Thomas Butler, a physician and scientist at Texas Tech University, couldn't locate 30 vials of plague specimens. He reported this to the safety officer at Texas Tech, who called in the FBI.

According to reliable sources, Butler was questioned by FBI agents without legal counsel which he waived, because he felt he had nothing to hide, he had worked with the military and federal agencies for years on this and other projects, and he genuinely wanted to help the FBI allay public fears. Testimony at the trial indicates that, after many hours of interrogation without sleep, and with the assurance that such interrogation would prevent any legal action, he signed a statement to the effect that the vials may have been autoclaved. He was then put in handcuffs and jailed, having been accused of lying to the FBI (a charge for which he was later acquitted). Jonathan Turley, an attorney for Butler and a professor at George Washington University School of Law, noted that "this made no sense. He would never have created a controversy to conceal the accidental destruction of vials". After being incarcerated for 6 nights in county jail without bail, Butler was allowed to post bail of US$100 000 (which was later increased to $250 000) but remained under house arrest, with electronic monitoring. He was not to contact colleagues who were on a witness list, and he had no access to his computer or e-mail for many months, despite having worked as Chief of the Infectious Diseases Department at Texas Tech University and having lived in Lubbock for 16 years, where he and his wife were raising 4 children and enjoying much respect in the community.

Butler was offered a plea bargain which involved pleading guilty to lying and spending 6 months in jail but declined and chose to risk trial by jury to clear his name. Although the original concerns of bioterrorism were not supportable, multiple additional charges largely unrelated to the disappearance of the vials containing _Y. pestis_ were filed (i.e., "piled on"), including illegal transportation of plague bacteria, tax evasion, embezzlement, and fraud, for a total of some 69 charges carrying a maximum sentence of 469 years in prison and US$17 million in fines. Many of the charges had to do with contract disputes Butler had with his university (which are normally handled through civil, not criminal, proceedings) and were unrelated to the original charges associated with the disappearance of the vials. During the trial, prosecutors described Dr. Butler as an "evil genius" and compared him to "a cocaine dealer smuggling illegal drugs," and they emphasized the accusations of lying to the FBI and endangering the public and made repeated references to terrorism, actions many felt were designed to create an atmosphere of fear in the conservative West Texas courtroom.

Remember, this was a respected research physician with an unblemished career and a history of responsible behavior. The story goes on to explain how most charges were dropped, but Butler was ultimately sentenced to two years in prison and required to pay $38,000 to Texas Tech University - this was questionable and it appears the judge might have suspended his sentence but was concerned that a suspension would result in an automatic federal appeal for an even longer sentence.

Can we help Butler's situation? All concerned individuals can help Dr. Butler and discourage misuse of current laws designed to defend us against terrorism by writing to members of Congress, to the Department of Justice, or to the newly confirmed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Dr. Butler's appeal is currently pending in the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.. He has exhausted his personal savings and retirement funds. If you wish to assist his defense by providing expenses for his appeal, donations to the Thomas Butler Legal Defense Fund may be sent to Daniel C. Schwartz, c/o Bryan Cave LLP, 700 Thirteenth St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20005.

Meanwhile, we should wonder what will happen the next time a scientist discovers that potentially dangerous materials are missing. What would you do? [Link]

Susan Crawford has a friend who's a string player in a conductorless orchestra. [Link]

The idea of a conductorless orchestra is effortlessly cyberian. Beautiful music, made without anyone in charge! Through listening and reacting, through feedback and awareness, the net becomes intelligent and produces order for free. No one has to direct its growth.

But listen to my conversational companion from last night: "There are these people that just love to hear the sound of their own voices. They can't even explain what it is they want. They say, 'More like THIS,' and bend an elbow or something, and no one knows what the heck that means. The people I respect never say anything. No one shuts anyone else up. It's just awful."

I've been trying to find time all week to post about "Group Relationship Management," a label I came up with earlier this week in conversation with Allen Gunn of Aspiration Tech. I just sent an email to a list that puts the term in context... here's most of that text:

Mitch Ratcliffe and I gathered a set of papers at that captured some of the thinking around the time of the presidential primaries and election, and the conversations (about effective use of technology to build networks for civic engagement and organizing) and related development are ongoing. Some of us are focused on the goal of building networks (as opposed to organizations) that actually get stuff done through coalition building, with all the advantages (and disadvantages - obviously there's no utopia in this) of decentralized, distributed work.

CNet just published "Five reasons social networking doesn't work", and I found myself shaking my head as I read it. (My pal Bijoy Goswami sent me the link, and I composed a response that took so long to write, I inevitably want to blog it...)

Starting with the title: we all know that social networking "works," but she's not talking about social networking. She's talking about technologies built to facilitate social networking, what we sometimes call "artificial social networks." And she's not really saying that they don't "work" so much as saying they don't seem to have a viable business model, that they're not profitable... though all she's really said is that Friendster seems to be in trouble. She never mentions Ryze or Tribe.net, both of which seem to be hanging in there pretty well.

As for her five "horsemen":

1) Nothing to do. I've always said that SNs make more sense if there's a targeted purpose, that the technology for identifying connections and relationships will find its way into a mix of tools to support business or organizational goals, rather than existing as an end in itself. That said, some of the SN sites do offer some set of community tools that some people are finding useful. There's a LOT of activity on Tribe, and there seems to be a lot on Orkut, too. And I'm constantly getting LinkedIn requests to help people connect, so it seems to be active and valuable to many of its users.

2) It takes too much time. I don't really get that one - it's not like you have to do anything on the sites, or use all the tools and functionalities they offer. The one SN site that takes a lot of my time is Flickr, but I love every minute of it, and I have friends who are active there though they never got into the other SNs. (This is an instance of the "targeted purpose" thing - showing and sharing photos).

3) Traffic alone isn't enough. Okay, but we knew that. Maybe Friendster thought traffic was going to be enough, but I think other sites are aware that's not the case. Ryze, for instance, has always offered premium services at $9.95 a month. I think Google gained quite a bit of intelligence from Orkut; I always assumed they were using it for load testing, and possibly to try out a few concepts.

4) Strangers suck. I always thought the point was to find your friends, and then possibly meet new friends through those connections. I think the real argument here is that the author didn't find value in networking tools she was using at some site (she doesn't really say which, though evidently most of her experience was at Orkut). But she seems to be speaking pretty subjectively... other people do use the tools, and they're finding more to do than "read profiles over and over." She also says " social networking sites pretty quickly and inevitably degenerate into cliques," - she doesn't cite evidence to support the contention, but I'm sure it's true, though I have an issue with the way she's framed it. Why doesn't she say "social networking sites pretty quickly and inevitably lead to group-forming behavior." That sounds less degenerate, no?

5) We already have the Internet. True enough, but the Internet has always been a network of networks, and the artificial social networks are just another way to leverage network structure and network thinking. It's a pervasive model, no? If you read some of the recent thinking on scale-free networks and complex systems, you find that networks are everywhere, it's inherent structure, in cells and molecules. We begin to consider that top-down social hierarchies may be anomalous, social networks were there first, we called them tribes.

Jon Hicks has discovered a comic strip "Story of the Sex Pistols" from 1984, and posted it as a photoset on flickr.

The avian flu virus has been mutating and spreading, and could result in a global pandemic. [Link]

The danger of a global flu pandemic that could be as bad as or worse than the "Spanish influenza'outbreak of 1918-19 (which killed 40 to 50 million people, half of them young, healthy adults) comes from the fact that a strain of influenza virus that normally affects only birds can swap genes with a strain that is highly infectious between human beings. If people with the human type of influenza should also be infected with the avian type (through direct contact with infected poultry), the gene swap can easily occur -- and direct human-to-human transmission becomes possible. At that point, given current patterns of international travel, the world might be only weeks away from a global pandemic.

At WorldChanging.com, Dawn Danby posts an overview of the Subtle Technologies conference she just attended... "a great interdisciplinary conference that overcomes the tyranny of specialization and gets the art and science communities talking."

Yesterday I saw a truck with a "Support our troops" ribbon and a list of soldiers – evidently a list of the driver's family members who're in the military and probably in Iraq.

Later Marsha and I were discussing how nobody seems to be thinking about the war, and I mentioned this truck as an exception – certainly people who have family members in Iraq are very aware of the war, however they might feel about it. I was saying how the best way to support our troops would be to bring them home... if you want to know why I feel that way, read this. Marsha suggested a different kind of bumpersticker, and I created it at CafePress:

Big Bucky is a flower, called a Titan Arum (also called the "corpse flower" in its native Sumatra, because of its stench) that lives in a greenhouse at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. When it blooms, it releases a roadkill scent.

Botanists call the titan arum the "world's largest flower," but it really is an inflorescence, or collection of thousands of flowers. The titan arum are supposed to be rare and hard to cultivate, although researchers at UW-Madison have had four blooms on such flowers in the last five years.

The flowers bloom only about three or four times in their 40-year lives, when they slowly unfurl their green and purple spathe and release the stench, botanists say. This is the second bloom for 12-year-old Big Bucky.

The stench often is compared to road kill or rotting meat, and some visitors bring gas masks for protection. Fayyaz describes it as smelling "like a dead deer by the road that has been there for a few days" but says it's sweet to the beetles and flies that it attracts for pollination.

What could be better than an Erik Davis book that explores the roots in mysticism of Led Zeppelin's songs? A Mark Dery interview with Erik, is what!

I believe the interpretive imagination is "open," and that a responsibility to one's creative daemon, and to questions of ultimate meaning, is as fundamental as a responsibility to history or the disenchanting function of the intellect. This interest in imaginative overreading underlies my abiding fascination with religious revelation, the occult, and "visionary culture" of all stripes. In my view, the occult is peculiar in that it is almost designed to elicit creative overinterpretation—it encourages the reader to start connecting x and y, planets and roses, and drawing links between different texts until an immense quasi-conspiracy of signification arises. This process, once unleashed, takes on a life of its own, and takes one on a journey from which you never altogether return. Because the occult is designed for this sort of hermeneutics, one no longer needs to speak about the intentionality or ultimate value of individual texts. Random information—want ads, comic books, stray conversations—can be transformed into grand cosmologies through the occult imagination, a process that ultimately leads to psychosis but underlies scores of great fictions as well. I don't believe Plant and Page consciously put a lot of the stuff in that I describe, but I believe the creative imagination did. In other words, I allow the creative imagination a sort of agency because that's the ticket to get into the door, an animism of consciousness. So I'd like to think my mythopoetic reading of a goofy rock record is both legitimate and perverse, and sustained—like the performance of magic—only by its own ability, or not, to amuse, instruct, bewitch. I am drawn to a sort of "sacred irony": irony not as a simple dodge, but as a deeper turn of the screw.

The machine on the right is a robot that was built with "self-replicating rapid prototyper" or "RepRap" technology. It's a universal constructor, "a machine that can replicate itself and - in addition - make other industrial products. Such a machine would have a number of interesting characteristics, such as being subject to Darwinian evolution, increasing in number exponentially, and being extremely low-cost." According to an article at CNN.com, the machine can be relatively inexpensive and, according to its creator, Dr. Adrian Bowyer, "is the first technology that we can have that can simultaneously make people more wealthy while reducing the need for industrial production."

Doc Searls has parked an interesting set of questions about a proposed Identity Metasystem in his IT garage. This concept's being driven by Microsoft, specifically Kim Alexander, Microsoft's Identity and Access Architect, who's in a position to realize and think about the issues of identity online that are cropping up and haven't been addressed very well in a standard way across the Internet. As Kim's Laws of Identity white paper says, "The Internet was built without a way to know who and what you are connecting to." Without a native identity layer, we're seeing the emergence of a patchwork of "identity one-offs"...

As use of the Web increases, so does users' exposure to these workarounds. Though no one is to blame, the result is pernicious. Hundreds of millions of people have been trained to accept anything any site wants to throw at them as being the "normal way" to conduct business online. They have been taught to type their names, secret passwords, and personal identifying information into almost any input form that appears on their screen.

There is no consistent and comprehensible framework allowing them to evaluate the authenticity of the sites they visit, and they don't have a reliable way of knowing when they are disclosing private information to illegitimate parties. At the same time they lack a framework for controlling or even remembering the many different aspects of their digital existence.

Recent birthday boy and Weblogsky pal Steven Johnson's appearing on tonight's Daily Show with Jon Stewart, no doubt discussing his new book Everything Bad is Good for You: HOw Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter. Steven also wrote one of the best pieces in Extreme Democracy, "Two Ways to Emerge, and How to Tell the Difference Between Them" (Link to pdf), one of the best analyses of the rise and fall of the Howard Dean Presidential Campaign. Break a leg, Steven! [Link]

Jonathan Schwartz' latest post includes an SEC Safe Harbor provision, about which he says

I'm required to include the following disclaimer and safe harbor provisions (which do, in fact, exceed the blog in length) as a part of this communication. I was going to be frustrated at the requirement, until it occurred to me we'd just set a bit of corporate communications history - blogs are now an official communications vehicle at Sun. We should tell the SEC to update the regs.

The New York Times says "...a White House official who once led the oil industry's fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents." This is news? [Link]

Polycot's Maida Barbour at our new HQ

Polycot was subleasing from Enspire Learning, where we had a terrific relationship and a very positive kind of problem: both companies were growing so fast, the three-story building on Guadalupe was about to explode! Fortunately my partners and I found another great space just a block away, at 503 W. 17th, behind Mars Restaurant. While Matt and I were presenting a proposal in San Diego yesterday, the other Polycots were moving into the new digs, where we plan to stay for a while. We're near Atomic City and the Dog and Duck Pub, so we should be okay.

Iranian blogger Hossein (Hoder) Derakhshan is going home to Iran for a visit. He's understandably concerned about the risk of going back, since he's been openly critical of the Iran's rulers, who had who arrested journalist Sina Motallebi and held him for 23 days, partly because of his blog. Motallebi attributes his release to attention from bloggers and j ournalists:

They didn't expect the pressure from Webloggers and foreign media in my case. They think I'm an individual [freelance] journalist and not affiliated with any political party, I'm not an insider. So they think that when they arrested me, there wouldn't be strong pressure to release me.

But the community of bloggers came together and helped me, and spread the news around the Web, and became united. There was a petition with more than 4,000 signatures on one site. And there was coverage of the story in the foreign media. And there was pressure from other countries that were concerned with human rights. I think they found the cost of arresting me more than they thought before.

Hoder's done even more than Motallebi to push for free speech and more in Iran, so his trip clearly has risks, though there's also hope that he "will come back and tell the world how vibrant, alive and amazing Iran is these days, and how the world can help Iran move toward a more transparent and democratic system." He's asking bloggers and others to support his effort – first, by making contributions toward the cost of the trip; second, by providing support if he "gets into trouble." He has a list telling us what we can do in that case – spread the word, get the media involved, etc. And "Don't be surprised: Under duress, I may confess that I've been on the Bush Administration's payroll to undermine the regime by helping to spread use of weblogs; I've tried to weaken moral values of young Iranians by promoting western culture and values; I've been part of a secret network of Israeli and American spies; I've distributed large amounts of money to Iranian dissidents, activists, bloggers and journalists inside in Iran so they can topple the regime. Nor should you be amazed to hear me say that I've been running a virtual brothel in Tehran from my apartment in Toronto; I've been trafficking heroin and cocaine to Iran; and I've been secretly dating Natalie Portman and Kyra Knightly and have even an illegitimate child with Rachel Weisz." [Link]

A bit of surfing: I followed Pesco's link to Erik Davis' piece about Druid Heights, which includes a link to Steve Speer's Greetings from the S.S. Vallejo, a piece about the Vallejo's renovation. At the Vallejo site I saw a link under "stories" to Alicia Bay Laurel, author of Living on Earth, a book Marsha and I had around the house for years after we joined forces in '73. Curious, I followed that link, and found a piece that mentions the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur. This brought back memories... I spent the summer of '72 in California and visited Big Sur with friends – we were on our way to Yosemite from Los Angeles. On that trip I had been reading Miller's Big Sur and the Oranges of Heironymus Bosch, a great little slice of Henry Miller's life. In fact all of his works were slices of his life in various shapes and sizes. I recall Big Sur as one of the Miller books that suggested a choice between making art, and making your life a work of art. At the time, having been told so many times by various mentors that I had writing talent, I thought I would be a kind of artist, a writer and poet. Miller made me wonder about that, and over the next year, around the time I was married, I sat for hours trying to write as an end in itself, and convinced myself that I didn't have a story worth telling (which is bogus – everybody has a story worth telling, you just have to believe that's the case).

Now I write what I want to when I want to – i.e. I blog – and I have plenty to talk about, but I don't practice writing as a craft the way I did then. This odd bit of surfing, though, has taken me back to a fountain where I can drink again and renew some of the old urges. Reading Henry Miller again can do that, and thinking about Big Sur, and finding the art in my still-robust life.

Okay, Microsoft didn't really ban democracy and freedom – the Chinese version of MSN Spaces banned the words "democracy" and "freedom." [Link]

MSN this year became the first big international internet service to win a licence to offer value-added telecoms services in China, a coup that was possible in part because of its decision to team up in a joint venture with Shanghai Alliance Investment (Sail). Sail is an investment arm of the Shanghai city government. Microsoft has also been careful to ensure that news and other content offered through the Chinese MSN portal are provided by local partners who can work within the informal and shifting boundaries set by China's unseen army of internet censors.

The MSN Spaces service, however, is directly operated by the joint venture, Shanghai MSN Network Communications Technology, in which Microsoft holds a 50 per cent stake.

MSN on Friday declined to comment directly on the ban on sensitive words, but its China joint venture said users of MSN Spaces were required to accept the service's code of conduct. "MSN abides by the laws and regulations of each country in which it operates," the joint venture said. The MSN Spaces code of conduct forbids the posting of content that "violates any local and national laws".

John Markoff's new book, What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer, is a great history of the genesis and evolution of personal computer technology, the roots of which are in the psychedelic era, the Free Speech Movement, and Doug Engelbart's cyborganic vision of computers that would enhance or augment human capabilities. Markoff is discussing the book in a conversation on the WELL.

On the specific question posed by Matisse - my interests are sociological rather than psychological. That said there are some minor parallels to Kerry Mullis (who conceived of PCR while he was in an "acid fugue state" driving up to Mendocino). Two examples, one minor, one not. Tim Mott had smoked dope before he thought of the double-click UI concept. Dan Ingalls, who invented bit-blt, which is the key idea underlying the modern GUI, would only say generally that he would get in the mood for programming while smoking dope.

On the other hand, two well known techies who were instrumental at PARC were hiking/tripping in Foothills Park behind Stanford one day when one of them realized that he had come upon the solution to the natural language understanding problem. They sat down in the grass to discuss the issue and the other one noticed some purple snakes crawling around them. Thus distracted, the natural language solution was lost... 8) (this story wasn't in the book)

From Slate: would a genius like Mozart fail to thrive in today's hostile market? [Link]

There is no question that Mozart's youthful creativity was an amazing feat—a feat spurred on in part by his receptive cultural surroundings and, as Solomon points out, by his own avid receptivity to influence. But the wonder, certainly to a modern sensibility, is also that young Mozart thrived despite an early bombardment of demands and deadlines that sound as though they could well have waylaid, or worn out, a lesser genius. Being too plugged in to dominant cultural forces, of course, is a problem that contemporary classical music prodigies can only dream about having, as The New Yorker's astute music critic Alex Ross noted in a wistful blog entry not long after Jay Greenberg (who calls himself Bluejay) enjoyed a rare taste of the pop spotlight on 60 Minutes last fall. Cautioning that "the social and cultural pressures for a modern American classical prodigy are so unlike those faced by Mozart that no comparison is possible," Ross ventured a grim verdict anyway: "Then the market demanded such a talent; now, the market is hostile."

But perhaps it's worth considering whether there might be an upside to the pessimistic portrait of prodigies marginalized in a crass culture. It's true enough that a reward-filled market can be a great goad to achievement. But public demand and the clamor of competition can also be a distraction, eroding the near obsessive concentration that prodigious achievement of any kind seems to require. Creative isolation and independence are the truly rare commodities in our era of instant communication and information overload, and it may be that there's no need to pity boys like Bluejay, cut off from their "emo-listening, hip-hop-dancing, ironically 'American Idol'-analyzing classmates," as Ross put it in a New Yorker column. On the contrary, what is crucial is to find distance from an e-world of indiscriminate input. You might say young classical prodigies are liberated to listen to the voices of past musical heroes in their own heads. Meanwhile, Greenberg has harnessed the information age for his purposes: With a computer, he's his own transcriber, master not just of melodies but of the means of production.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has assembled a set of resources on the legal rights of bloggers.

Like all journalists and publishers, bloggers sometimes publish information that other people don't want published. You might, for example, publish something that someone considers defamatory, republish an AP news story that's under copyright, or write a lengthy piece detailing the alleged crimes of a candidate for public office.

The difference between you and the reporter at your local newspaper is that in many cases, you may not have the benefit of training or resources to help you determine whether what you're doing is legal. And on top of that, sometimes knowing the law doesn't help - in many cases it was written for traditional journalists, and the courts haven't yet decided how it applies to bloggers.

But here's the important part: None of this should stop you from blogging. Freedom of speech is the foundation of a functioning democracy, and Internet bullies shouldn't use the law to stifle legitimate free expression. That's why EFF created this guide, compiling a number of FAQs designed to help you understand your rights and, if necessary, defend your freedom.

Photo by Doc of Robert Scoble, from a presentation at reboot7. Okay, conferences are fun, and it's great to spread the word, but do conference nomads get anything else done? (I admit it, I envy those guys.)

In 1997 I wrote about a "nodal politics", a network-based alternative to the centralized, top-down efforts that have traditionally used members or supporters as sources of contribution and political power-through-numbers without empowering them to do actual political work. The Internet, a network of networks, seemed to present a model for organizing could be decentralized and, as Jillaine Smith, Marty Kearns, and Allison Fine noted recently, could push power to the edges. I had envisioned a network of groups and individuals that would share information and form ad hoc coalitions, but vision is one thing – making it work is another.

Recently my friends at CivicSpace Labs were talking about needing an API for groups, and I was thinking we need to define and understand social as well as technical group interfaces in the context of an evolving network society. There are projects focused on individual identity (Identity Commons, Identity Metasystem) and constituent relationship management (or relationship of the group to the individual, e.g. CiviCRM), but I'd looking for work on the relationship of groups to other groups as well as to individuals.

While taking a walk yesterday I sorted out some initial thoughts about a concept of Group Relationship Management. Some basic first thoughts:

Assumptions about individual and group networks:

• Individuals and groups are nodes in a network.
• Individuals connect to one or more individuals, and one or more groups.
• Groups connect to one or more individuals, and one or more groups.
• Groups include one or more individuals, formally or informally organized. (Organization is a primary defining characteristic of "group" in this context.)
• Individuals that connect to many individuals are hubs in a network of individuals..
• Groups that connect to many groups are hubs in a network of groups. (I don't think the group/individual relationship, i.e. how many individuals are in a group, is relevant in this context, though an individual group member may be the source of the connection to another group).

The problems we most want to solve:

• Discovery: how do groups and individuals find other groups and individuals that share affinity and are potential partners in ad hoc or sustained coalitions.
• How do groups share data about individuals, and how is data sharing constrained by privacy issues?

Drenched with sweat from the overbearing Texas heat, I just wandered away from DemocracyFest here in Austin, and drove home blasting the AC and sorting out my impressions after a day among an especially partisan group of citizens who are more than a little pissed off at the corporate political machine, and I don't just mean the Republican Party. They're Democrats, but they're populist Democrats, and they're not going to be pushed around by Democratic bosses or Republicans or anybody else who would abstract and commoditize them as mere sources of funds and votes.

The partisan thing makes me uncomfortable somehow, so I often keep it at arm's length. I didn't go to candidate Meetups, preferring to spend my time focusing on communities of progressive activist developers. I should do more of this, though... I was fired up by some of the speeches I heard (e.g. David Van Os and Richard Morrison at a Van Os rally) and I saw a couple of great an inspiring panels, one on the Civic Action Network concept of small group activism, and the other on Religion, Democracy and the Common Good.

Civic Action uses the concept Small Groups – Big Victories. It's about using small, personal groups to do targeted work toward a specific political goal, a strategy that worked well for the right wing, which "was built on small, church-based structures."

Outside of the U.S., we looked at a series of non-violent democratic revolutions - from Poland in the 1980's to Ukraine in 2004 - and realized that they often relied on small "cells" acting independently but toward shared goals. Likewise, during the last election, we witnessed first hand the power Meetup-based organizing to build small, local groups of progressives across the country. Inspired by these examples, we decided that a formal structure for small group organizing could be a useful tool for progressive activists.

During the Internet boom I worked for Whole Foods Market as in internal evangelist for Internet technology and, later, as part of its ecommerce experiment. I enjoyed working with John Mackey, whose business philosophy always felt pretty right to me and influenced my own thinking about "power to the edges" in a business context. I've never seen as clear an articulation of John's thinking as I found in his interview at Sunni's Salon, a site dedicated to "individualistic, pro-freedom culture."

Free-market economists have done a major disservice to capitalism and to business by making profit maximization the supposed primary goal of business. The terrible reputation of business in the world today is a direct result of the belief that business has no other purpose besides maximizing profits. The average person believes that business should care about its customers, employees, society, suppliers, the environment -- as well as its investors. The fact that business philosophers and economists articulate a philosophy that business should only care about maximizing profits and shareholder value (and has no other compelling ethical responsibilities to any of the other stakeholders) has done incalculable harm to the reputation of business. The "brand of business" in the widest sense is pretty terrible throughout the world. Read David Korten's book When Corporations Rule the World to get a good perspective on how many intellectuals see corporations and big business today -- a threat to the well-being of the entire world. The anti-globalization movement is actually an anti-corporation movement and it is a direct result, in my opinion, of the faulty logic of the shareholder value maximization model. You and I know that business and capitalism are helping increase prosperity throughout the world. Too bad the economists have done such a poor job of intellectually justifying the intrinsic ethical nature of business and the capitalist system. Both business and capitalism have terrible reputations as a result. Socialism, communism, and anti-globalization are all reactions to this philosophy. I sometimes wonder whether any of these horrible philosophies would have had much of a following except for the intellectual failures of our economists to properly understand the real purpose of business.

Second, there is a fundamental paradox that I call the "paradox of shareholder value". The best way to maximize shareholder value is to not make maximizing shareholder value the primary purpose of the business. Why not? Because it is the business that satisfies customers best that has the most customers, the highest sales, and the most profits. The best way to satisfy customers best is to organize the entire business around satisfying the customer. Every communication the business makes towards its customers, its employees, and the media should be about putting the customer first. Ultimately the best way to satisfy customers' needs best is to actually put those needs first. If profit is the articulated primary goal of the business then it is unlikely that the employees or management of the business will dedicate themselves to customer satisfaction to the same degree they would if customer happiness was seen as more important than investor profits. In the first case customer happiness is merely a means to an end -- maximizing profits. In the customer-centered business, however, customer happiness is an end in itself and because it is it will be pursued with greater interest, passion, attention and empathy than the profit centered business is capable of.

In my Demfest post, I said The partisan thing makes me uncomfortable somehow, so I often keep it at arm's length. I was thinking about that at the "Bloggers' Breakfast" this morning, where I realized why strong partisanship bothers me. There's an echo chamber effect, and I could see it clearly among the bloggers at DemFest, most of whom are clearly reading each other and generally agreeing, but they're not reading and thinking outside their sphere. I don't want to seem to critical of this - as Joi Ito said, "Many people blame the failures of the Dean campaign to this "echo chamber" and point to this "echo chamber" as a problem that is prevalent on blogs. I do see the risks, but I don't think criticizing the existence of communities or friendships is the solution. I think that communities and friendship are the foundations of trust and love and I do not agree that an aggregate of facts and single voices are the solution to finding the "ultimate truth" in writing." He suggests that "the goal is to bridge many communities and try to expand one's notion of community the largest possible size," and "one way to increase the size of the community one identifies with is to participate in multiple communities or to include members from other communities."

David Weinberger also addressed the question of echo chambers, concluding that "the Internet as a whole presents the broadest range of opinion, belief, feeling and creativity in the history of civilization. If you are not on the Net, you are limited to a diminishing selection of outlets expressing a diminishing range of views. Stories are picked up and replayed. Master narratives determine, with the rigidity of a machine for extruding plastic, the basic way of presenting those ideas."

No, if you want to see a real echo chamber, open up your daily newspaper or turn on your TV. There you'll find a narrow, self-reinforcing set of views. The fact that these media explicitly present themselves as a forum for objective truth, open to all ideas, makes them far more pernicious than some site designed to let people examine the 8,000 ways Hillary is a bitch or to let fans rage about how much better Spike was on "Buffy" than he'll ever be on "Angel." And if you want to see the apotheosis of the echo chamber -- the echo echoing itself so perfectly that it comes perilously close to achieving the 60-cycle om of the empty mind -- consider a president who, rather than read the newspaper, is happy to have his aides pick and choose what headlines he learns more about, because he believes them to be "objective."

We are at a dangerous time in the Internet's history. There are forces that want to turn it into a place where ideas, images and thoughts can be as carefully screened as callers to a radio talk show. The "echo chamber" meme is not only ill-formed, but it also plays into the hands of those who are ready to misconstrue the Net in order to control it. We'd all be better off if we stopped repeating it and let its sound fade.

The Bush Administration is trying to undermine global attempts acknowledge and deal with climate change. [Link]

The USA might be worse than it's been in years, but at least we have basic free speech (otherwise I'm sure the proper authorities would have carted me away months ago). No such luck in China, where free speech is considered a threat to national security, and where Zhang Lin may find himself rotting in jail because he posted the words to a song. I'm hoping those of us who still have voices and can speak openly will raise unmitigated hell about this travesty. Bloggers, this means you! (Via email from GILC – hey, guys, it's time to update the site!) [Link]

The LA Times' experimental "wikitorial" last week disappeared after pornographic images were posted there. [Link - NY Times, requires registration]

"Nothing bad happened really until after midnight on Saturday," said Michael Newman, deputy editorial page editor. At 8:32 p.m. Saturday, a posting on www.Slashdot.org, which bills itself as "news for nerds," directed readers to the Times wikitorial.

"Slashdot has a tech-savvy audience that, to be kind, is mischievous and to be not so kind, is malicious," Mr. Newman said. "We were taking stuff down as soon as it went up and staving them off. Finally we had to go to bed. Someone called the newsroom a little bit before 4 a.m. and said there's something bad on your Web site, and so we just took the whole site down."

With the Downing Street Memo(s) we have another case where bloggers drove press coverage in the US, according to Jay Rosen. [Link]

Now if there's something newsworthy coming out of the U.K. but neglected in America the political blogs in America and other activists online keep talking about it. Quickly the story's unjust obscurity will reach a political player who can change that by acting in a newsworthy way, lending fresh facts and additional reason to cover the story.

Andrew Hoppin blogs about his experience at DemocracyFest in Austin, and our CivicSpace Users' Conference yesterday (where I "test drove" the Group Relationship Management discussion. [Link]

Weblogsky pal Andrew Rasiej has a video blog for his campaign... he's running for Public Advocate in New York. Most recently he's advocating for universal public wireless Internet access in NYC. Weblogsky readers in New York, take note – and vote! [Link]

Molly Ivins wonders why mainstream media is dismissing the evidence that, as many suspected regarding the war in Iraq, "the whole thing was a set-up." She goes on to say "...the very prestigious papers that are now dismissing the Downing Street Memos have already themselves admitted that their pre-war coverage was -- I don't know, you pick the adjective. Slack? Inadequate? Less than rigorous? Wrong? And now they're saying, oh hell, this isn't news, we knew it all along." [Link]

If you think the war in Afghanistan was over a long time ago, think again. [Link]

The Taliban forces, estimated at anywhere from 2,000 to 10,000 fighters, cannot hold territory against U.S. forces. But the battalion in Zabol has been attacked more than 10 times since March. During one bloody seven-hour clash in Zabol in May and in a series of pitched firefights across the south and east since then, the Taliban has revealed itself to be a hardy, resilient foe equipped with machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars.

U.S. and Afghan military leaders contend that most of the battles are products of an aggressive campaign they launched this spring to force Taliban fighters from their hideouts. In Zabol, the fighters appear wary of taking on U.S. troops directly after suffering heavy casualties, but they continue to ambush U.S. patrols with gunfire and improvised explosives -- such as one that claimed the battalion's first fatality, Pfc. Steven C. Tucker, 19, of Grapevine, Tex., on May 21.

Meanwhile, the men of 2nd Battalion, 503rd Airborne Infantry, have had to drastically adjust their expectations.

"I thought the Taliban had fallen," Conlon marveled recently. "I thought this was going to be a peacekeeping mission."

Also posted at Save Muni Wireless. Senators John McCain, R-Ariz., and Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J. will introduce legislation (called the Community Broadband Act of 2005) Thursday that would allow municipalities to offer broadband service. This Senate bill is a counterbalance to Pete Sessions' proposed bill to prohibit muncipalities from offering broadband. Lautenberg says that "government should work to open doors to greater technology for the American people, not slam them shut. Our bill will protect the right of communities to offer wireless broadband access to their citizens, creating a powerful tool for education and economic development." [Link]

The two senators are offering the legislation because they want to remove all barriers to broadband deployment, the congressional source said -- noting that 14 states have enacted laws restricting localities from establishing wireless or wireline Internet systems. It is also a response to recent statistics showing the United States dropping to sixteenth in broadband penetration worldwide.

NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft will (if all goes well) rendezvous with comet Tempel 1 and send an impactor, collision with which will create a crater on the surface of the comet's nucleus. The idea is to take a look inside the comet's nucleus, and gather data about its composition. The timing's pretty cool – this'll be happening around the fourth of July. [Link]

My ears stood up when I started reading Jeff Veen's post about flickr's organization as close-knit collaboration between extremely talented people... "the abstraction of a tiered architecture is an efficient way for people to work, communicate, and collaborate. But that seldom works without a deep respect built from working together side-by-side, at least at first. In other words, designing things works better together, and building things works better with structure." Jeff also points to Tom Coates' overview of Cal Henderson's presentation on "How We Built Flickr," which led me to an aha! moment or two because it resonates so well with our evolution and thinking at Polycot:

One particularly interesting chunk was about the relationships between various people operating at different layers - with the developers able to easily create page logic-level functionality that allow the designers to take it away and build user-facing features around them. This relationship is phrased as a negotiation, with the designers coming back and asking for page logic level functionality as they see a need for it (and then being completely responsible for the building of the front-end elements of the site, and for checking it before launch). The whole enterprise is around continual development and improvement and reaction, which probably explains another fairly jaw-dropping moment of the morning - when Cal revealed that on 'good days', Flickr releases a new version every half an hour. In order to support this kind of working, they've built structures that 'supports rapid iteration but enforce at least a little rigour'. Stunning. Although clearly not right for everyone...

A lot of this stuff really fits with my aesthetics of developing products effectively for the web, because - I guess - it's actually a very responsive and very web-native way of building. This process cycle of rapidly building, creating structures that support future iteration, being connected to the users on your site and being able to react and redevelop your proposition almost on the fly - these all seem to me to be the way that most of my peers worked before moving to large organisations that attempted to enforce standard software development methodologies on a completely different medium. And of course, it all hooks in with elegant ways of writing and producing web pages in ways that allow rapid change and evolution, making design about interactions and services and components and design swatches and aesthetics and change rather than about .psd files, yearly redesigns and distant heavy-handed top-down management (and sign-off) from a distance.