I had promised to write something for WorldChanging about Extreme Democracy; when I started writing, I found myself trying to say, as simply as possible, what we've been talking about in various discussions relating to social software (esp. blogs) as political software. I hesitate to call something I wrote this quickly a manifesto, but I saw it as a pointer in that direction, given more feedback from others... from, you, for instance. [Link]

Aldon Hynes blogs about the protestors who are being "detained" in New York City - rounded up and held in holding tanks. Not arrested, just put aside so they could have no (public) voice. George W. Bush likes to talk about people who "hate our freedoms," I guess he's hoping to fix the problem by leaving them less to hate. [Link]

My colleagues from WorldChanging.com have assembled as a panel discussing the kinds of things the blog covers – global climate change, economics, world community, sustainability... focusing on thinking way outside the box, and finding solutions. [Link]

What's even more hilarious about Zell Miller's bug-eyed rant at the Republican National Convention is the source for the content of his speech: evidently he drew part of it from one of the many email hoaxes that are circulating among rank and file Kerry opponents. Martini Republic broke the story. [Link]

I'm traveling this week, hiting the east coast just ahead of residual hurricane Frances, seen in transit through an airplane window at 29,000 feet, a staggering diversity of white cloud formations, deceptively calm.

One thing I'm thinking about on this trip is organizational culture, and I'm coming from a context of everyday thinking about the political problems of the U.S. and the world and how we might make repairs so that we can focus on very real problems of the 21st century - climate change, problems of developing nations, resource depletion, etc. Tough problems that the mainstream U.S. is generally ignoring because traditional channels of communication are dominated by divisive political squabbling and tabloid melodrama.

A year ago I was talking to a great Texas political operative and mentioned the Dean Issues Forums that I was working on with Bob Jacobson. The politico smiled and said "I don't really care about issues. I just want to get our people to the precincts." Makes sense, of course - that has to be his focus. However that comment exemplifies the problem with partisan politics, which is not at all about issues, problems and decisions about governance. It's about winning and taking power. Party platforms and promises are often ignored once the latest iteration of the game is done. Parties take positions that will result in votes. Each candidate talks about "my plan" but you can't take those plans seriously - they're based, not on what the candidate is prepared to do, but on focus groups that tell them what their constituents want to hear.

If we really want to solve problems and make the world more livable and more sustainable, we can't depend on politics or politicians. All of us who care must become activists, and advocate effectively for the issuese that are important to us.

In politics, as in organizational cultures, leadership positions are too often assumed by persons who are not effective leaders. If this is the problem, I would say that the solution is to rethink how leadership emerges in those cultures, and now natural leaders can be nurtured and encouraged. Not everyone is a leader, and not every leader is legitimized by election or appointment to a position of leadership.

This is a tough problem, and it requires that we stress in our teaching and training not just how to lead, but how to follow...and set that within some kind of ethical framework.

John Quarterman posts about the politics of fear and division...within Anasazi culture. [Link]

My buddy Ed Ward has written a very good overview of this year's Ars Electronica conference. We should all head over there next year - AE is a huge shiny object on the conference landscape.

Knut Graf just posted some images from a recent conversation over Pozole - Jason Levitt, Honoria Starbuck and I were cooking up a Plan (to be announced sometime). Link to more images.

Sunrise at Woods Hole


Captain Ian Thomas of the When and If


David Burstein on the When and If

I just returned from a few days at Woods Hole, where I spent an afternoon on the schooner When and If – I'm already trying to figure out how to get back onto the water, even if it's on a tiny sailboat. Also had the benefit of spectacular weather despite the blow-by of Hurricane Frances' remnants.

This struck me as a little perverse: if you pre-order George Lucas' THX 1138 director's cut DVD from Amazon, you also get "a collectible aluminum replica of the THX 1138 ear tag featured on the DVD packaging art." What will those whacky marketing guys think of next? I'm sure I'm missing the joke, but it seems strange to distribute collectible symbols of stifling oppression - the movie's supposed to make you recoil form that sort of thing, no?

Yours truly with Matt Sanders (center) and Jeff Kramer (right)

My partners and I celebrated the third birthday of Polycot Consulting, L.L.C. today. Though we formed in tough economic times (our partnership papers were filed the day after 9/11), we've been doing very well, and I want to thank all of our friends and supporters, especially our several associates: Honoria Starbuck, Phil Brader, rachel nation, Skip Baney, Ed Penak, David Nunez, and Boris Anthony. Also the many companies and organizations we've worked with.

Scotland's Sunday Herald made an apology and paid damages for a comment a reader made in its online forum. Nato secretary general George Robertson's damage award for a false allegation may also have the affect of stifling newspaper discussion forums; it implies that forums should be held to the same level of editorial control and fact-checking as other content areas at a newspaper site. This will doubtless have a chilling effect on informal conversation about news, at least on sites that are connected to sites published by news organizations. [Link]

Lord Robertson's lawyer, Cameron Dean, warned that the case highlighted the danger of "operating a website without being fully aware of the legal risks and responsibilities".

But media law expert Mark Stephens, of law firm Finers Stephens Innocent, said the courts had to recognise that message boards were not read in the same way as newspaper websites.

"Readers understand that bulletin boards are not reliable sources of information. Just as you wouldn't treat a copy of the Beano in the same way as a serious scientific journal, so in the modern era you have to realise that bulletin boards are not always scrupulously accurate," he said.

Looks like Hurricane Jeanne will come in right behind Ivan, projected landfall is Sunday, probably striking Florida or the Gulf Coast. This series of four back to back hurricanes will strain systems - probably beyond the areas that are getting slammed. As one who's been concerned for several years about global climate change, I find myself wondering if this will be an annual problem and grow worse. It's certainly the sort of thing we've expected to see as an effect of warming trends and shifting climate, though on the other hand it's not unprecedented to have multiple hurricane strikes in a season, and there have certainly been hurricanes as intense as Ivan, Frances, and Charley. What's troubling is the proximity of storms, one right after the other, and the fact that each storm is high-intensity. Of course we're not thinking enough about mitigation yet.

The RESFEST Digital Film Festival is coming to Austin October 8 (Alamo Drafthouse Cinema). RESFEST will be coming to 33 cities in 13 countries with short films, music videos, motion design, live music, speakers, etc. This year there's a special shorts program called Bushwhacked!, and you can guess the focus. (Thanks to John Worthington for the pointer!)

This is weird: I look at the Drudge Report, and I see a headline screaming GALLUP SHOWS BUSH BLOWOUT: 14 POINT LEAD OVER KERRY. Then I go to the Gallup site, and I can find no evidence of this 14 point lead. Is Drudge just making stuff up?

Update: National Business Review has a piece with a link to the Gallup poll Drudge mentioned, which says that Bush leads Kerry by 13 points among likely voters; 8 points among registered voters.

Gomez at ACLFest

I'm an avid music fan living in the "live music capital of the world," but I seldom take time these days for live in-person music, so attending the Austin City Limits Music Festival over the weekend was like a great meal after a fast. But the air conditioner's broken, it's complicated to cook, some of it tastes a little flat; in the end I'm elated but my stomach's rumbling sore.

Complicated to cook.

The logistics for ACLFest are complicated but handled very well by the folks that organize the thing. The toughest part is getting there, but you have several options: you can park at the Long Center, which is a mile or so away... or you can park in one of the state parking garages along Trinity/San Jacinto and ride one of a jillion shuttles that run throughout the event. You can take a bicycle or a taxi or a bicycle-rickshaw (saw plenty of those around). However you do it, there's some walking involved, and this year the weather was HOT and muggy, so you could be dripping sweat by the time you get to the gate.

Once you're there you generally have to hustle from one stage to another to catch the acts you want to see, and often one's starting before another begins, and the crowds this year were so much more than last year's, we found it more difficult to get from one stage to another; you had to push your way through people who were jammed together in crowds that were especially huge and dense at the stages for the major acts. And then there were the chair people to contend with.

The chair people.

Of the 75,000 or so attending, I figure half or maybe two-thirds brought collapsible chairs, the kind you can fold and store in an easy-to-carry bag. Last year we thought this was a great idea, even brought our own for one or two days. However this year with so many people on hand the chairs were a nuisance, and there was a particular breed of chair-toting whacko that we referred to as the chair people – people who treated their chairspace as property, and god help trespassers who wander through. Wandering in for the Sheryl Crow set, we stopped to stand in a relatively clear space in front of a couple of these creatures, and they simply went nuts. "This is not going to work," they told us. "You can't stand there. We came here 45 minutes ago so that we'd have a place with nobody standing in front of us." Eh? You've got about 50 rows of people in front of you and they're all going to be standing. Aren't YOU going to stand? "That's not the point. We were here first, you can't just come and stand in front of us." That's not exactly the way we usually do it in Austin general admission shows, but from the looks of 'em, these folks hadn't been to many of those. (They were evidently young Republican typse who were set off by the Kerry bumpersticker Marsha was wearing.) We did okay, though... we moved a few feet over into a passel of young girls who knew Crow's songs by heart and became an emergent choir each time she it a particularly striking chorus. Amazing harmony! They took the Crow set to another level. In fact, this was one of the best sets - Sheryl was bubbly in love, her boyfriend Lance Armstrong hanging around the periphery of the set. Her band is incredibly tight, and she had a couple of extras (Ryan Adams and Doyle Bramhall).

Some of it tastes a little flat.

A couple of disappointments: The Pixies had a bad start, attributable mostly to a bad mix, though they didn't seem passionate about the music when they started... this might've been because they knew the sound sucked. The mix was thin and Joey Santiago was buried. After three or four songs we were wandering away, but stopped to talk to friends and, as we were talking, the sound system kicked in. The rest of the set was pretty good but not great.

Wilco didn't quite fly, either, though I think it was because we'd just walked over from the Drive-By Truckers set, and Wilco opened with a set of songs that were softer and less compelling. I think Tweedy was onto this; there was an up-tempo shift for the last half of the set, capturing the crowd's attention, which had been wandering.

The best of the best.

Four bands blew me away, and one was a surprise: I'd heard of Drive-By Truckers but I should've paid more attention. Their set was the most energized of all... explosive manic rock that drove the crowd wild. They were the second great Southern rockblues band we saw, the first being the North Mississippi All Stars, already one of our favorites. The All Stars play blues resonant with The Allman Brothers and Derek Trucks, at least Luther Dickinson's guitar style is Allmanesque (similar, but not derivative: his chops are his own). Then there was Gomez – I've been listening to their recorded music a lot lately, a kind of pop psychedelic blues combo, infectious listening. No disapppointment here, the band blasted through their set with relentless energy.

I'm elated but my stomach's rumbling sore

Heh - we had a great weekend but the heat and the walking and standing and DANCING wiped me out!

I should recover in time for next year's festival, though...

Three members of Tom DeLay's crew have been indicted in Texas for money laundering after a two-year investigation into Texans for a Republican Majority, a PAC that DeLay founded to ensure a Republican majority in the Texas House of Representatives. The PAC sent corporate money to the Republican National Committee with a list of candidates who should receive donations, and the RNC sent the money back into Texas. It's against the law in Texas for corporations to fund campaigns. [Link]

John Dvorak of PC Magazine has gone out of his depth with a piece about social networks, where he ponders whether they're "Dead Already?". Sites that support social networks have their problems, but they're certainly not "dead." However Dvorak betrays his biases in his second paragraph:

I was getting an invitation to join one or more of these systems daily. LinkedIn seemed to be the most popular at the time. I demurred, since I'm not much of a joiner. But after being hounded and hounded, I reluctantly joined a few of these services and watched my personal network of associates grow.

Dvorak seems to think that all social networks have the same goals and functionality as LinkedIn:

The idea behind these social/business networks is that with the Internet and these special services, you can put together and control a list of people who have qualified as your friends. These people in turn develop networks that you can access. When somebody from another network wants to get hold of someone in your network, you can forward the request as a kind of qualified lead. "This guy is okay because I know him," and that sort of thing.

The first thing that happens is that you begin to notice that many, if not most, of these people have bigger networks than you have. You look like a total loser if your network is smaller. So you start to invite people to join your network to pump up the numbers so you won't look like a schmuck. Soon others do the same. Now it's a race. Okay, so I let the guy from Toledo add me so I can add him and get my numbers up. This factor alone ruins the usability of the entire scene, since nobody is qualified at all.

Dvorak explains a bizarre experience he evidently had with LinkedIn where he was limited in his ability to contact other members. He could only contact four, and three didn't respond. Since they didn't respond, he surmises that they were "bogus."

On Orkut, he says he "couldn't do the kind of search he he needed to isolate anyone," but he doesn't quite explain what he couldn't do - he's distracted by the thought that some Orkut members might have better looking friends than others, another point where he assumes people are competing. What evidence does he cite for this? None.

He says in his next to last paragraph that he sees "no evidence that any of these systems really work." I.e. he couldn't find a use for them, so how could anyone else find them useful? Did he ask around? He doesn't say. I suspect he didn't.

In the final paragraph, he says his invitations to the services dropped off. He doesn't really say what this is supposed to mean. To me it suggests that most of the people he knew who were likely to do the social network thing had already done it... but it certainly doesn't mean that no one is using the social networks. It's really not just about adding more and more people, after all. The idea is that you'll make use of your connections and communities in various ways, and there does seem to be a lot of that happening... at least to me, when I wander back to Tribe or Orkut.

Finally, he says

After about four months of inactivity, one lone person gave me an invite to LinkedIn, with a canned message that made me roll my eyes. It went on and on about how valuable the network has become for the person.

When I got it, I laughed.

There's a lot to say about social networks, but Dvorak's remarks are basically just bile, nothing constructive in 'em. What I'd really like to talk about is what you can do well with social networks, and how they might be more effective in a context where they are not an end in themselves, but serve another need.

You got me working, boss man
Working 'round the clock
I want me a drink of water
You won't let me stop
You big boss man
Can you hear me when I call?
Oh, you ain't so big
You just tall, that's all
&ndash Big Boss Man by Al Dixon and A. Smith

I keep hearing, thinking, and talking about future work environments where workers are more independent and self-directed, and can work pretty much anywhere, so when I read something like
this at News.com:

Cell phones are giving employers new ways to check up on employees in the field--and raising fresh workplace privacy concerns as a result.

Something like 37 years ago, I (and many others) were waiting for a record album that was sure to be a masterpiece, Brian Wilson's Smile, recorded by the Beach Boys and set to release on Capitol Records. Smile would follow Pet Sounds, a pop symphony that stretched my thinking about the aesthetic possibilities in Phil Spectorish "wall of sound" pop arrangement. Brian Wilson was a genius who could make music from anything, even the clanking of spoons at the dinner table. The short version of a very complex story is that Brian ditched the project, evidently after a fire in the next studio that happened to break out as he was recording part of "the elements," the part about fire. I have a hunch there was more to it, but that's great myth-building. So the album was never finished, never released; bits and pieces of it showed up in other albums, like Smiley Smile. Now Wilson, having reconstructed his head after so many years, has finished the work; Smile will be released this Tuesday! Perseverance furthers. [Link]

Originally posted at WorldChanging: Another World Is Here:

Frank Coluccio posted about an article in the October Scientific American about Internet Zero of Internet-0, "described as an architecture that defines the protocols and internetworking relationships of everyday objects found in the home and the business place." The Scientific American article isn't online yet, but Frank posts from a sidebar summary of the project:

• Giving everyday objects the ability to connect to a data network would have a range of benefits: making it easier for homeowners to configure their lights and switches, reducing the cost of complexity of building construction, assisting with home health care. Many alternative standards currently compete to do just that – a situation reminiscent of the early days of the Internet, when computers and networks came in multiple incompatibly types.
• To eliminate this technological Tower of Babel, the data protocol that is at the heart of the Internet can be adopted to represent information in whatever form it takes: pulsed eclectically, flashed optically, clicked acoustically, broadcast electromagnetically or printed mechanically.
• Using this Internet-0 encoding, the original idea of linking computer networks into a seamless whole – the Inter” in "Internet" can be extended to networks of all types of devices, a concept know as interdevice internetworking.

• The seventh and final attribute of I0 is the use of open standards. The desirability of open standards should not need saying, but it does. Many of the competing standards for connecting devices are proprietary. The recurring lesson of the computer industry has been that proprietary businesses should be built on top of, rather than in conflict with, open standards.”

Sir Tim Berners-Lee explains the Semantic Web in an interview published in the latest Technology Review. The interviewer is Mark Frauenfelder of boingboing.

The Semantic Web technology tackles the problem in two stages. The more mundane is a common data format. You can take a database or a calendar or an address book or a bank statement or a weather reading—basically anything with hard data in it—and make the machine write it in the basic Semantic Web language, instead of some proprietary or application-specific format. This solves the “syntactic” problem.

It still doesn’t solve the “semantic” one, though. For that, the Semantic Web first gives names to the basic concepts involved in the data: date and time, an event, a check, a transaction, temperature and pressure, and location. These are all defined just to mean whatever they mean in the system which produces the data—for example, “Transaction date as I get on a bank statement,” and so on. This set of concepts is called an ontology. Then, where there are connections between ontologies, such as when the date and time on a photograph is the same concept as the time on a weather report, we write rules to take advantage of these connections. This allows one to query the Semantic Web agent for photos taken on sunny days, for example. Bit by bit, link by link, the data becomes connected, interwoven. The exciting thing is serendipitous reuse of data: one person puts data up there for one thing, and another person uses it another way.

I'm irritated with myself for blogging this, it's like feeding the troll. I think Orlowski (who is evidently a smart guy) likes to play devil's advocate to stir up controversy and attract attention (similar to Bill O'Reilly on Fox Network, only Bill O'Reilly isn't an advocate; I'm pretty sure he's the devil.) His latest target: Wikipedia, which he assails as the product of unqualified "wiki-fiddlers" (which he originally wanted to call "wiki-wankers," contributors to "the world's most useless encyclopedia."

Make no mistake, the small coterie of self-selecting wiki fiddlers have done a fine job of producing a hyperlinked encyclopedia that appeals to um, wiki fiddlers. Yards of text are devoted to things that interest, mostly, people who like to write online encyclopedias. It's very much a religious belief, the notion that good stuff will spontaneously "emerge". But what you end up with is a hypertexted junk where Eric Drexler gatecrashes the Buckminster Fuller section and where the entry for "memes" is as long as the entry for Immanuel Kant. (Needless to say, there's no entry for Mary Midgley. We could go on, but you get the general idea).