics and technology, including open source on the tech side.

Trippi's talk:

One thing that's amazing: how the press, who never could figure out what the Dean campaign was, feels qualified to define whether the Dean campaign was a success. Spin coming out of the broadcast media: broadcast politics has failed us miserably. No real debate about the war or the Patriot Act - except on the net. Also where are implications of the DMCA being discussed? Not in the mainstream media.

This is about changing a system that is broken, rusted, corroded.

Television post=Nixon/Kennedy debates: a one way communications tool, the people are excluded. It's all about raising money to buy television exposure.

The Internet is the only tool available for taking the country back. It will happen because millions of Americans agree to act in concert. There are 33 lobbyists for every person in Congress.

Dean campaign was not a dotcom crash. It was a dotcom miracle. Dean started as an asterisk. It is a miracle that Howard Dean moved from there to 45 million dollars, more money than any Democrat has raised.

Dean or Trippi didn't do it - the people did it.

American people now have the beginnings of the tools and the platform to take it back, to ensure that there is debate.

Where did meetup.com come from? Read Jerome Armstrong's blog... that Dean people were using meetup to pull supporters together. Meetup called within the next week.

Today nearly 200k people are registered for Dean meetups, first Wednesday of every month. This was the Internet getting people to do something offline. It's not just the online tools, but offline... media didn't understand where the campaign was happening, because it was happening in the streets, over backyard fences, not on the media.

Moveon.org is a real pioneer of the movement.

The Internet community doesn't understand the hard cold reality of American politics. Referencee to the scream taste. This wasn't news, but enetertainment, like heat seeking missile footage. Run over and over, portrayed out of context. Now they're apologizing. Same people also saying this didn't work, what happened to the Dean thing.

It did work, tho, because of the people that did something really amazing.

Dean took on the war, and thousands of people responded. "He's teaching us how to be an opposition party." Suddenly there was a debate in this country about whether there were weapons of mass destruction or not. This started with Dean. The rest of the party realized that's where we have to go. The candidates remaining are now fervently against the war regardless how they voted.

Dean said "it's time to get the government back" for the people. Now Kerry and Edwards are talking about taking on special interests... that is directly attributable to this campaign.

The Dean campaign IS the campaign that empowers the kind of change we need in this country, and the Internet did that. Now Kerry et al are also saying we have to end the way special interests and money rule this country.

But it wasn't just Howard Dean. This is about hundreds of thousands of Americans making a real difference.

The other candidates decided they had to use blogs and other Internet tools, having seen how this worked for Dean. That is important: this isn't going to stop. Broadcast politics is on the wan. The media jumped the shark on the Dean campaign and on this new kind of campaigning.

Thinks our democracy is threatened right now in ways that the American people haven't really grasped yet. Most important thing to change: look at the receipts at the FEA and see who raised the most money at every level up to a million? Republicans. Over a million? Democrats. This is a betrayal of our birthright as a party. What the Dean campaign and the Internet did was to turn that on its head.

*It is about the money.*

American people finally have the tools to say *Enough.* And the people who are going to give them those tools are in this room.

What this is about is - when is the date? Two or three million people giving $100 each would make the difference. We're a long way off from that in this cycle, but Trippi believes it can happen in this cycle.

The tools are almost mature enough to make a difference. Now Kerry et al are trying to track small dollar donations over the Internet. Dean led the way.

What you need to understand about the political system. The Hunt Commission within the Democratic party wanted to make sure we never have another Jimmy Carter, who did not acknowledge the party establishment in making his way to the presidency. "How do we make sure that no insurgent can ever possibly get this party's nomination."

For an insurgent, you had to be so strong that you could knock 'em out in Iowa and New Hampshire. That's what we had to do. Dean campaign not to a place that, according to the party rules, it shouldn't have reached. It was all done with people, not party institutions.

Then ran straight into broadcast politics.

Al Gore endorsed Dean. Alarm bells went off in every newsroom and campaign in the country. That alarm said "Kill him now." Because if we don't kill him now, he's going to be the nominee. Press corps said, he's going to be the nominee, we have to hammer him. For three or four weeks, every candidate was hammering him, the press was hammering him. Dick Gephardt realized he had to win in Iowa... murder/suicide: wrecked Dean campaign with their attacks, but Gephardt still lost.

This wasn't a dotcom crash, it was dotcom America being shot down.

"Gee, it failed." Why do they need for it to fail?

To start the narrative that this was a dotcom crash is easy... a little too easy. But a dotcom was supposed to make money, and Howard Dean did raise money.

Did the governor give them ammo on occasion? Yes, he did. But that isn't a failure of what you built.

You have done something absolutely amazing. The Internet has empowered Americans who were taught by the system that there is nothing they can do to make a difference.

We are now more powerful, working together for the common good of our country.

Anecdotes:

A woman at Penn state sent an email that said "I sold my bike for democracy." That email created a meme. That happened because of the Internet.

Request from a guy in London for Americans Abroad for Dean. Set it up immediately, got a thank you from a woman in Spain. This happened in ten minutes. Would have taken two months before the Interne t.

Bryant Park during sleepless summer. Arrived late, pulled press over at a deli, Got a call saying if raise a million by the time the gov's on stage, have him carry a red bat on stage saying we did it. And they made it happen... very last minute... real ownership of the campaign by the grassroots - they knew that they suggested this, and it happened within 45 minutes. This was the first campaign really owned by the American people. And what we have to do now is build a movement that's owned by the American people.We didn't know what we were doing half the time. We were doing things that hadn't been done before. Some of it didn't work.

Did sending 3500 stormers to Iowa hurt us in Iowa? Trippi doesn't buy it. Did similar thing for Mondale, and it was fine.

Given what we were trying to do, we didn't have the luxury to say, hey, some of us go off and be for Kucinich and Edwards. There has to be some way to get a unity movement together where we're building it for everybody, not just for Howard Dean. We have to give the country back to the people.

No white knight is going to ride in and fix America - WE have to do it.

Q&A:

Ed Cone - moderating and asking questions. Oriented to 'teach-in' meme.

What worked?

We still need to work more on tools that let people online work together offline. E.g. Meetups, house parties.

Important to mesh candidate orgs with other orgs. Slating delegates: we thought meetup people should be among those delegates, but established local politics people felt a sense of entitlement, and this resulted in some contention.

(Many establishment politicos were put off by the new way of doing things, others got it. Some don't want to give up power... esp broadcast media, which stays regardless what happens to candidates. Look at what they can do in a three week period.)

Ed asked about his pay and the finances in the campaign. Internet is supposed to make things cost effective. The "Joe Trippi getting rich" thing.

Joe: A misunderestanding of what we were. We did bold crazy stuff, like bought 100k of TV in Austin, TX... and got media coverage for getting in G Bush's face in Texas. Raised more than it cost. "Spend money to make money."

Joe is offended by the implication that he's not only a thief, but a really BAD thief. He personally made $165,000 on the Dean campaign... a lot, but not millions. Says this is an effort to make the campaign seem like a Trippi get rich scheme to stop people from giving $$. Trippi says he didn't have budget authority. Steve McMahon, Trippi's partner, had been doing Dean's media for 12 years and would have been doing it anyway. And Trippi gets a share as his partner. That was the 165K, and Trippi would've got it regardless. (The 7.2 million television expenditure mostly went to the cost... the firm took 7%, not the normal 15%). People need to knock this down, because this is really about trying to undermine the campaign and the potential movement.

Joe was having a hard time later in the campaign conveying the sense that they were in real trouble and needed help. Press and other campaigns were reading the blog, too.

Micah Sifry: who owns DeanForAmerica when the campaign folds? (Esp. - who owns the member data?) Joe: I don't know. Trippi says he's going to do something. Deep apprehensions about the Democratic party getting the DFA DB.

More notes from O'Reilly's Digital Democracy Teach-iin. I apologize - sketchy notes of a very good panel.

Jay Rosen talks about conversion from public to audience. This is starting to come apart now. Dick Morris said the Internet has done one thing radical, it has given the public a mouth.

Jeff Jarvis:

Now everyone has a printing press and the audience has a voice. Everyone is a reader and everyone is a writer. Importance of listening to the people.

What should happen:

Meetings in our towns should all be webcast. No reason not to.

Insist and expect that politicians have weblogs or equivalent.

Insist that political orgs have citizen-friendly web presences.

We should expect public officials to enter into a dialog with us.

Expect journalists to report, not just repeat.

The day of one-size-fits-all journalism are over.

Jay:

Media and the press should be seen as different. Press is an important institution; should sustain its authority.

John McCarthy asks about connection between press feedback and campaign technology. Jeff mentions that a blog is just a tool… one guy in Canada posted how to blog in Persian, now there’s a bushel of Persian weblogs that may be part of a revolution.

Jay: problem that journalists stopped caring whether people were becoming engaged, and focused only on information delivery, not en

gagement.

Bopnews.com is about blogging of the president, 2004. Chris Lydon creates audio interviews that are unlimited in length. An interview is a very democratic instrument.

Ebayization of politics? Jay: it’s not just that people can get information without going to traditional media. It’s the different perspectives / diversities of perspectives. It’s that bloggers are doing it for love, and that is an advantage that they have. Love of what’s right, of participation, of their community, etc. That’s a very powerful thing.

Amateurs are a threat not because they are going to take over a franchise, but because they have such different motivations for what they’re doing. The root of the word ‘amateur’ is ‘lover.’

Q from Tim Bishop. Is it harder to explain technology to politics or politics to technologists? What are the imperatives that push the mass media toward infotainment (if I understood the question correctly).

Dan respects mass media, and is part of it.

Jay says journalists don’t exactly know what their future is; the space where they can practice their craft is squeezed by potential withdrawal of investment in journalism. People aren’t making distinction between the craft of journalism and “big media,” which is actually as much a threat to professional journalists. The authority system journalists had of representing the public with the insiders is coming apart. Now journalists are seen as insiders themselvese, and this has worn away at their authority. Some journalists are hip, and are trying to figure out how to find a form of authority that is more interactive.

(I was distracted, but Jeff J. just mentioned that Big Media can’t coopt blogs…and referred to big media that doesn’t coopt, but cooperates.)

Q: What does digital democracy look like? What’s the role of portals?

Jay: what does a democratic culture look like, is the question, and what is the role of technology in that. What can digital technology do for us in creating a democratic culture is a better question.

Joi shot this photo of me at ETCon and called it the "compassionate founding father look." I'll be posting my own ETCon photos when I get sorted out. Computer memory problems at the conference slowed me down, I meant to post more from there.

Last year, when we talked about forming the Social Software Alliance around O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference, one of our first long discussions was over the need for a standard that would allow you to specify whether you were linking to something because you think it's cool, or because you think it sucks. The Social Software Alliance never quite happened, nor did any final spec for "Vote Links." At this year's conference last week, Kevin Marks and Tantek Çelik pulled a draft spec together, posted here.

Gallery of images from O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference, 2004..

I found myself nodding over this post from Doc today. Yesterday I wandered into multiple different conversations comparing the Bush administration to a dictatorship, which may be a stretch at this point, though I'm 54 years old and never in my life have I felt the same sense I feel now – that we could ultimately be so totally screwed that our grandchildren will inherit ashes. But I'm with Doc: this happens only if we let it happen. Those of us who are involved with Internet technology have the tools to make a difference, and a responsibility to put those tools to work. [Link]

It's different now. Large institutions today — church, business, goverment, education, law enforcement, the courts (and crime as well) — are not just connected by the Net, but rely on its open, free and increasingly capable infrastructure. Activism can now be very direct and personal. The threshold of engagement, of organization, of raising and spending funds, is so low it has become negligible for all but the very poor.

Its enemy is passivism, which is maintained by manufactured entertainment, consumed on a massive scale by citizens of civilized countries around the world. The result is stupidity on a grand scale.

Some time ago Ana Sisnett of Austin Free-Net asked Adam Weinroth of EasyJournal and I to help put together a training on blogs and social software. While Adam and I were still getting our time and our heads together, however, Zafar Shah, a very smart and motivated Vista volunteer for Free-Net, created and delivered the training, and Austin Free-Net, one of the oldest and most successful community network nonprofits in the U.S., had incorporated weblogs and wikis as a standard component of their organizational communications tech. Now Zafar's written an article on nonprofits and blogging for Nonprofit Quarterly. [Link]

When she encouraged her staff to blog about their work, Sisnett recognized another benefit of nonprofit blogging: She could now easily keep up to speed on her staff's work and the progress of various, concurrent projects. Soon, between the executive director, the technical staff and volunteers, Austin Free-Net had three staff blogs full of updated and archived information that could easily be incorporated into strategic plan updates, VISTA reports, press releases, newsletters and grants. When a colleague, a sponsor or even a journalist needed information about a project or issue, Sisnett could refer the interested party to a blog.

South by Southwest Interactive asked participants in the upcoming conference what they think of Bill Gates' idea of "a caller ID for email," which will soon become a feature of Hotmail. Rich MacKinnon of Less Networks, which provides a backbone for free wireless hotspots in Austin, posts an interesting response. Less Networks uses email for confirmation of registration on its system, an after quite a bit of research, Rich discovered that Hotmail users weren't getting the messages. Actually finding a Hotmail contact required more research; it wasn't clear from the site how to reach someone who can actually have an effect on this kind of problem. Rich did track someone down, and she said at first that Hotmail wouldn't dump email without explanation. After some tests, she changed her story: the Less Network Confirmation had been blocked by "a filter deployed to stop unsolicited email." Remember, this is a system that sends confirmation emails to people who signed up, i.e. it sends only emails that are explicitly solicited by the recipient.

How to get out of this mess? Microsoft is evaluating a third party "Bonded Sender Program," which means Rich could pay a fee and post a bond, and there would be a better chance that the emails would get through - but still no guarantee. [Link]

Okay, so after four weeks of dealing with user complaints and investigation, we are introduced to the Bonded Server Program. This is a program that requires us to pay an application fee, plus post a bond in case of infraction. These fees are not insignificant. Also recall that the emails in question are false-positives--they are being sent on behalf of Hotmail users requesting registration confirmation. Even worse, they are not being sent to a "spam folder", they are dumped. The Hotmail user never has the opportunity to screen them. The Hotmail person said there was no way to address the false-positives, so I had either pay for the chance to send email to Hotmail users or deal with the dumped email. How many thousands of Hotmail emails have been lost in other similar cases where the service providers or the users didn't have the persistence to track down this problem?

Based on this experience, I don't have any confidence that Microsoft can launch a whitelisting product that is responsive enough to needed tweaking. Millions of communications will be lost while people desperately use LinkedIn to find someone who's knows someone who works in Redmond..."

The amazing Mark Frauenfelder of boingboing is pouring bits of his head into a bubbling brew called Mad Professor, named after his great book of whacky science projects and experiments.