Should the United States control the Internet? Or the United Nations? Fact is, the Internet has no real "control" other than the system for assigning domain numbers and names, so politicos focus on that aspect as "Internet governance" and argue at length about it. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) . It is more specifically responsible for "Internet Protocol (IP) address space allocation, protocol identifier assignment, generic (gTLD) and country code (ccTLD) Top-Level Domain name system management, and root server system management functions." There's political contention now over U.S. control via supervision of the Internet addressing system, and some want that to be a cooperative international endeavor. Jeanette Hoffman of the Internet Governance Caucus has a good point about the potential for the UN to assume reponsibility: "The UN is not a good body to run the Internet," she says. "We don't want nondemocratic countries to have influence over a system that is so important to the freedom of expression." From the International Herald Tribune:

Groups representing Web surfers at the talks complained that the dispute between the United States and the rest of the world over administration is overshadowing more important issues, such as cleaning up spam from e-mail systems and combating cyber crime and identity theft, areas where they say governments should play a more active role.

"I think the debate here is not all that relevant to people that use the Internet," said Lynne St. Amour, chief executive of the Internet Society, a nonprofit organization based in Reston, Virginia. "The row is largely because of the geopolitical situation."

While nations feud over who should authorize the use of domain names, experts say the real power is likely to remain with the one billion users of a system that unifies almost a quarter million networks and is largely democratic in the way it operates.

Looks like Google and Sun have been working together on a "Google Office," based on Sun's StarOffice, which is a slightly better version of the Open Source office suite, OpenOffice. The word is that we'll hear something about this today. Google and 37Signals are definitely making this boy's life easier.

Update: Link to CNet article

After attempting a day off on Thursday and playing catchup on Friday, I'm spending Saturday at a business conference sponsored by TiE Austin. Meanwhile this morning there's news of a devastating earthquake in Pakistan, magnitude 7.6, and less than an hour ago the latest aftershock was a 6.3. The earthquake map shows 43 earthquakes in the vicinity of Asia over the last week, and 162 quakes worldwide, many around mag 5. Meanwhile in Texas the news is all about conflict: the notorious Texas vs Oklahoma football game, first and foremost, and for those who ignore football, there's always Tom DeLay vs Ronnie Earle.

Update: The earthquake killed more than 18,000 people.

The casualty toll from the 7.6-magnitude tremor rose sharply Sunday as rescuers struggled to dig people from the wreckage, their work made more difficult as rain and hail turned dirt and debris into sticky muck. Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, Pakistan's chief army spokesman, told Pakistan's Geo TV network early Sunday that more than 18,000 had been killed _ 17,000 of them in Pakistani Kashmir, where the quake was centered. Some 41,000 people were injured, he said.

quality entertainment that would engage, educate and inspire. Together, we built an environment to foster storytelling that engages the audience, generates awareness of topical and interesting issues and inspires individuals to take action.

The same group who created the Tsunamihelp blog as well as the hurricane help wikis have created a South Asia Quake Help blog. (Thanks to Dina Mehta for this info.) The death toll from the quake is mounting, nearing 20,000. There's also a Pakistan Quake 2005 blog.

There's a huge fuss over the idea that the United Nations (or some other international group) should assume responsibility for "Internet governance." The Internet is decentralized and the concept of "governance" doesn't quite seem applicable, but we're talking about governance of a fundamental part of the Internet's structure, the assignment of domain names and numbers, currently managed by The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN. If you look at ICANN's site, you get a sense of the complexity of governance. Declan McCullagh has a very good piece about the proposed "power grab" and the implications of a possible balkanization of the Internet:

This may seem like a complicated political muddle that only Talleyrand could love, but this process is important. If it spirals out of control, we could end up with a Balkanized Internet in which the U.S. attempts to retain control of its root servers and a large portion of the world veers in an incompatible direction.

This would amount to a nuclear option in which a new top-level domain would not be visible in the U.S. and its client states--but would be used in many other nations. The downside, of course, comes when two computers find different Web sites at the same address.

The autocratic, bellicose Bush administration is no paragon of civil liberties virtue, but letting delegates from Cuba, Iran and Tunisia decide on the principles for an open and democratic Internet would be an even worse alternative.

Yahoo launched its own blog search... actually revamped its news search to include material from blogs. You can search news and blogs, or news only, but not blogs only. However blog results are displayed separately in a column on the right side of the results page. So far the aforementioned results are underwhelming, and Google's blog search isn't much better. Technorati's stilll got the best handle on blog searches, maybe it should add a news search? (Just kidding.) [Link]

The Red Cross has deployed its Family News Network for the South Asian Quake region. Similar to the PeopleFinder project set up following Hurricane Katrina, though we don't think the Red Cross has adopted an open format like PFIF (the PeopleFinder Interchange Format). Global Voices has a summary of online community responses to the quake, and a longer summary of the generally ignored problem of flooding caused by Hurricane Stan in Central America. ("Current events are making me tense," as Larry Monroe usedta say.)

It's gotta be a real nightmare to lose people, and have no way of knowing whether they're alive, injured, or dead. These database projects for tracking people down need more development, and we need ways to provide access on or close to the scene so that searches will yield meaningful results. And it has to be more than a volunteer effort. The Red Cross is probably the right organization to be putting the databases together, but distribution of a common format that many can use to gather data that feeds into the central authoritative search respository is crucial, and I don't think the Red Cross has that as one of their priorities. I know there are PeopleFinder volunteers still mindful of that goal.

We're going to talk about the high tech Katrina relief efforts at Austin's first PlaNetwork meeting this week, October 13th, at City Hall. Gary Chapman and I will be talking about efforts we were involved with. It's an evening meeting; I'll post details here asap.

The Internet is "fairly resilient to attacks," according to a study that uses describes the net as "robust yet fragile." According to TRN News Roundup,

The study showed that the Internet's network of routers, which controls the flow of data between computers connected to the Internet, is different than the scale-free structure of Web sites and the connections between them. While scale-free networks have a few highly-connected sites, or hubs, in the center and many peripheral sites with far fewer connections, the physical router network that underpins the Internet has highly connected hubs at its periphery and less well-connected central hubs, making it resistant to targeted attacks.

India's corner of the blogosphere is buzzing over a controversy that began when the webzine Jam published a critical piece, "The Truth About IIPM's Tall Claims,". The article suggests that India Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM) uses false advertising to attract students. IIPM visited Jam, then initiated legal action. Amit Varma at India Uncut describes what happened next:

A number of blogs sprung up overnight defending IIPM and defaming Rashmi and Gaurav Sabnis, a popular Indian blogger who had linked to Rashmi's article and added some facts of his own. Ludicrous rumours were spread about Aaj Tak, the news channel, having done a sting operation and having caught Amity, a rival of IIPM, giving money to Rashmi to do the story. Rashmi posted on the matter, and filthy comments were left on that post – you can read them for yourself and see the class of the people who left them. Also, Gaurav received a hilarious legal notice, which he reproduced on his blog – it was hilarious at the time, that is.

Then it got serious. IIPM happens to be a client of IBM, Gaurav's employer, having purchased a huge bunch of laptops from them. (In fact, they are a company with serious money clout, and are one of the biggest advertisers in India.) So what would you expect them to do? Well, Gaurav relates that on his post on the subject. It's bizarre and worrying stuff – read it.

I'll sum it up for you: to save his employer from a dharam sankat, Gaurav found himself faced with two courses of action – to delete his posts and apologise; or to resign from the company. What choice would he make? Isn't the practical thing to do obvious?

Remember Community Access television? Think Wayne's World. Access television was home to all kinds of low budget, quirky content put together by pretty much anybody with a will to work through whatever training and bureaucracy was required. If you give people access to the airwaves and lower your expectations about quality of presentation, you could find occasional gems on the access channels.

With lower barriers to entry, better production technology, and potential millions of channels for delivery along with searches and filters, you might find thousands of gems, delivered at no cost to your computer, then possibly to your home theatre. "Consumer is producer" - the John Gulagers of this world won't need a greenlight to make and distribute their creations.

That's one vision, anyway - Open Source Media. I happened onto some people from the Berkman Center discussing this in a chat backchannel for a virtual meeting, and one of 'em blogged about it... a lunchtime talk about Digital Bicycle.

Last night I spoke at a PlaNetwork event at City Hall in Austin, which was about the response to Katrina. First speaker was Austin's CIO, Pete Collins, talking about Austin's IT Incident Preparedness Group. Pete said they essentially had to build a cityw ithin a city within 20 hours when they set up the local evacuee center. Some of the lessons learned:

• They needed a boundariless prequalified IT pool representing key skill sets.
• In an emergency response situation, it's important to get to operational mode as quickly as possible.
• There's more pure labor than you would expect in moving and setting up PCs.
• Focus on communication - very helpful to have phones so that people can let others know where they are, that they're okay.
• We need to be better prepared overall or "we might not be able to do this again, especially in a situation that's far worse.

Gary Chapman showed the Austin Helping New Orleans web site he'd set up with help from volunteers. The site, based on pMachine's Expression Engine. His focus was on aggregating information for people who were confused about what was going on and how they could help. Gary said there had also been work on an online volunteer database for Austin, not finished in time for the Katrina effort, but it'll be there in the future.

I talked about my work with the Katrina PeopleFinder Project and its sister project, ShelterFinder. Check out this pdf from my presentation. I've blogged about PeopleFinder here, at Smart Mobs, and at WorldChanging.

I just read a beautiful, sad piece in Salon. Despite their new bargain basement design, the folks at Salon are still happening. Read this piece, it's a Rashomon take on something real.

Chris Pirillo's behind a very interesting new metasearch engine, gada.be. Sez Chris,

It was borne out of several frustrations. If you've ever tried to visit a Web site over a mobile device, you know it's a pain in the knuckle. The domain had to be simple to key-in from anywhere. gada.be is 4232.2233 on most cell phones and/or PSP. Normally, when you want to find something online, you have to choose a Web site (wait for the page to load) enter the query (wait for the second page to load) then see results from that provider. With "gada.be," you insert the query *AS* the subdomain!

• http://corpse-bride.gada.be/http://corpse.bride.gada.be/

Those are two different URLs, each with a different set of results. A dot between two keywords implies a quoted statement, whereas a dash implies the AND operator. Note, too, that you can easily change categories by adding the designated category slug to the end of the entire URL. Too geeky for you? Then you're thinking too hard about it.

The American Society of Magazine Editors has selected the top 40 magazine covers for the last 40 years. Interesting set. Number 1 choice: the Rolling Stone cover featuring John and Yoko.

I'm sold on the idea that we should have a banana breakfast.

"Time to gather your arse up off the floor,
(have a bana-na)
Brush your teeth and go toddling off to war.
Wave your hand to sleepy land,
Kiss those dreams away,
Tell Miss Grable you're not able,
Not till V-E Day, oh,
Ev'rything'll be grand in Civvie Street
(have a bana-na)
Bubbly wine and girls wiv lips so sweet--
But there's still the German or two to fight,
So show us a smile that's shiny bright,
And then, as we may have suggested once before--
Gather yer blooming arse up off the floor!" pp 8-9

"mugsfull of banana mead...banana croissants and banana kreplach, and banana oatmeal and banana jam and banana bread, and bananas flamed in ancient brandy" p 10

(Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow)

An AP article (linked here from Wired News) notes Fred Ziari's rural wifi project in Oregon, saying that he drew none of the resistance we've been seeing to municipal wifi projects. This piece suggests that's because it's a rural project where phone companies see little profit potential. This isn't exactly a correct interpretation, though: the big telcos have opposed urban wifi projects, not because they're urban, but because they're operated by municipal governments, which they see as unfair competition. In Texas, the telcos have seemed just as interested in protecting whatever potential there might be for them to offer rural broadband services in the future.

What's great about Ziari's project is that he's doing it - he's figured out how to blanket a large rural area, which can be difficult, and he's succeeding partly because he was smart enough to contract with cities and counties to provide funds, and this has worked because he's pitched the various innovative ways they can benefit from pervasive broadband.

"Internet service is only a small part of it. The same wireless system is used for surveillance, for intelligent traffic system, for intelligent transportation, for telemedicine and for distance education," said Ziari, who immigrated to the United States from the tiny Iranian town of Shahi on the Caspian Sea.

Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy say that publishing the genome for the 1918 flu virus is a "Recipe for Destruction." Declan McCullach sent an excerpt of the article to his Politech email list, and got three interesting counter-arguments.

I would argue there are no "wrong hands" for information to get into. We are collectively responsible for situations that create the anger and misguided behavior that lead to mass destruction. My conclusion is that we (all humans) must recognize that technological instability requires us to make everyone (yes, everyone) a "right hand" for the preservation of the race. This conclusion will be forced on us whether people agree or not because of the power available through replicating destructive technologies.

Getting everyone to play together and hide information will only work when all involved agrees to hide it. One person can spill the beans. Similarly, in a world where 1 person with 80kb of data, a biochem cookbook and 3 feet of lab space can create a tool that kills tens of millions -- we should all be working toward a world where *no one* wants to do that. We won't be able to stop individuals who can. (Jonathan M. Dugan, PhD, Stanford)

Hurricane Wilma is yet another category 5 hurricane; I just heard that it's now the strongest Atlantic hurricane on record. Check out a high res image. The projected path has it strkiking the Yucatan Penninsula, and glancing off to the right into Florida.

Dan Lowden, Robert Durand, Dara Quackenbush

Dara Quackenbush invited me down to speak to a Public Relations class at Texas State University yesterday, as part of a panel with Dan Lowden from Wayport and Robert Durand from Edelman - guys who do marketing and PR, respectively, and who have a clue about blogging, which was the subject of our discussion. In my presentation I covered the power law distribution of blogs and the significance of the long tail, aggregate influence, how journalists work with bloggers, etc. The class seemed receptive, and they were quick to swarm Robert after the discussion to find out about Edelman internships.

Yahoo and the Internet Archive are building the Open Content Alliance along with several other contributors "will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content." Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle says

The opportunity before all of us is living up to the dream of the Library of Alexandria and then taking it a step further-- Universal access to all knowledge. Interestingly, it is now technically doable. Then the question became-- is it in the interest of enough people and institutions to get there? Some hang-ups have been around costs, rights, and guidelines for sharing. All of these things were worked out for their domains by Internet folks and open source folks in the last few decades. But how are we going build a system that has everything available to everyone?

Hence the Open Content Alliance, where "our guiding principle is to offer high-resolution, downloadable, reusable files of the public domain." Brewster goes on to discuss copyright issues and potential resolution via Creative Commons licenses.

Technorati Tags: opencontentalliance, media

Now and then you make a wrong turn and need a chance to reassess your life and figure out whether the pieces fit. I'm in one of those places now; though I've seemed productive and active for the last five years since the Internet bubble burst, I've been struggling with a growing sense of malaise. This is despite the fact that I've found at least some projects that were a good fit for me, and very appealing. At the same time I've worked on things that didn't really fit, and I've blown a lot of energy in the process. And I don't think I've given my best to some of the projects I care most about.

It's not worthwhile to talk about the wrong turns at this point, but I do want to say a little about where my head is now because it'll have an impact on the focus of this blog (and other projects as well).

Through the 90s I was future-focused, in fact a bunch of us who hung out together online and offline referred to ourselves as "neophiliacs" and were focused on a future that seemed interesting, if sometimes dystopian. FringeWare was part of that scene, and Mondo 2000, bOING bOING, EFF, et al. We focused on online community, computer networks, new technology, the future of design and art, robotics, extropianism, crypto, cyber liberties, etc. Then on '97 I took a job with Whole Foods Market as their "Internet guy," and found myself committing my time and my head to the business side of the Internet (I remember how I laughed when I first heard someone refer to "the Internet industry.")

If you were gonna go corporate, Whole Foods wasn't a bad way to go. It's not a traditional top-down kind of corporation, which is why people like to work there so much. Whole Foods is very "power to the edges" in its thinking... decentralized, distributed, entrepreneurial. Though my gig there was quite difficult in many ways, I was digging it. The the bubble burst and the project we were working on went away. I spent a year consulting with another company and scrambling to get my head around a diverse set of new technologies. There wasn't much work for the Internet Solutions Group I was in, hence the second layoff and our move back to Austin, where I was starting Polycot Consulting with my partners, Jeff Kramer and Matt Sanders.

Polycot is what I care most about, of course. With four years of hard work behind us, we've pulled together an excellent team and completed a very interesting pile of projects. We built a consultancy at a time when there were few dollars for pure consulting so we initially placed more emphasis on our technical abilities, and the fact that we can handle complex back-end development. We're beginning to focus more now on consulting and on innovation, especially whatever pieces of "Web 2.0" that we don't regard as hype. Tim O'Reilly's overview of his view of Web 2.0 includes a list of characteristics of Web 2.0 companies that fits Polycot pretty well:

• Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
• Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
• Trusting users as co-developers
• Harnessing collective intelligence
• Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
• Software above the level of a single device
• Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models

I've also been committing some time to work on the Central Texas Digital Convergence Initiative, an economic development project that fits a futurist philosophy I picked up from my friend Derek Woodgate. Derek says that futurism is not about predicting the future – it's about creating the future. I find myself repeating that quote and getting more and more into that mind set (and as part of that process, I'm joining the Board of Directors of the Central Texas Chapter of the World Future Society. And I'm currently putting together a section of the the WorldChanging book.

After several years of interesting confusion, I'm thinking like a neophiliac again, and the solutions for the future that I'm trying to get my head around are more practical than utopian or dystopian. And sustainable. And despite the current political, economic, and environmental chaos, I'm feeling better. By next week or the week after, I might even feel energized and hopeful.

Technorati Tags: jonlebkowsky, future

Marc Canter blogged a pointer to the Open Media Developers' Summit and noted that he and others had been doing pretty much the same thing at ourmedia.org. I was slightly in that conversation and know how much effort they put into it. Marc sez Jeff Kowalski's been keeping the system up "with bubble gum and kite string" – which reminds me that Polycot's got a Jeff that does the same, my partner Jeff Kramer, who's getting married Saturday. We had a bachelor party for Jeff last weekend where he had his first-ever tequila shots:

Xeni's posted some background on Edward R. Murrow and the film Good Night and Good Luck,, which I found via Wendy Seltzer. I'm old enough to remember watching Murrow, though I didn't quite know what was a stake at the time... I figured it out over the years, though, and had the deepest respect for his work and his courage. Studying and thinking about Murrow as I flirted with a career in journalism helped make me a civil libertarian and free speech advocate; not sure where we would be today if he hadn't stepped up, along with John Henry Faulk. We've seen fundamental rights threatened in the US over the past few years; studying the McCarthy era can remind us how bad it can get, and studying Murrow's work can remind us how to take a stand when basic rights are challenged.

WorldChanging blogger and sustainability consultant Alan AtKisson has been appointed International Transition Director for the Earth Charter Initiative beginning in January. My first experience of Alan's work was in the 80s, when he was editor of one of my favorite magazines, In Context

Earth Charter is an organization, but it's also a document that defines sustainability. You can download a pdf of the charter, Here's an excerpt from the preamble:

The choice is ours: form a global partnership to care for Earth and one another or risk the destruction of ourselves and the diversity of life. Fundamental changes are needed in our values, institutions, and ways of living. We must realize that when basic needs have been met, human development is primarily about being more, not having more. We have the knowledge and technology to provide for all and to reduce our impacts on the environment. The emergence of a global civil society is creating new opportunities to build a democratic and humane world. Our environmental, economic, political, social, and spiritual challenges are interconnected, and together we can forge inclusive solutions.