Marqui is paying me to blog about their company and its products for communication management. I've added a disclosure statement if you want to know more about the arrangement.

Mitch Ratcliffe has blogged a consideration of WikiNews, WikiMedia's collaborative news experiment. Mitch says

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.

Mitch has posted a long piece about blogging for Marqui, taking on critics like Jason Calcanis and Stowe Boyd. (I did post a comment on Boyd's remarks today, but if I take more time to deal with critics, I'll never get a chance to write my weekly Marqui post!)

As I noted earlier, I've agreed to blog weekly about a company called Marqui, formerly MaestroCMS, in exchange for sponsorship. This is slightly controversial: some bloggers believe that those of us in the program sacrifice integrity when we agree to take money to blog about a product. However I'm more than happy to disclose what this is about. Marqui is not asking us to endorse their product (I don't use it, after all) – they're asking us to help tell their story. Each week they're going to give us something to blog about, and it's up to us what we say.

This week's subject is the web site for the David Suzuki Foundation, and I find that very easy to discuss, because I share Suzuki's interest in sustainability and preservation of the environment. Dr. Suzuki, a geneticist and host of CBC's documentary series The Nature of Things, uses Marqui's content management system for his web site, which has 1200 pages and send 40,000 emails per week, according to the info provided by Marqui.

The Suzuki Foundation site is a great source of information about environmental issues and challenges. I especially like his explanation of sustainability:

Everywhere we look, human activities are tearing at the very fabric of life on Earth. We have changed the composition of the atmosphere. We’ve altered the hydrologic cycle. We’ve literally moved mountains and created immense lakes behind giant dams. The fact is, we cannot continue on this same path. With an estimated population of nine billion people by 2050, we cannot continue to consume resources at the same rate and maintain our quality of life.

That’s where sustainability comes in. Quite simply, sustainability means living within the earth’s limits. It means living in a world where feeding people does not necessitate polluting groundwater and coastal shorelines. Where transporting people and goods does mean polluting our air and changing our climate. Where heating our homes and powering our industries does not require vast amounts of polluting fossil fuels.

George Tenet calls for new Internet security measures - just what those are are't specified in this article, which quotes him as saying "I know that these actions will be controversial in this age when we still think the Internet is a free and open society with no control or accountability, but ultimately the Wild West must give way to governance and control."

Mr. Tenet pointed out that the modernization of key industries in the United States is making them more vulnerable by connecting them with an Internet that is open to attack.

The way the Internet was built might be part of the problem, he said. Its open architecture allows Web surfing, but that openness makes the system vulnerable, Mr. Tenet said.

Access to networks like the World Wide Web might need to be limited to those who can show they take security seriously, he said.

Mr. Tenet called for industry to lead the way by "establishing and enforcing" security standards. Products need to be delivered to government and private-sector customers "with a new level of security and risk management already built in."
The national press, including United Press International (UPI), were excluded from yesterday's event, at Mr. Tenet's request, organizers said.

1. If called by a lawyer, calm your mind and lower your pulse.
2. Ask politely that they put it in writing.
3. Take the letter to your city or county's Public Recorder's Office.
4. File it for the public record for a small fee.
   (you may enter anything into the public record, even a movie stub).
5. Scan the letter and post it online as a GIF and a PDF.
6. List the official record number.
7. Let us do the rest.

None of this is fair to the lawyers who do this because they're only doing their job. Tough noogies. In every transition of power, force is projected by the rising elite against the old, and careers and reputations are lost and individuals are hurt. It is the way of nature. The question is, are we bloggers willing to discover and expose the words and identities of the individuals, having no fear of retribution, who threaten our friend Jason? We're certainly willing to track down every other detail that interests us, why not when one of us is attacked?

The exercise of real power is never fair. In the last year there's been a shift of power to citizen journalists who simply examine the public record and report what we've learned. We must rise up now that they have come for Jason, for they will surely come for us next.

An article in Salon asks Whose party is it anyway?, exploring the possibility that the Howard Dean wing of the party might be the answer. Dean's grassroots activists demand that the Democrats push for an alternative to business as usual. Dean is the Democrat most likely to speak for folks like the authors of the November 3 theses.

Dean's unequivocal anti-Bushness is red meat for progressive Democrats hungry for something beyond the empty calories of "Fuck the South." The liberal blogosphere -- which played both father and son to Dean's presidential run -- has all but demanded that Dean be chosen to lead the Democratic Party when the DNC meets in February. In Oregon, the race for a spot in the state's DNC delegation turned into a blog battle over which candidate would offer the strongest support for Dean's as-yet-undeclared candidacy. In Washington, DNC member Donna Brazile said Monday that she has received so many e-mails from Dean supporters that her Blackberry has died from the abuse.

There's no question that Dean can inspire the Democratic base. And as a former governor -- albeit of a tiny state -- and a presidential candidate who helped revolutionize political campaigns, Dean has a track record that suggests he has the organizational skills necessary to make the Democratic Party work. But a good résumé and the impassioned pleas of a thousand dailykossacks does not a DNC majority make. Brazile -- who may or may not have been in the race but is out now -- says Dean has only "lukewarm" support from party insiders. If Dean decides to run, she says, "You'll see the same forces that tried to derail his campaign reconstitute themselves as an anti-Dean bandwagon."

Holiday weirdness:

CNN says church leaders in the U.K. have condemned a Christmas nativity display featuring David Beckham as Joseph and his wife Victoria (aka Post Spice) as th e, ahem, Virgin Mary. [Link] - also reported in the Houston Chronicle.

Also in England: Satan's Grotto at York Dungeon features a horned devil in lieu of Santa Claus. Santa's evil surrogate hands out severed fingers as gifts and proffers a scroll where visitors can sign over their souls. Says Reverend Roger Simpson, "It is not just complaining for the sake of it. There are real evil forces and we in our work come across people who are damaged seriously through their involvement with occult forces." [Link]

Jeff Jarvis challenges statements by FCC Chair Michael Powell regarding the agency's attempt to become a powerful new Legion of Decency.

Shall we read the First Amendment together? Congress shall make now law... abridging freedom of speech. Yes, I do not want government -- you -- abridging speech in any way. Neither did our founding fathers. I trust the marketplace, the citizenry, the people. So did our founders. You do not.

This post is part of the Marqui Sponsorship program. I've told a few people who had questions about Marqui that my own company would be unlikely to adopt the product for any of our projects because we don't code or work with Microsoft's Active Server Pages. Thierry LeVasseur, Marqui's founder, sent me a clarification via email:

Yes, it's true, the tool is programmed with ASP, but the web properties you build with Marqui are completely platform and code independant. We are the only CMS that can be used as a development platform for both .NET & J2EE. We have clients managing their Java on UNIX, PHP on Windows, CFM, XML, XHTML, even companies producing exclusively Word documents to a file server, etc, etc. This is why our partners love us so much. There are NO restrictions to the code or platform you can use.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. ~ Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

John Barlow tells about his Taste of the System, in September of 2003 – he's kept mum about it 'til now, as he says it seems to be coming to a head.

On September 15, 2003, shortly after Burning Man, I was hauled off an airplane that was about to depart San Francisco for New York and charged with the misdemeanor possession of controlled substances that had allegedly been discovered during a search of my checked baggage.

They clearly regarded me as a threat to public safety. When I pointed out to the officials that they only had authority to search for threats to the aircraft, one of them, a bug-eyed, crew-cutted troglodyte, declared that, if I had taken any of these substances, then I would have endangered Flight 310. That such an obviously ungifted person was capable of so imaginative a conceptual leap remains a marvel to me.

There I spent most of the remaining day, while I attempted to raise the truly astonishing $25,000 bail upon which my liberty now depended. Finding rescue was tricky. The "phone" in my cell could only make local or collect calls. I didn't know anyone in Redwood City and cell phones won't accept collect calls. Furthermore, they'd taken my address book and my cell phone and calls to directory information were not permitted. I was left with the few land line numbers I still keep in my head. Lunch consisted of a slice of baloney between two unadorned slices of Wonder Bread, but I didn't have much appetite. At some point in the recent past, someone had thrown up in our cell and no one had bothered to clean it up. I was getting what Rudy Giuliani like to call, during his tenure as the Mean Mom of New York, "a taste of the system."

All this over a few crumbs of recreational drugs allegedly found in the bottom of an ibuprofen bottle. Why don't I feel more secure?

I'm posting John's last paragraphs in full for your consideration...

Now the more authoritarian among you might say that if these searches reveal other, non-terror-related, criminal activity, then so much the better. The 4th Amendment should provide no sanctuary for the guilty, whatever their crimes. But randomly searching people's homes against the possibility that someone might have a bio-warfare lab in his basement would reveal a lot of criminal activity. And it is certainly true that such searches would reduce the possibility of anthrax attacks and enhance public safety. Still, I doubt you're ready to go there. Yet. Given a few exotic outbreaks, you might be. Should that day come, would you still believe such searches should not be precisely limited? This may seem hyperbolic, and of course it is, but it's actually a fairly short conceptual distance away from what's going on in the nation's airports at present.

Assuming the possibility of appeal - which is a certainty if I lose this round - this case may go on for a long time, but if that's what it takes to prevent the imposition of general warrants upon the traveling public, I'm willing to go the distance. John Gilmore, bless him, appears willing to do the same. We're trying to set a precedent here and the government is determined to prevent one. Only through such solitary struggles as this one can we preserve the dreams of Jefferson and Madison through this period of panicked expediency. On September 11, 2001 I sent out a spam to my mailing list in which I warned that "the control freaks will be dining out on this day for the rest of our lives."

I mean to deny them at least one small course in that terrible meal.

At the Berkman Center's Votes, Bits, and Bytes gathering, Zack Exley and Chuck Defeo discussed their respective campaigns, blogged by Micah Sifry at the Personal Democracy Forum.

Exley was a tad defensive, given the complaints from the left that Kerry's online effort was too top-down and fundraising-obsessed and didn't do enough fostering of grassroots conversation or power. He parried those critiques by pointing out that they used the net to get thousands of people on the ground talking to voters, and given the Bush campaign's expected fundraising advantage, they felt it important to raise the money needed to keep pace in the ad wars. "We did listen to our base," he noted, describing how the campaign solicited stories from its supporters on how they had been affected by the Bush economy. "We got 100,000 responses which were put into a database. So when you saw people standing at a Kerry rally telling their life stories, those were real people telling real stories," he said.

Joi makes one of those posts that makes me wish I had more time to investigate – this one was inspired by a Susan Crawford post, and Susan was inspired by a Seth Schoen post about evolution and the second law of thermodynamics, which suggests that disorder in an isolated system will increase... the system will become less organized, more chaotic. Schoen's piece is about John W. Patterson's essay "Thermodynamics and Evolution," which challenges the creationist assertion that the second law contradicts or disproves the theory of evolution, because evolution suggests that order is increasing. Susan summarizes Schoen and Patterson, noting that increased order or negentropy is localized: "This local order emerges BECAUSE the outside area is becoming increasingly disorganized." If you've read Gravity's Rainbow, think of the banana breakfast, which represents enclosed, local negative entropy while the chaos of war goes on outside.

This is where I could take more time, because there's more to these three posts and their references than I have time to capture here, but also because I know there's confusion about the second law and the concept of entropy, and I've often thought that the second law is applicable to the state of the universe we perceive now, but I've wondered if reversal is possible, so that there's a kind of puslation, that disorder increases to a point, and at that point there's a reversal; order increases and disorder decreases. I can speculate about something like that because I'm not a scientist and I'm ignorant of physics, and that makes me wish I could know more.

Joi quotes Susan, and this quote ties her post to discussions about a free and open Internet, which many want, and many others fear:

Here is Patterson's conclusion:

"In reality, ... the 'uphill' processes associated with life not only are compatible with entropy and the second law, but actually depend on them for the energy fluxes off of which they feed. Numerous other kinds of backward processes in simpler, nonliving systems also proceed in this way, and do so in complete accord with the second law."

This all ties to internet governance. A sufficiently open net will tend towards order, not chaos -- and will do so on its own, with no external pilot.

And now a word from our sponsor, Marqui... Janet Johnson of Marqui created a paperless brochure for Marc and Lisa Canter with a q&a about Marqui's CMS, evidently responses to questions from The Head Lemur, another Marqui-sponsored blogger. They have weekly free webinars to show how Marqui works, Janet sez, though I have to admit I couldn't find info about those on the site (something Marqui might want to think about). Meanwhile they've posted a new whitepaper, A Marketer's Guide to Search Engine Optimization, which I haven't downloaded yet... on my way!

Wow, this story makes my heart flutter: a federal judge awarded an ISP a billion dollars in a judgement against no-show spammers. Now all they gotta do is FIND the plaintiffs and collect what they can! [Link]

Calling it "the Friendster of photo sites," Salon profiles the photo-sharing site, flickr.

On most sites, you create your own album or page of photos, and invite your friends to look at them. But on Flickr, you can mingle all your photos with similar images, creating an endlessly beguiling cross-pollination of photos that spark a host of unique communities.

Mind Hacks: Tips and Tools for Using Your Brain is an exploration of cognitive neuroscience. I haven't read it, but Mark's posted an interview with one of the editors. The book just has to be a great Christmas gift for people who have brains and want to play with 'em.

Longtime friend, fringester, culture jammer, media critic Mark Dery has a new site (Shovelware) and blog (The Gilded Hack). He hsa the right attitude (or altitude): "'Blog' sounds like a portmanteau for some clammy new fetish, best left undescribed – an unhappy hybrid of blob and flog. Yeah, I know it’s short for 'weblog,' but who calls journals 'logs,' anyway, except the glassy-eyed minions in sea orgs or people who begin their diary entries with stardates?"

This is going to be fun!

Link to Mark Dery's Shovelware

ILECS ("Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers," sometimes called Baby Bells, formerly "the phone company") express their unique perspective at the Heartland Institute's Telecom Reform Conference. According to David Isenberg, this particular conference was all about getting the ILECs what they want: more deregulation, fewer taxes on telecom, and a "competitive" envirnoment that favors their interests. That's certainly one perspective... but at a conference like this, you'd hope to hear more. [Link]

WorldChanging.com just won the 2004 Utne Independent Press Award for online cultural coverage, which is a great honor for the growing team of WorldChanging bloggers (including yours truly), and for editors Alex Steffen and Jamais Cascio. [Link]

MIT's Technology Review profiles Wikipedia co-creator Larry Sanger, a professional epistemologist who left the project, partly because of the "revert wars."

...there’s a second complaint against Wikipedia that bothers Sanger more deeply—the fractiousness among Wikipedians themselves. Sanger says participants often become embroiled in “revert wars” in which overprotective authors undo the changes others try to make to their articles. He says he’s afraid that this kind of behavior drives away academics and other experts whose contributions would otherwise raise Wikipedia’s quality.

Sanger may be speaking from the heart. He left Wikipedia in 2002 when funding for his position ran out and no longer contributes, in part because of the lingering sting of some particularly nasty revert wars. He now lives in a suburb of Columbus, and lectures in the philosophy department at Ohio State University, his alma mater. To build a public encyclopedia, you don't need faith in the possibility of knowledge, he says. "What you have to have faith in is human beings being able to work together."

[Link]

Cool Mandelbrot-style generated images resembling the traditional depiction of the Buddha in meditation. [Link]

The Buddhabrot Set is a re-visualization of the familiar Mandelbrot Set using a technique invented by Melinda Green. Instead of selecting points on the real-complex plane, initial points are selected at random from the image region. The point is iterated through the function, z = zˆ2 + c, where z has components in both the real and imaginary planes.

If the particle escapes (exits the viewing area with high speed), its path is reiterated, exposing its position onto the image surface with each step. In this fashion, areas of dense particle travel appear bright white. The result is an amazing universe of structure, spirituality, and mathematical intrigue.

And now for a word from our sponsor, Marqui! Thanks to Shannon Clark for pointing out that I failed to link to Marqui in my December 10 post. And thanks to Meryl for posting some details about using Marqui.

Marqui sent us a document with some thoughts about their perception of this experiment in marketing communication:

Marketing automation and communication management tools (like Marqui) are key to helping marketers maintain their relevancy to consumers, while allowing them to serve themselves and influence new communities as they form online, on air, and in their workplaces. (Janet's evangelism is showing!) Our blogosphere program, for example, is a free focus group online, offering product and support suggestions we're already rolling into our roadmaps.

With regard to the blogosphere program, Marqui will participate in Alex's FeedFest 2005 by putting Marc Canter and David Weinberger (contributor to Corante) on with opposing viewpoints on paying bloggers to blog. We'll try to get Rowland Hanson to moderate the discussion.

Here's a swell holiday animation from HP, via WebZen. (Be sure to pull the lever and mouse around.) [Link]

A couple of weeks ago I wandered along 37th Street in Austin, which is famous for its annual festival of Christmas lights. You can find out more about the lights here, and there's a page with photos of Central Texas Christmas lights here. My own 2004 phots are posted in a gallery here. Give it a whirl! And have a merry one...

A humongous earthquake 100 miles off the West Coast of Sumatra, 8.9 on the Richter scale, slammed southeastern Asia and killed more than 4,800 10,000 people via massive tsunamis triggered by the quake. Even more interesting, this is the second 8+ quake in a matter of days, the first being an 8.1 quake 305 miles north of Macquarie Island near Antarctica on December 23.

This latest quake is the strongest since March 1964, and the fifth strongest since earthquake measurements began in 1899.

Update: The death toll keeps climbing, and CNN has set up a special Tsunami Disaster Section. Latest figure is 11,500 dead.

Ken Goffman, better known as R.U. Sirius, former co-editor of Reality Hackers and Mondo 2000, has just co-authored a history of Counterculture through the Ages with Dan Joy. Ken and I have been jamming about the book and his life on the WELL, along with several others who've read the book. The two-week discussion ends next Friday; if you have questions or comments, email them to inkwell-hosts at well.com and they'll be posted. Meanwhile buy the book, it's a great bit of gonzo nonfiction. Ed Ward has already pointed out some inaccuracies; if you see any, post here and I'll forward the info along for the second edition.

Buy the book:

My friend Ed Ward, one of the best writers I know, has been living in Berlin for several years. He started blogging last May, and I'll put his blog near the top of my top ten list if I don one (but don't tempt me). He's posted an Actual Heartwarming Berlin Christmas Story, and it has indeed brought warmth on this chilly day after Christmas. (The image above is from his next later post, Christmas Card.)

Volunteers have set up a The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami blog to gather and coordinate information about resources, aid, donations, and volunteer efforts in response to the devastation in Southeast Asia. There are several posts at WorldChanging.com about the catastrophic effects of the great quake. WC will follow up soon with a more comprehensive post, and thoughts about how such tragedies might be averted in the future. Here's an excerpt from a message I sent in a private email earlier today:

Humans have the gift of potential foresight yet we're in denial about our fragility and vulnerability to exceptional natural forces. I think that's the real story here. More so than developed vs developing nations... consider that Thailand had tsunami warning systems but hadn't thought to deploy them on the West Coast. India and Sri Lanka hadn't joined the international warning system because tsunamis are less frequent in the Indian Ocean, as if something like this could never occur. The Indonesian quote says they couldn't afford the equipment, but I suspect that means they hadn't given it priority.

I wonder if there'd been any kind of risk assessment to suggest that tsunami detection might in fact be a priority?

And what other risks are we ignoring? We pay at least some attention to potential asteroid collisions, but what action would we take if we did spot an asteroid on a collision course with the earth? I suspect that scenario hasn't got the attention it deserves.

We see this with global warming. We see this with some volcanoes - Yellowstone is an excellent example. If Yellowstone blows, and it very well might, we'd potentially have a world-killing catastrophe. How much thought have we given to preparation/mitigation?

So I think this is about understanding potentially catastrophic forces, creating strategies for prevention, warning, mitigation, whatever, and getting buy-in on those. Perhaps we need a set of potential catastrophe scenarios with probability ratings for prioritization, and proposals for response.

The 2004 election really does seem over, and nobody seems to have much energy for a fight at the moment, but in Ohio, folks are still talking and thinking and paying attention, concerned over evidence of voter fraud. (Thanks for the pointer, John!) [Link]

Pre-punched ballots; touch-screen vote switching; more absentee votes than absentee voters; unfair provisional voter deletions; change of voting sites on Election Day; voter suppression; voter intimidation; double voting; malfunctioning machines; recalibrated machines; evidently rigged machines; and even 25 million negative votes registered in some races in Mahoning County!

Those were among the problematic incidents shared at a 3-hour public hearing on vote irregularities in the Mahoning Valley held on December 21 at the Warren-Trumbull Public Library. Panelists taking voter testimony included Rev. Rick Judy of Mahoning County; Rev. Werner Lange of Trumbull County; Ray Nakley, an officer of the Arab-American Community Center in Youngstown; and Russ Buckbee, Green Party coordinator for NE Ohio.

Many panelists and testifiers wore orange ribbons symbolizing the ongoing fight for democracy. "The color orange was chosen to remember Florida, where the wishes of the voters were ignored in order to place George W. Bush in the White House in 2000," read the attached explanation, "Here were are in 2004 and we allege it is happening again."

Cory Doctorow on Wired Magazine's article about Bram Cohen, creator of BitTorrent p2p file-sharing software. Cory takes issue "where Clive talks about Microsoft DRM being useful to 'keep content out of pirate hands'"...

...there is not a single piece of content in the history of the universe that has been "kept out of pirate hands" (i.e. kept off the Internet, or prevented from being stamped out in pirate CD factories abroad) by DRM. It's a weird kind of Big Lie strategy by the DRM people to talk about how DRM can prevent "piracy" when there has never, ever been an example of this happening.

It's a statement that's so categorically untrue, it seems to come from a parallel universe with different laws of physics and economics. BitTorrent proves the futility of DRM as surely as DRM turns honest customers into studio-hating downloaders.

I bought a Sopranos Season Three DVD set for a friend's Christmas this year. When the friend opened the gift on her Christmas holiday in France, the discs wouldn't play in her hotel's French DVD player; nor would they play in the on-site English PowerBook -- because the discs had DRM. At that point, the rational thing to do would have been to sell the discs on Amazon and just download Season Three using BitTorrent -- the studios have rigged the game so that you get a superior product (e.g., something you can actually watch) when you download bootlegs from BitTorrent, and they actively punish customers who buy their products instead of downloading them.

Cory boings back at Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine after Anderson repsonds to his earlier DRM rant in a post about Wired's BitTorrent article.

DRM, "Digital Rights Management," is a breaks your technology and limits your access to content that you paid for, requiring you to pay more. And more. DRM advocates with their hands in your pocket say they're protecting themselves from piracy, but "DRM is not protection. There has never been a DRM-covered file that was kept off the Internet. Ever. DRM has never once in the history of the field kept a file from appearing online, or from being booted by organized crime pirates. Despite its rhetoric on this, Hollywood is perfectly aware of how bogus the DRM-is-protection claim is...."

DRM isn't protection from piracy. DRM is protection from competition. If you believe that "much as we might want it to be otherwise, content owners still call most of the shots," then you believe that the guy who makes the record should get a veto over the design of the record player. That the film studios should be able to ban the VCR. That the recording industry should have been able to shove SDMI down all our throats and make MP3 disappear.

This is a profoundly ahistorical proposition. Never in the history of media from the dawn of the printing press right up to the invention of the DVD have we afforded this kind of privilege to incumbent rightsholders. Quite the contrary: at every turn, brave entrepreneurs have engaged in "piracy" of copyrighted works (through devices like the record player, radio, cable television and VCR) and kept at it until the law caught up with the technology.

It's different with the DVD. With the DVD, the electronics companies completely wimped out. They traded their customers to the studios for two packs of cigarettes, and the result has been a decade of stagnation in DVD players. There's no indication that movies are being released sooner or more cheaply on DVD than they were on VHS; and in fact, the release of movies on VHS was preceded by incredible, absurd hyperbole about the video-cassette's inevitable destruction of the film industry and the compelte impossibility of a movie ever being released by a studio for viewing on your VCR.

If you believe that "content owners still call most of the shots" then you believe that the studios will make movies and just not release them, they will amass a great pile of unreleased material in their Hollywood vaults and sit before the doors, arms folded, glaring at the world until it arranges itself into a more accomodating configuration. It is ridiculous. DRM hasn't convinced the studios to put new material online -- the offerings that the studios have put online are a pathetic shadow of the material one can download from the P2P networks. The studios have all the DRM in the universe at their disposal, but they're not using it to bring new material to market.

Nope, they're using it to sell you the same crap for more money....

Coco Fusco fears we're abandoning history (and reality) in favor of matrixes and maps. [Link]

Viewing the world as a map eliminates time, focuses disproportionately on space and dehumanizes life. In the name of a politics of global connectedness, artists and activists too often substitute an abstract “connectedness” for any real engagement with people in other places or even in their own locale.

What gets lost in this focus on mapping is the view of the world from the ground: lived experience. What is ignored is the pervasiveness of the well-orchestrated and highly selective visual culture that the majority of Americans consume during most of their waking hours. Most people are not looking through microscopes and telescopes and digital mapping systems to find truth about the world. They are watching reality TV, sitcoms, the Super Bowl, MTV and Fox News, all of which also offer maps of a completely different kind: conspiracy theories that pit innocent Americans against the Axis of Evil, embedded journalists’ hallucinatory misreadings of foreign conflicts, allegories of empowerment through consumption and endlessly recycled, biblically inspired narratives of sin and redemption.

In the rebuilding efforts following the Southeast Asian tsunami's destructive impact, we should not just restore; we should build better systems and structures, and build for sustainable prosperity in the region, according to Alex at WorldChanging. [Link]

This top ten list is based on the various stories I blogged throughout the year – these strike me as the most interesting subjects.

I also tacked on a 'best of' music list, a few albums that impressed me in 2004.

1. The Howard Dean Presidential Campaign. I made a lot of posts on the subject, like this one from last January on Dean, Software, and Democracy
2. Social Software for nonprofits. In February I posted a link to "What's a Blog, and Why Should Nonprofits Care?", an article by Zafar Shah, a VISTA volunteer working with Austin Free-net. I was involved in conversations related to this subject all year, especially since one focus of my company, Polycot, is social software for nonprofits, activists campaigns, and small companies. I also thought and blogged a lot about software for identifying and managing social networks (Friendster, Orkut, etc.) Several items on this subject in March: detail about a meeting in Austin with several local talking, mostly about LinkedIn. I blogged my response to David Weinberger's Why I Hate Friendster. Also blogged links to other blogs commenting on our Aesthetics of Social Networks panel at SXSW Interactive. In April I posted a link to Andrew Leonard on social networks, where he says "the not-so-secret secret of social networking is that flimsy is good!" I also posted a response to John Dvorak when he wrote that social network systems were "dead."
3. Digital Democracy Teach-in, an O'Reilly conference immediately preceding the February Emerging Technology Conference. I was on the steering committee and one of the panels. Audio here. I blogged "Gatekeepers No More: The Grassroots Challengs the Journalistic Priesthood" and Joe Trippi's talk.
4. SXSW Interactive. I helped put together the Wireless Future track at SXSW Interactive and organized some other panels; didn't have much time to blog, other than a few notes about the panel on Blogging, Journalism, and Politics, and a debrief published at WorldChanging.com.
5. I made several posts about Fahrenheit 9/11, including this response to Christopher Hitchens' critique.
6. Cory spoke at Microsoft about "Digital Rights Management," which describes a set of technologies created to break other technologies so that various packages of proprietary digital media have limited use. If you want other uses, you have to pay for them. The motion picture and record industries say that they want to protect their intellectual property - i.e. content that they bought from those who created it, artists that they supposedly want to protect but who often get a tiny fraction of the return on their investment of creative energy – often less than they contracted to receive, because the film and music distributors famously make "accounting errors" that often go unchallenged because of the legal expenses involved. Okay, I'm ranting, and Cory's rant is better. I blogged more from Cory this week.
7. Brian Wilson released his great concept album Smile this year, almost 40 years after he made the initial recordings. Why so long? I posted about that here, with a link to a Newsweek article about the release. Here's another item published just before the release date.
8. Mitch Ratcliffe and I put our book Extreme Democracy online when we couldn't get it published before the election. We're hoping to publish a revised version in book form in late spring 2005.
9. The goddam election. "Don't complain, organize!"
10. The Southeast Asian earthquake and tsunami. First short post was the day after Christmas, followed the next day by a pointer to the SEA-EAT site set up to coordinate relief. I posted a lot more at WorldChanging.com, starting with this summary on the 27th, a collaboration with Rohit Gupta and Dina Mehta. A real nightmare; blogging about it made me feel a little less helpless. Just a little.
11. Can I squeeze in a #11? I have to mention the folksonomy, defined in Wikipedia as "a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using simple tags in a flat namespace." The two sites I use that employ this scheme are de.licio.us and flickr. I haven't done as much with de.licio.us, where tags are used to characterize bookmarks, but I'm beginning to see the value of planting bookmarks in a shared space. I'm much more active at flickr, a photo sharing site, where I've uploaded several hundred photos by now. (I had a free three month trial with a pro account, which has gone away, but I plan to upgrade to pro shortly. At the moment 100 of the photos I've uploaded are visible.) Tagging is a great way to categorize photos, though flickr, which is also a social network site, also has photo groups.

Music: not a top ten list, but a few that made an impression in 2004:

• Drive-By Truckers: Dirty South. The Truckers blew me away at the Austin City Limits Festival. Their songs are powerful, intricate, beautiful explosions of southern angst and elation, sometimes reminiscent of The Band (which is the the subject of one song, Danko/Manuel, about the two members of The Band who died of a heart attack and suicide, respectively.
• 
  Gomez: Split the Difference. Gomez was also great at the ACL Festival; this album is kind of a weird hybrid: pop blues?
  
• Wilco: A Ghost is Born. I was more immediately impressed by Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but Ghost grew on my, and after a half dozen plays I'd moved in and got comfortable.
• Loretta Lynn: Van Lear Rose. A great country rock album from Loretta Lynn, produced by Jack White of the White Stripes. Who'da thunk it?
• Jim White: Drill a Hole in that Substrate and Tell Me What You See. I discovered Jim White this year and bought all of his music, including this, his latest CD. I liked his other albums better, but the whole body of work is fascinating. He's a great songwriter and the arrangements are psychedelic.
• Thievery Corporation: Outernational Sound Jazzy world music mixes from Rob Garza and Eric Hilton. This one makes me smile.
• Catherine Braslavsky Ensemble: Chartres - The Path of the Soul. Ancient and Contemporary Sacred Music recorded live at the labyrinth of Chartres cathedral. Simple but powerful and inspiring.