Alex Steffen has a vision for "The America I Wish We'd Been This Week." Many comments follow. [Link]

Imagine, if instead of offering a few million dollars and a press release, the president had flown to Indonesia, and, standing in solidarity with the victims, had announced that the United States government was going to, say, cover one third of the relief and reconstruction costs, a figure of five billion dollars. Imagine further, that the president took the opportunity to reaffirm the US commitment to compassion and global cooperation in pursuit of freedom and prosperity, as, in another context, another president once did.

The USGS site has an RSS feed for earthquakes worldwide. [RSS 2.0 link: Earthquake Activity]

Happy New Year from Marqui, a Weblogsky.com sponsor! Marqui defines its CMS as a "Communication Management System," which suggests something more than content management. Marqui sees their system as the nexus of a communication system that includes and integrated email system, interface with CRM and other existing infrastructure, and calendar-based campaign management tools. Marqui wants you to know about a whitepaper they've prepared that addresses the fundamentals of effective search engine optimization, including the basic steps to help make site content even more "SEO friendly" as well as creating an optimization methodology for CMS. Properly implemented, these tips can dramatically strengthen search engine rankings, and, hopefully, the bottom line.

Cory clarifies that some comments on the Digital Rights Management issues he's been debating include straw-man arguments, so he's made another long post clarifying the debate (setting the straw men ablaze). [Link]

"I noticed last month that Chris A (as befits an ex-Economist writer) is keen to encourage commercial companies to sueeze every last penny of value out of their intellectual property"

This is a straw-man. Neither Chris nor I question Disney, Fox, et al's desire to suck the consumer electronics companies' customers dry with DRM. The argument we're having is over whether it's in the CE companies' best interests to be accomplices to this.

To have a functional market, you need companies and individuals who act in their own best interests. Traditionally, the entertainment companies have wanted fewer devices of less capability in the market -- which is why they strongly opposed the phonogram, radio, jukebox, cable TV, VCR and Internet.

Traditionally, the CE companies have perceived a market opportunity to give their customers more devices and more capable devices, because customers want to get more for less.

This has resulted in a tension that yielded a balance to everyone's benefit. The CE companies built devices that were capable, customers got more freedom, and entertainment companies discovered new opportunities to expand their revenue.

Today, the CE companies are agreeing to participate in secret consortia where a maximum threshold for functionality is being set out by the studios. The CE companies are promised that if they play within the cartel's rules -- i.e., if they don't ship the products their customers want -- then the cartel will sue into oblivion any competitor who enters the market with a more-capable device.

Under "10 Tech Trends," Fortune has a swell longish article, Why There's No Escaping the Blog, which features a great photo of Xeni: What does it all mean!!??

These are still the early days of blogging, and the form is still morphing. Blogs that host music and video are popping up, people are starting to blog text and photos from their phones, and sites like NewsGator, using a technology called RSS, allow people to subscribe to blogs. Plus, an arms race is building behind the scenes. Venture capitalists last year invested a still tiny $33 million into blog-related companies, but that was up from $8 million the year before, according to research firm VentureOne. Blog ad companies, which place ads and pay per response, are enabling bloggers to earn money from their sites. And blogging publishers have emerged. Two of the most prominent, Jason Calacanis and Nick Denton, are going head-to-head with stables of popular blogs (Engadget and Autoblog vs. Gizmodo, Gawker, and Wonkette, among others). More important, some of the most competitive companies in tech are throwing their weight behind blogging.

Great visionary comic artist Will Eisner, who pointed to the evolution of comic book to graphic novel, died yesterday. [Link]

Another year, another "State of the World" interview with Bruce Sterling.

If you've got a choice between two worst-case scenarios: a planet whose atmosphere is wrecked by giant volcanoes, and a planet whose atmosphere was wrecked by Exxon-Mobil, hey, there's no question that first one is vastly preferable. Natural disasters, as opposed to human-inflicted ones, can actually improve our morale.

I mean, look at the warm, snuggly, aren't-we-wonderful reaction to the mayhem that hit the shores of Tamil Nadu, compared to the who-us, no-way, talk-to-my-lawyer reaction that still surrounds Bhopal.

When a giant tidal wave hits Asia, Bush pulls his own dad out of mothballs, but when the Arctic melts from climate change, permafrost forests fall over drunkenly and Eskimo villages slide into the thawing muck, everybody in the Republican Party looks all pie--eyed, quotes the Bible and blames hurricanes on lesbians.

We're doing practically nothing useful about climate change and it's a steadily mounting disaster. I do think the next decades are going to see a whole lot of paramilitary Operations Other Than War in reaction to astonishingly bad weather. So, well, an event like the tsunami gives us the chance to refine our disaster-response chops. They could use the improvement.

In thinking about my involvement in the Marqui blog project, I realized that I should be posting about another company, i.e. my own, Polycot, which is a partnership with Jeff Kramer and Matt Sanders. We formed the company in a series of online meetings throughout the summer of 2001: Jeff was logging in from San Marcos, I was coming from Boulder, and Matt was coming from Rome, Italy. Our entity formation was filed September 12, 2001, not the best time to have started a business, especially one that's Internet-focused.

We were Polycot Consulting, L.L.C., but we've dropped "Consulting" even though that's a component of most of our projects. We've all been involved with the Internet for a decade or more – in my case, since 1990 – and we have complementary backgrounds: Matt writes code, Jeff builds and manages networks, and I have business and project management in my background. Others who work with us: Honoria Starbuck, PhD, is an instructional designer with specialization in usability and accessibility. Honoria holds an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Education and Communication with a specialization in Creativity in International Networks, and she's also an artist and impresaria of the cyberopera Honoria in Ciberspazio. Phil Brader is a business consultant with 30 years of broad business experience ranging from management consulting to executive management in small to large, private and public, corporations in consumer (& industrial) products and services, manufacturing, wholesale, and retail. David Nunez is a brilliant software developer and former Information Technology and Future Media Cluster Director with The Capital Area Training Foundation. David builds robots and creates multimedia art when he's not writing code.

We're primarily custom web developers. We're not designers, though we have designers that work with us (and a couple of us have done some limited web site design). We also do custom web hosting and network support, as well as strategic web consulting and business consulting (with Phil in the lead). We have a core site engine that is often our platform for custom development, but we also do installs and custom modifcations with CivicSpace, Drupal, and other Open Source content management systems. We have extensive knowledge of social software platforms that support various kinds of interactions, including meetings, customer relationships, political and activist endeavors, online publishing, etc.

Polycot's turned out to be a great company and a great experience for all of us. In a future post, I should write about our business philosophy. We focus less on growing the company internally than on building relationships and forming alliances that extend our capabilities. I tend to think that smaller, agile companies that do cooperative work together will be more common in the future than large companies that try (often with significant difficulty) to integrate many internal divisions.

(If you want to know more about Polycot's services, drop me a line at jonl at polycot.com.)

Polycot is based in Austin, Texas.

Bill Gates sez free culture advocates are "some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises." Xeni posts more of Gates' quote, along with Matt Bradley's suggestion that "we need ... a large red flag with a gold copyleft in the upper left, replacing the hammer and sickle." Xeni obliged by creating the flag, above. I have a hunch we'll see a bunch of those. Meanwhile somebody should lend Mr. Gates a clue... money is not the only incentive. And a willingness to share some things freely does not a communist make. We know what a communist is: a guy who looks like Oscar Homolka, drinks too much low-grade vodka, and beats his shoe on a desk when he's pissed. What does that have to do with free culture?

UPDATE: Xeni posts a second "Creative Commies" image by Jaime:

From the press release: "Six Apart, makers of the highly acclaimed Movable Type publishing platform and TypePad personal weblogging service, today announced that it has acquired Danga Interactive, Inc., the operators of the popular service LiveJournal, for an undisclosed amount of stock and cash. With the acquisition, Six Apart solidifies its position as the industry's recognized leader in weblogging software across all markets, and LiveJournal can continue its rapid growth trajectory under Six Apart's umbrella. As of today, the combined user base of both companies exceeds 6.5 million users, with thousands more added daily." [Link]

A powerful, touching piece by Morquendi (Sanjay Senanayake), who's been covering the tsunami at Chiens Sans Frontiers, about his love of the sea... and the sea's betrayal of that love. [Link]

August last year I was chasing Indian trawlers off the coast of Pesalai in Mannar. They were coming in from Rameshwaram and fishing in Sri Lankan waters. The fishermen wanted the story broken. I wanted a big story to break. So there we were, me and my crew, on a motor boat rigged with two engines for double the speed, racing through the seas in the Palk Straight, chasing trawlers with Rameshwaram registration. After a few minutes we couldn’t see land and I was exhilarated. We did catch them. I got my story and the fishermen got the exposure they wanted. But that is another tale. On our way back to shore I asked how deep the sea was. We were about 5 miles from shore. They told me it was about a hundred feet deep. I took off my t-shirt and jumped in right off the moving boat. I dove to see if they were kidding about the depth. At about twenty feet when my ears began to hurt I swam back up. I’ll never forget that. Surrounded by nothing but the sea on all sides. No shore in sight.

Always a disturbing read,: Project Censored's latest "Top 25 Censored Stories".

What's "folksonomy"? Wikipedia has a good definition:

Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using simple tags in a flat namespace. This feature has begun appearing in a variety of social software. At present, the best examples of online folksonomies are social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, a bookmark sharing site, and Flickr, for photo sharing. Gmail's labeling system is somewhat similar to the use of tags, but it is not a folksonomy because users cannot share their categorizations. Folksonomy is related to the concept of faceted classification from library science.

Folksonomies work best when a number of users all describe the same piece of information. For instance, on del.icio.us, many people have bookmarked wikipedia (http://del.icio.us/url/bca8b85b54a7e6c01a1bcfaf15be1df5), each with a different set of words to describe it. Among the various tags used, del.icio.us shows that reference, wiki, and encyclopedia are the most popular.

Any comparison of the advantages of folksonomies vs. other, more rigorous forms of categorization that doesn’t consider the cost to create, maintain, use and enforce the added rigor will miss the actual factors affecting the spread of folksonomies. Where the internet is concerned, betting against ease of use, conceptual simplicity, and maximal user participation, has always been a bad idea.

Technorati, the system that tracks weblogs to show who's linking to what – and who's being linked – just ended its first developers' contest and announced winners, developers judged to have made the most innovative uses of the Technorati API. The big winner was Joshua Tauberer at GovTrack, which tracks bloggers' posts about legislation. (Congratulations, Joshua!)

A train crash released a toxic cloud of chlorine gas that killed nine people in South Carolina [Link] This made me think of Don DeLillo's White Noise, wherein the narrative pivots on a similar accident.

Another word about Marqui, a Weblogsky.com sponsor! Marqui has a blog, too, and the December 31 post talks about the Search Engine Optimization white paper mentioned in my New Year's Day post. I dutifully passed the word on without analyzing the SEO paper, but other Marqui bloggers, especially Robin Good, took time to read, analyze, and write critiques of the paper. Robin said "the white paper is a badly written collection of well-known antiquated principles and techniques that are either out of use, outdated, unsubstantiated or plainly wrong." This negative feedback is a great test of Marqui's resolve to encourage the kind of honest responses that bloggers would normally post, even from blogs the company is sponsoring. As Mitch notes, Marqui has been living up to its promise to take criticism to heart and respond constructively, as they did in their December 31 post.

I asked Bill Leake, whose company LCG (Leads Customers Growth) specializes in SEO, what he thought of Robin's critique. Bill thinks that page titles are probably still relevant, and the anchor text in a link is important, despite Robin's statement to the contrary. He also says "content and links are the most important thing, but it's not all about simply getting good on-page content and links from quality websites. There are many minor tactical devils lurking in the details that become, in aggregate, strategically important when trying to optimize and do well in a competitive space," whereas "some spaces are not at all competitive, and simply good on-page content writing that gets indexed, with no particular SEO expertise behind it, will perform very well indeed in such spaces."

Two linguistics professors at the University of Texas - San Antonio are studying "Texas Twang," the distinctive Texas dialect that makes such an impression on non-Texans. Some find it charming, but there's a negative perception all Texans will recognize – one of the linguists, Jan Tillery, says "I was treated as such a backwards pea-brain because of how I talked that I decided I would just be very upfront and even more pronounced. I'll tell you something--it's a good way to hide an intellect." It took me a while to understand that some, especially in the northeast US, perceive my own West Texas drawl as a clear sign that I'm an illiterate buffoon, whereas I'm actually fairly literate (but a buffoon nonetheless, perhaps.) [Link]

Good piece by Britt: The Tsunami made citizen journalism via blogs even more visible and valuable. Blogs are more persistent, perhaps obsessive, about the stories du jour. The news and the historical record are so much richer as a result. [Link]

Via Cameron Sinclair at Architecture for Humanity:

SPICE

January 27th to February 8th 2004:
Gallery Show at ABC No Rio, New York, New York:

Wednesday, February 9th 2004:
Silent Auction at a gallery to be announced

Step 1. Submit one 5”x7” to SPICE by January 23rd
Step 2. Participate in gallery show and anonymous auction
Step 3. Bid on a work of art and help us rebuild in South East Asia

Jennifer MacFarlane, a NYC based photojournalist, and Architecture for Humanity New York (AFHNY) are organizing a photography show and anonymous silent auction to aid the organizations’ rebuilding work in South East Asia.

We are asking people to please submit one 5”x7” photo under the theme SPICE, whose theme is to celebrate the culture, color, sights and sounds of region. SPICE will run from January 27th to February 7th at the ABC No Rio gallery in downtown NYC with an opening reception on the evening of the 27th.

During the the run of the show all the photos will be displayed without labels and on the wall there will be a list of all those participating. The auction will be held on February 9th 2004 at a gallery to be announced. At the end of the bidding the names of the photographers will be revealed and you could be the proud owner of a snap from a backpacker, someone from the region, an award winning designer or a world-class photographer.

If you are interested in participating please email spice (at) architectureforhumanity (dot) org and we will send you information on submitting your work.

On an email list, somone said my point has been that the blog isn't structured enough. My response:

Blogs and wikis are part of the changed approach to software development that includes free software, open source, and various "open source-ish" projects. With proprietary software sold in shrinkwrap, especially when far fewer people had net access and bandwidth was narrower, you would make software adaptable by making it feature rich, building in everything any potential user might need or want. Now we build adaptable software by making simple pieces that can be adapted through user-imposed structure (think wiki) or and a modular approach (integrated or aggregated). From this perspective, I wouldn't say that blogs aren't structured *enough*... I figure we define blogs formally (where the form includes reverse chronological order, short form, permalinks, feeds, etc.), but we can also integrate other features, or incorporate blogs as modules of systems with more features (a la CivicSpace) in order to adapt.

In my response, I didn't quite complete the thought about the impact of a network environment that makes is so much easier for us to get access to software packages and modules and use various web-based application services to create custom environments that give us the features we need. There is a trend away from all-and-everything software packages. (I wouldn't call this a monolithic trend; I think Microsoft and Intuit and Symantec &ndash with proprietary approaches and at least partial delivery via shrinkwrap distribution – will always be there. However even those companies are tending to deliver patches and modules via the network where it makes sense according to their business plan.)

I'm interested in hearing your comments.

Do bloggers undermine their credibility by posting with an obvious lack of objectivity? Should bloggers aspire to some standard of journalistic objectivity? Those are the kinds of questions Bill Mitchell touches with his post on Questions of Ethics at the blog for Harvard's upcoming conference on Blogging, Journalism, and Credibility. I planned to be a journalist 37 years ago, when I graduated from high school, but took another path... partly because I wanted to write subjective pieces. I muddled about with various kinds of writing - fiction, gonzo (subjective) journalism, essays and op-ed pieces before I started writing for the web. Some of my writing has been absolute crap, meaning I could've used more time with a good editor along the way, but I do think that I can get closer to the truth by revealing my biases. I think the biases are always there; objectivity is a laudable goal but unattainable, in my opinion. If you aspire to be honest, authentic in your approach to blogging, then you'll have credibility, objective or not.

Who'da thunk it? A University of Texas student was part of the world's fourth largest spam operation. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has filed his first lawsuit based on Federal anti-spam legislation; defendant Ryan Pitylak from Austin and his California business partner, Mark Trotter, are accused of sending scam spams, emails with misleading subject, like "Re: your past due bills" or "Urgent: Household Loan Memorandum: Please Read." The actual messages were ads. The defendants had multiple companies. [Link]

The state's case is based on evidence gathered by Dewey Coffman, who runs Net-Sieve Inc., an Austin spam-filtering company. Coffman had been collecting spam in general since 2002 and started saving spam sent from Pitylak's company on a CD in September 2003. At one point, Coffman said he got about 12 to 15 e-mails a day from PayPerAction and Leadplex.

Microsoft Corp. also helped by setting up e-mail accounts to capture spam. From Feb. 18, 2004, until July 4, 2004, the Hotmail accounts received 42,000 e-mails from Pitylak's company, about 24,000 of which were illegal, according to the suit.

Technorati now supports "folksonomy," the practice of categorizing content with tags. David Weinberger has some thoughts about what this means. Look for a taxonomy of the web to emerge from grassroots tagging efforts. [Link]

Zephyr Teachout's zinger about "financially interested blogging" generated a lot of blog over the last few days, and Thursday's clarification didn't resolve ill will generated among those who felt Zephyr's comments were naive or worse. What shook the hive? Mainly this couple of paragraphs:

On Dean’s campaign, we paid Markos and Jerome Armstrong as consultants, largely in order to ensure that they said positive things about Dean. We paid them over twice as much as we paid two staffers of similar backgrounds, and they had several other clients.

While they ended up also providing useful advice, the initial reason for our outreach was explicitly to buy their airtime. To be very clear, they never committed to supporting Dean for the payment -- but it was very clearly, internally, our goal.

Atrios has useful posts about this flap, the latest here and here.

Though I hate to prolong the agony by bringing "zephyrgate" up after everybody and his uncle's brother has blogged the story, but it's enough of a bad deal for the Dean coalition that it bears mentioning. Besides, I want someone to add weblogsky to the list of blogs who've posted about this – which you can find at the page for the Berkman Center Conference on Blogging, Journalism & Credibility. (What's life about, if not ATTENTION!?)

Conservative warblogger John Little (Blogs of War) has created a platform for citizen journalism, Take Back the News. Dan Gillmor posted a pointer; the concept is potentially a good platform for the kind of grassroots journalism he's been talking about. It's looking so far like a good objective repository of news links with comments. Marjolein Hoekstra posted a detailed overview of the site at Robin Good's new media site.

My sponsors at Marqui are sponsoring the Blog for Business Summit in Seattle on Jan. 24 and 25. The conference lineup looks solid, including Marc Canter, Halley Suitt, Glenn Fleishman, Robert Scoble, Stowe Boyd, and Molly Holzschlag. For an idea what assumptions the conference planners are making, here's a description of Robert Scoble's keynote:

Simply put, Blogs are eating the lunch of many traditionally architected sites. In terms of reach, influence, cost and convenience, the advantages are indisputable and significant. For those still building sites the “old” way, this hour will reveal why the future belongs to Bloggers. Robert Scoble, who FastCompany Magazine claims “may well be one of the most powerful people in Redmond” has helped shape Microsoft’s blogging strategy, and has advised Bill Gates on the market opportunities. Robert will reveal why this new architecture rules and how to take full advantage of it.

Meanwhile I just ran onto another site that's powered by Marqui, CanSpeak, a company that provides speakers for various events. The site has a list of speakers, and each speaker has an individual page on the site. Retrieval is zippy, check it out.

Loren Coleman reviews the year's top cryptozoology stories, including the much-blogged discovery of homo floresiensis, which lived on the Indonesian island of Flores as recently as 13,000 years ago. He also mentions the evidence for the existence of the six-foot Bili Ape, Bigfoot/yeti and lake monster news, and several discoveries of new animals (a shark, a tiger, a peccary, birds, and rodents, as well as a new species of macaque monkey. [Link]

Ever think that Google could take the lead in stopping comment spam by figuring out how to ignore links posted within blog comments? Since the purpose of comment spam is to create more links to sites and boost page ranking, ignoring those links would remove the incentive to spam. Yesterday Google announced a program to do just that, by working with blog software makers, who can modify their software so that links within comments get a rel="nofollow" attribute that will tell Google to ignore the links. Meanwhile David Sifry has called for a Web 2.0 Spam Squashing Summit.

Tags: spamsummit

The GOP/Bush propaganda machine has been spewing its latest mantra, this time about the supposed "social security crisis." Laura Tyson in Business Week:

After years of repeated warnings by conservative political thinkers, the word crisis has become the mental frame that shapes the way many Americans think about Social Security's future. But as a recent Brookings Institution book by Peter A. Diamond and Peter R. Orszag demonstrates, Social Security does not confront a crisis; in fact, its solvency for future generations can be ensured through modest benefit reductions and modest revenue increases.

A major lesson of this analysis is that Social Security can be put on a solid financial footing without dramatic change. In contrast, President Bush is using the specter of an impending crisis to justify allowing workers to divert up to 4% of their payroll taxes into private, individually controlled retirement accounts. This would reduce payroll tax revenues available to cover promised Social Security benefits by as much $2 trillion to $4 trillion, transforming an imaginary crisis into a real one. The Bush Administration has recently indicated that it plans to finance these transitional costs of creating private accounts through additional government borrowing. But the amounts involved are as much as an added $100 billion a year in government borrowing for the next decade, rising to $350 billion a year after 20 years. Additional borrowing of this magnitude on top of already large government deficits could spook global investors, triggering sharply higher interest rates on U.S. government debt and a collapsing dollar. But President Bush has been silent about the possibility of such a crisis. He has also been silent about the fact that individual accounts would require paying financial management fees that could amount to more than 25% of Social Security's current 75-year funding gap.

If there is no crisis, why are Bush and company so intent on creating that impression? Marie Cocco in Newsday:

So why does Bush want to create a crisis that doesn't exist and provide a solution that doesn't fix it? Because he is an economic Darwinist. In Bush's view, the financially strong should be helped to prosper. The weak should pay the bill.

This philosophy has guided his mammoth tax cuts. It underpins Bush's answer to Americans without health insurance. He wants them to insure themselves through still more private savings accounts.

This game of roulette would, of course, have winners. They are corporate chieftains and other Bush business allies, the same donors who fund his campaigns. They contribute as much as $250,000 for his upcoming inauguration. A celebratory check in that amount would pay 13 years of Social Security benefits for an average retired couple.

Now these donors pledge a multimillion-dollar advertising blitz to push privatization of Social Security. So buyer, beware.

(This was also posted at Greater Democracy.)

Michael Powell announced he will resign from the FCC this March. A rumor of Powell's impending resignation has been in the air for a while. [Link]

I've been listening to the realtime webcast of the Blogging, Journalism, and Credibility conference at Harvard's Berkman Center on Internet and Society and participating via the chat room. Today's discussion has been great. Brendan Greeley posted about "A Beautiful Moment" this moring. On the side I've also been learning more about podcasting from David Berlind and talking a bit about blog as medium (vs the incorrect impression some have that "blog" is a type of content... it is a medium with many types of content). The conference is well-documented at the site.

Evidently the U.S. government is requiring domestic ISPs to deny service to clients in states deemed to be sponsors of international terrorism – see godaddy's statement on the subject. This means that, if you're a blogger living in Iran, for instance, you can't get service from the U.S. – and you can't get decent service in your own country, either. Does this make sense? I suppose the thought is that some will be terrorists sending coded messages? I don't know how likely that is, but Hoder makes a very good point: "I wonder whether this is what president Bush considers standing with a nation for their freedom. Who else is using these websites other than mostly secular, freedom-loving Iranian youth?"

Smart people like Liz Lawley and Clay Shirky (both blogging at Many2Many) have been talking about "folksonomy" or (as Liz labels the concept) "social tagging," and Clay makes a great point:

But this is where the ‘acceptance’ half comes in. It doesn’t matter whether we “accept” folksonomies, because we’re not going to be given that choice. The mass amateurization of publishing means the mass amateurization of cataloging is a forced move. I think Liz’s examination of the ways that folksonomies are inferior to other cataloging methods is vital, not because we’ll get to choose whether folksonomies spread, but because we might be able to affect how they spread, by identifying ways of improving them as we go.

To put this metaphorically, we are not driving a car, with gas, brakes, reverse and a lot of choice as to route. We are steering a kayak, pushed rapidily and monotonically down a route determined by the enviroment. We have a (very small) degree of control over our course in this particular stretch of river, and that control does not extend to being able to reverse, stop, or even significantly alter the direction w’re moving in.

These paragraphs could just as readily apply to changes in copyright, lossily compressed music, or spam: they are characteristics inherent in the ecology itself. The discussion needs to center around how to exist in their presence, not how to change them.

Thinking about how this all relates to cointelligence , the wisdom of crowds, and extreme democracy. Also smart mobs. A common argument against democracy is about tyranny of the majority or mob rule, but there's some evidence that "mobs" can be more intelligent than their individual members. Perhaps what I'm calling media ecology is a social ecology, and the collective thinking/action that drives it is more intelligent than I often think.

Mark Dery lacerates the pretensions behind "Not One More Damn Dime Day" in brilliant essay on left-elitist slacktivism. This is a wake-up call for me, having committed by usually-nonpartisan self to the support of partisan campaigns hoping to derail the vast right-wing conspiracy, I've been closer than usual to the mechanics and rhetoric of candidate and activist campaigns while trying to sort out the various biases and agendas there, and within the political blogging community as well, where the contests are not just for the hearts and minds of varied constituents, but also for the blogosphere measure of market share: Googlejuice, Technorati "blog authority," etc. Mark's post is a great cynical blast of oxygen...

Not One More Damn Dime won't work, for the obvious reason that it has niche appeal, and niche appeal only. A dated, they've-got-the-guns-but-we've-got-the-numbers attempt to pour sugar in the gas tank of the road-hogging, gas-guzzling SUV of consumer capitalism by refusing to buy a new cruelty-free loofah or foregoing that appointment with the feng shui consultant, NOMDD needs mass support to get off the ground. But mass support implies mass appeal. If you're going to sell a holy war, you need rousing, to-the-ramparts rhetoric, not some flabbyassed assurance that the faithful can "do something by doing nothing." (Although I have to confess, right about now, that NOMDD's Zen koan speaks to my Inner Slackivist). If your shock troops are going to suffer on behalf of your sacred cause, you need to make palatable, even desirable, the world of pain they're about to enter. Appealing to their better angels is fine ("Ask not what your country can do for you..."). Subliminally seducing them by playing on their naked self-interest is even finer. As in: "Rise up, o ye faithful, against the Great Satan and his Zionist puppetmasters to prevent our sacred sands from being defiled by the boots of the infidels! (Did I mention that every martyr who straps on a suicide belt and blows himself to chum gets to spend eternity in the Garden of Unearthly Delights, boinking dark-eyed virgins?)" By contrast, the left (among whose endangered numbers I count myself, I should probably emphasize again) hasn't managed, in recent history, to make either its public persona or its ideas sexy to the masses. Ensuring that you're synonymous, in the public mind, with hair shirt-wearing self-denial and granitic humorlessness (think Kerry, Gore, Dukakis...) is not likely to win the hearts and minds of Middle Americans, most of whom shrink from things like the NOMDD Day because they sound like the political equivalent of the gray, gluten-free, sugar-free, fun-free snack foods drearily gummed by vegans and other humorectomy sufferers. A mass boycott that mandates total self-denial and, by default, sentences the participant to house arrest in order to avoid spending a plugged nickel, let alone a thin dime, is a mass boycott doomed to failure.

Tags: Current Affairs, Politics

Harish Rao of echoditto suggests he wants to see a one size fits all system for progressives that is inexpensive, easy to use, and "does content management, blogging/podcasting, credit card processing/fundraising, bulk email management, event management, metrics & reporting, CRM, and voterfile management (yes, all of these things should be integrated) properly." Of course, CivicSpace has already been moving in that direction, and Polycot has been doing some CivicSpace installs for some clients where our usual custom development approach might be overkill. However I have a different perspective from Harish. I posted this comment:

I'm with Jason Lefkowitz on this. We've had several conversations over the last two years with potential resellers who wanted Polycot to build a one size fits all solution, however this is one of the very things we dislike about the proprietary/shrinkwrap approach to software: in trying to market systems that meet the demands of many potential users, they create bloat and incorporate additional complexity, and there are inevitably pieces of their systems that are below par.

What's great about working with Open Source tools is that you can find and integrate best of breed solutions - and rather than paying a huge sum to Microsoft for some suite of bloatware, a nonprofit or small company can pay a developer/integrator to build a custom system that includes the best applications to meet whatever requirements were defined - and the system can be focused on the specific needs of the organization.

Monday is Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day!

Bubble Wrap® brand cushioning starts as polyethylene (plastic) resin, in the form of beads about the size of pea gravel. The beads go into an extruder - a long cylinder with a screw inside that runs its entire length. As the screw is turned, heat builds up and the resin melts into a liquid that is squeezed out of the cylinder into two stacked sheets of clear plastic film. One layer of the film is wrapped around a drum with holes punched in it, and suction is applied drawing one web of film into the holes that form the bubbles. The second layer of film is then laminated over the first so that when the two films are joined, they stick together and trap the air in the bubbles.

This may sound easy, but polyethylene is a porous material like a sponge. Air can easily leak out through the pores, which tends to limit the cushioning ability of the packaging. Realizing this, Sealed Air started using a Saran coating to seal the air in the bubbles. Eventually, a method of encapsulating an air retention barrier in the polyethylene during the extrusion process was developed. This process is a trade secret of Sealed Air Corporation.

Weblogsky sponsor Marqui was also a cosponsor of this week's Blog Business Summit in Seattle, and the Marqui folks were liveblogging the conference. Some highlights:

In Robert Scoble's keynote, he says that "blogs are useful because they reveal – and enable &nash; 'passion concentrations.'"

Regardless of whether someone agrees or disagrees with the opinion of a blogger, if the topic is something readers are passionate about, they will migrate to and participate in that blog.

Robert says this is why so many journalists are keen on blogging; it gives them insight into what topics and trends seem to be most interesting to readers. Similarly, businesses can use blogging as a window into what customers are saying. No surprise there, but he went on to say that this type of "window" is now being used by some to predict how well a product will fare in the market based on feedback in the first 24 hours. For these same reasons, blogs can now dramatically amplify a product's failure or unprecedented success…a la the Halo 2 phenomenon.

Janet posted more notes on Scoble's keynote yesterday:

The brave new world of blogs:

Opportunities: They'll come to you because of your passion and authority in this new world.

Ethics: The blogosphere will 'clean itself out' from lies or mis-representations quickly - usually, within hours. (Remember the Swift Boat Veterans hubbub?) Don't lie in a blog, there are smarter people in the audience than you are.

Momentum: Evangelize your product or service through 'connectors.' If there's a target blogger you'd like to reach in your area of influence, talk to the 5-10 bloggers around your target. They'll blog about it, and your target will notice. (It only takes five people talking about a subject to capture Scoble's attention.)

Fear: The fear of blogging and being exposed? (Or there's a worse fear - what if I blog and no one notices?) Blog. Then blog some more. Keep at it. Keep linking out, and people will pick up on your efforts.

And while we're at it, what if conflicts erupt? (I'm remembering being called "pond scum.") According to Scoble, humans love a good story. Go ahead and be provocative - conflicts between opposing viewpoints engage readers.

On day two of the summit there was a discussion of guidelines and recommendations for employees who are blogging for their organizations.

My compatriot Mitch Ratcliffe also posted about Scoble's talk, and Marc Canter/Chris Pirillo.

Ed Cone compares traditional journalism in the age of the Internet to a building, in C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia, "that is bigger inside than it is outside."

"Whenever I think I've mapped its new contours," Ed says, "somebody shows me another wing."

Ed's talking about the recent Blogging, Journalism, and Credibility conference at Harvard, where journalists and bloggers were jamming about the relationship of the two approaches to publishing, and the evolution of the weblog as a citizen journalism. Reputation and credibility are key issues for journalists and bloggers both, and organizations are emerging (e.g. Center for Online Investigative Research) that hope to explore the relationship between bloggers and professional journalists and the issues of ethics and credibility they have in common, especially as journalists begin more and more to incorporate intelligence from within the blogosphere. As Ed says,

This idea that there is more knowledge outside the newsroom than in it, that as writer Dan Gillmor puts it, "my readers know more than I do," is of course the point of bothering to report stories in the first place. What's new is the ability of individuals to publish their own words, as well as audio and video, cheaply and easily on the Web. Experts and eyewitnesses are no longer consigned to audience status. They don't have to wait to be interviewed by professionals but can push information out at their own discretion.

What media organizations, including the News & Record, are trying to figure out is how to add value to this flood of personal publishing without being drowned by it. Even as the new media enhances the old, it has some very disruptive possibilities. While Rick Kaplan, president of MSNBC, said at the conference that Web logs actually increase the ratings of his programs, online services such as Craig's List and Monster are already eating away at the ad revenue that pays for things like that Times bureau in Baghdad. Meanwhile the new media players are trying to figure out revenue models of their own.