At today's Blogging Enterprise conference, I'm appearing as a 'citizen journalist.' In the new book Blog! by David Kline and Dan Burstein, I'm interviewed as an 'activist blogger,' but Weblogsky is listed as a 'business and finance' blog. In my work as a consultant, I focus on web strategy and information design. I've also been guilty of occasional futurist planning and thinking, economic development work, and event coordination, and at Weblogsky I blog about... dang near anything that piques my interest.

It all seems to fit from where I'm sitting, but it's probably confusing to everybody else.

I'm remembering Oat Willie's battle cry... "Onward, through the fog!" (Which incidentally gets 282,000 hits from Google,.. though only 322 hits show proper attribution.

One thing I didn't do very well was attempt to coordinate a Penguin Day for Austin this Friday, (with a San Antonio event the next day coordinated by my colleagues and pals Dean McCall of SalsaNet and George Cisneros of Urban 15. Penguin Day brings nonprofits together with Open Source developers, the primary goal being to get nonprofits the kind of information they need in order to adopt and/or better use Open Source software. I made the mistake of thinking that, if we built it here in Austin, the nonprofits would come, it would just be a matter of getting the word out. Wrong assumption; only a handful signed up, and I realize we need to lay some groundwork so that the nonprofits will have a better idea what we're talking about and why they should care. Dean and George did a better job of that... so we're postponing the Austin event and focusing on San Antonio.

If you want to help build support for the Austin Penguin Day, which will probably happen in February, let me know.

That's a shot of me (on the left) at today's conference on "The Blogging Enterprise" here in Austin. I was on a panel with a blogger/consultant, Brian Oberkirch, and two gentlemen from the mainstream media side of the world, Fred Zipp of the Austin American-Statesman and Hal Straus from the Washington Post. Moderator was Lorraine Branham, Director of the UT School of Journalism.

Want to know what I said? I don't remember – but here's the notes I took along...

Journalism is a profession, a discipline with a body of knowledge, best practices, code of ethics, etc.

This has a lot of implications I don't have time to go into, but it's clearly a different paradigm, a different world, and it signals a transformation of media.

If you understand "the long tail," you'll get the idea of the Long Tail Camp:

Long-Tail Camp will start on November 11, 2005 at a location of your choosing. Just show up and start talking about the long-tail of whatever. There might not be a lot of people paying attention or even showing up but hey, it’s the long tail, what can you expect? We’re certain that Long-Tail Camp will be a huge success and expect it will be over in about 10-12 years, depending on the exact parameters of the distribution...

Chart Rhapsody's monthly statistics and you get a "power law" demand curve that looks much like any record store's, with huge appeal for the top tracks, tailing off quickly for less popular ones. But a really interesting thing happens once you dig below the top 40,000 tracks, which is about the amount of the fluid inventory (the albums carried that will eventually be sold) of the average real-world record store. Here, the Wal-Marts of the world go to zero - either they don't carry any more CDs, or the few potential local takers for such fringy fare never find it or never even enter the store.

The Rhapsody demand, however, keeps going. Not only is every one of Rhapsody's top 100,000 tracks streamed at least once each month, the same is true for its top 200,000, top 300,000, and top 400,000. As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it's just a few people a month, somewhere in the country.

This is the Long Tail.

You can find everything out there on the Long Tail. There's the back catalog, older albums still fondly remembered by longtime fans or rediscovered by new ones. There are live tracks, B-sides, remixes, even (gasp) covers. There are niches by the thousands, genre within genre within genre: Imagine an entire Tower Records devoted to '80s hair bands or ambient dub. There are foreign bands, once priced out of reach in the Import aisle, and obscure bands on even more obscure labels, many of which don't have the distribution clout to get into Tower at all.

A few scientists may still question growing evidence of global climate change, others wonder if the evident warming trend signals something even more extreme, a catastrophic "super-interglacial" state. [Link]

They emphasize that within a century global warming will probably exceed the Eemian temperature maximum and thus obviate all the models that have made this their essential scenario. They also suggest that the total or partial collapse of the Greenland Ice Sheet is a real possibility -- an event that would definitely throw a Younger Dryas wrench into the Gulf Stream.

If they are right, then we are living on the climate equivalent of a runaway train that is picking up speed as it passes the stations marked "Altithermal" and "Eemian." "Outside the envelope," moreover, means that we are not only leaving behind the serendipitous climatic parameters of the Holocene -- the last 10,000 years of mild, warm weather that have favored the explosive growth of agriculture and urban civilization -- but also those of the late Pleistocene that fostered the evolution of Homo sapiens in eastern Africa.

My pal Kyle Johnson appreciates Harry Reid and his "stunt." [Link]

Who knew, Senate rules allow for a single distinguished gentleman to step up to the mic and, with a solitary second-that-motion, shut the place down? Sleepy-eyed Harry knew.

So he did, banishing all the reporters and staffers and gawkers, silencing the Razrs and Blackberries, leaving only the one-hundred men and women Constitutionally charged to check unbridled Executive power to face themselves, and the fact that they let a proud nation conjure a war out of 9/11-smoke and Murdoch’s murderous mirrors.

At his Virtual Handshake blog, Scott Allen's posted coverage of this week's one-day Blogging Enterprise conference in Austin, where I spoke on a citizen journalism panel. I was unable to attend much of the conference, including Steve Rubel's moment of silence for old media earlier in the day. I'd heard a bunch of references to the "moment of silence," and when I saw the flags at the Pickle Center flying at half mast, I mentioned to Scott and Hal Straus of the Washington Post that they must be acknowledging old media's passing. Straus didn't laugh, but glared at me and told me he was pretty sure the flags were at half mast for Rosa Parks... ouch.

But as Scott says, "everyone seemed to agree that there’s a place for both [mainstream or 'old' meda and blogs], and a potential symbiotic relationship between them."

Scott's other posts: Who's Winning with Blogs and Character Blogs.

Others who blogged the conference - Shel Israel, Matt Mullenweg, John Moore.

Spent today at Urban 15 in San Antonio, at an Open Source workshop based on Aspiration's Penguin Day events. Despite Aspiration co-director Allen Gunn's presence and leadership, we saw this as more of a precursor to a larger regional Penguin Day that we'll put together sometime after the first of the year, probably in February. Today's event wasn't far off the mark, though. We started with general explanations of Open Source for the diverse group that showed up, the discussed actual Open Source implementations such as the use of Webmin to manage the sites hosted by the Metropolitan Austin Information Network, the San Antonio Independent School District's use of Open Source content management systems to support school web sites, the Drupal-based Write On Austin! web site, and the Urban 15 project Nos Unimos, which hosts family photos from San Antonio's historic West Side. In breakout sessions we talked about content management systems, licensing, and Open Source history. We also had a speed-geeking session (where I demo'd WordPress via the "You're It!" blog). Check out a few photos.

The Wall Street Journal revealed that it's quick and easy to produce generic Tamiflu, raising questions about Roche's contention otherwise. Roche holds the patent, and the U.S. government wants to make sure the company has the right to enforce its right to constrain production, saying (through HHS secretary Michael Leavitt) "We're resolved to work through the FDA to accelerate those licensing arrangements and hope to see, at some point in time, the supply of the drug added to." Sez Dan Gillmor at Bayosphere, "At some point in time? When this pandemic starts, there will not be any time to spare." [Link]

The Web 2.0 meme seems to create quite a fuss. At the Seattle Mind Camp (the sort thing, incidentally, that we should be doing in Austin), Chris Pirillo evidently dissed Web 2.0 as a sign of a new Bubblocalypse, which John Cook reported here...

"Web 2.0 is a $2,800 ticket to a tech conference. That's all it is." He went on to say that he tries not to use the term.

"I am praying it is not another bubble. If VCs are funding 'me-too' ideas than it is going to be another mess."

What I believe I actually said was, "Web 2.0 is all about the beer and free parties", which was a tonge-in-cheek reference to the frenzy in the community (where there IS beer and free parties), not that beer is my only experience of it. Yes, like I uprooted my entire family and moved to a new country to be the sole breadwinner for parties and beer. I'm afraid I could have done that quite comfortably in Toronto.

All of the grand demos and in-depth conversations and contacts over the weekend were instantly twisted to "I'm a Bimbo" in that moment.

I just spoke with Tara again this morning to clear the air and set the record straight. We both agreed that the quote was in the context of Web 2.0 and was not a reflection on her. Just so we are clear here, my intention in using that quote was to show that energy and enthusiasm is once again surging in the Internet community -- and that has led to free parties and beer. Hunt's quote, which was set up by Chris Pirillo's comments about the possibility of another bubble, was a tongue-in-cheek way of commenting about what is happening in the Internet world. That was the spirit of the quote and that is why I used it -- not to cast some negative impression on Hunt or women in general.

Then again, one more thing: Web 2.0 is much maligned as a bubble-blowing buzzword, but I happen to think it's useful to have some way to acknowledge new web paradigms. And if the insane valuation of Google hasn't set off a new bubble-binge, I don't know what would. However there does seem to be some business going on, and that's okay.

While researching a spread on Wi-Fi for the WorldChanging book recently, I saw instances where Wi-Fi was referred to as an abbreviated form of "wireless fidelity," which I thought was pretty weird. Fidelity to what? "Hi-Fi" meant "high fidelity," a 50s term for better sound reproduction on records... I always figured Wi-Fi was a play on that abbreviation, a pun, not meant to convey a similar literal meaning. Cory Doctorow writes about this in boing boing... [Link]

Last week, I wrote in passing about how WiFi doesn't "stand for" wireless fidelity. It's a pun on "Hi-Fi" and "wireless fidelity" doesn't mean anything. Innumerable correspondants wrote in to say that the Wi-Fi Alliance said different. I disagreed -- and still argue that a litmus test for whether a given article on WiFi is likely to be ill-informed is whether it takes pains to utter the nonsense, non-instructive phrase, "WiFi (short for 'wireless fidelity')"...

It's not news that consumers don't trust media and advertising, but David Kline blogs how corporate America really doesn't get "consumer-generated media."

...the study suggests that most American companies are woefully unprepared for the managerial, marketing, customer relations, and product development challenges of a new business environment in which customers trust bloggers and each other more than they do traditional corporate marketing. Unfortunately, the modern corporation is built on a solidly-hierarchical "push" model in which customers (and their friends) are at the bottom of the totem pole -- mere passive recipients of whatever the company chooses to deliver to them.

But that's going to have to change. And the change certainly won't come easily, not to a generation of executives and managers who were never trained to deal directly with customers who can now make or break their businesses.

Vint Cerf reminds Congress that the Internet's end-to-end architecture is a key, or THE key, to its greatness as a communications environment. If they don't pay attention, we're all probably screwed. [Link]

The remarkable social impact and economic success of the Internet is in many ways directly attributable to the architectural characteristics that were part of its design. The Internet was designed with no gatekeepers over new content or services. The Internet is based on a layered, end-to-end model that allows people at each level of the network to innovate free of any central control. By placing intelligence at the edges rather than control in the middle of the network, the Internet has created a platform for innovation. This has led to an explosion of offerings – from VOIP to 802.11x wi-fi to blogging – that might never have evolved had central control of the network been required by design.

My fear is that, as written, this bill would do great damage to the Internet as we know it. Enshrining a rule that broadly permits network operators to discriminate in favor of certain kinds of services and to potentially interfere with others would place broadband operators in control of online activity. Allowing broadband providers to segment their IP offerings and reserve huge amounts of bandwidth for their own services will not give consumers the broadband Internet our country and economy need. Many people will have little or no choice among broadband operators for the foreseeable future, implying that such operators will have the power to exercise a great deal of control over any applications placed on the network.

As we move to a broadband environment and eliminate century-old non- discrimination requirements, a lightweight but enforceable neutrality rule is needed to ensure that the Internet continues to thrive. Telephone companies cannot tell consumers who they can call; network operators should not dictate what people can do online.

I am confident that we can build a broadband system that allows users to decide what websites they want to see and what applications they want to use – and that also guarantees high quality service and network security. That network model has and can continue to provide economic benefits to innovators and consumers -- and to the broadband operators who will reap the rewards for providing access to such a valued network.

A fan of the original "King Kong," I'm on pins and needles waiting for the Peter Jackson remake of the film, which will release next month. The Guardian's already taken a peek. There's also a high-definition Quicktime trailer here.

Just saw Republican party chairman Ken Mehlman on this morning's "Meet the Press" defending the war in Iraq, and neither Tim Russert nor Howard Dean, who was on later, addressed my issues with Mehlman's argument, which is the Republican argument. Mehlman was explaining why Bush would have invaded Iraq and taken Saddam Hussein down even if he knew there were no "weapons of mass destruction." He says terrorist bombings had gone on for years, and we would often react, but we had never taken proactive measures against terrorists. It was time to be proactive.

I have several issues with this argument.

First, it's unclear that Saddam Hussein had a significant link with terrorists. He was certainly no friend to the Taliban or Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, people with strong fundamentalist beliefs. Hussein's only religion was Hussein, and it's no way clear that he would get beyond his self-interest to work with terrorist groups, even if they were willing to work with him. (Now, if Mehlman said "we thought we needed a establish a base of operations in the Middle East and were pretty sure we could knock Saddam off and occupy Iraq," I might at least credit his honesty, but he knows, and all the Bush group know, that the American people and the rest of the world wouldn't go for invasion and long-term occupation of Iraq, even if they could argue national interest. Better to stick to the simplistic arguments, however false.

Mehlman says it was time to be proactive because of 9/11, and I should mention what most people know by now: Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. If you want to hang that one on a nation, consider that the organizer was Egyptian and his team was mostly Saudi and Egyptian. However you can't really blame those nations, or Iraq, or any other national entity for an action that was orchestrated by Al Qaeda, which is another kind of "Second Superpower," but dedicated to terrorist war rather than peace. You don't destroy Al Qaeda by taking out Saddam Hussein, though you might position yourself as a presence in the region if you want to gamble that you can bring stabilization and undermine terrorist influence. What's more likely (and we can see it in the insurgency) is that you'll feed rather than starve the beast.

Another point about asserting ourselves proactively: just to do so in Iraq is burning billions of dollars and hundreds (possibly thousands, ultimately) of American lives. Could it be that we avoided proactive measures before because the cost was unacceptable given uncertaintly about the benefit? The thinking behind the war was evidently born within the neoconservative think tank called New American Century, and I admit that I haven't read their publications, but I'm guessing the underestimated the costs of the war and occupation, and overestimated the "return on investment." I don't think it's smart to take on the monetary costs when the American economy is vulnerable. The human costs I don't even know how to address – what's the "value" of a single life? How is it measured? Suffice to say that it's a great tragedy that we've lost so many in Iraq, and we can only hope it won't be another Vietnam (where we lost 58,000 troops and gained nothing in return).

Mehlman says "you can't wait until after the fact" of attack to respond, but what of other threats? Consider the canonical example, North Korea. Kim Jong-Il is arguably worse than Saddam and probably does have WMD, yet we haven't attacked North Korea. In fact, we don't have the assets to handle both North Korea and Iraq. To me it seems disingenous to argue that our policy is to proactively take out potential threats when it's really not something we can or would do. We've done it in Iraq primarily because, through conceptual sleight of hand, the administration managed to convince Americans that our invasion was reactive, that Saddam had something to do with 9/11, and was building an arsenal to do more. Most Americans, engaged in their own lives, heard only enough bits and pieces to be convinced that they were hearing adequate moral argument for war.

Out of all this, I think the most serious omission is that of cost. We can't argue that we're going to take out all the bad guys in the world, because we can't afford to take them out. It's better to work with our allies (though we have fewer of those now than we did before this war started) and take action through coalitions working together and sharing cost. And lower cost solutions, like embargoes, make sense.

I've been trying to avoid political rants, but I couldn't leave Mehlman's simplistic Rove-driven argument to stand unchallenged, of only by some web consultant who should be working the Sunday morning instead of blogging....

UPDATE: Joshua Micah Marshall at Talking Points Memo has more on Mehlman's appearance, saying "I honestly found it hard to keep up with the full number of lies and half-truths that rolled out of his mouth."

CNet writes about influential fan journalism on the web, focusing on Austin's Harry Knowles, whose site is one of my regular reads. [Link]

Here's something that takes the thinking behind the Katrina PeopleFinder Project and others like it to the next level: Warren Easton in Exile, a site that tracks everybody from the Warren Easton Fundamental High School of New Orleans. They're scattered over several states... and the site maps 'em with Google. There's also photos, blog items, polls, etc. Via Nancy White.

Pretty amazing: Reporters without Borders along with 25 U.S. and International investment firms pledged shareholder support "for an increased commitment to freedom of information by major Internet and technology companies."

The backdrop for the afternoon’s conference was a recent incident wherein Yahoo’s Hong Kong branch supplied information about an e-mail sent through its servers to the Chinese communist government. The e-mail—sent overseas by Chinese journalist Shi Tao—outlined new media restrictions imposed before the 15th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. The Chinese government charged Shi with “divulging state secrets abroad” and sentenced him to ten years in prison on April 30.

“Information supplied by Yahoo led to the conviction of a good journalist who has paid dearly for trying to get the news out,” an RSF press release stated. The company was apparently under no obligation to cooperate with mainland Chinese authorities.

Some members of the UN wanted to end US dominance of Internet management, but the Bush administration made a compromise, an agreement to set up an "Internet Governance Forum" for global discussion of various Internet issues. [Link]

What the agreement does not do is require the United States to relinquish its unique influence over the Internet's operations. The statement takes "no action regarding existing institutions," David Gross, the ambassador leading the U.S. delegation, said Wednesday. "It created no new international organizations."

Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon set up an 'Expression under Repression' panel at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia, and their Tunisian hosts tried to shut the discussion down... but they ignored the cancellation and held the session anyway, to an SRO crowd. [Link]

Rebecca rejects as absurd the idea that expression under repression isn’t relevant to ICT and development, as had been suggested by Tunisian authorities in reacting to our panel. She points to the spread of SARS in China as an example of the ill consequences of blocking communications between citizens. The blocking of sites that report on anti-corruption efforts probably costs real money, as politicans continue putting money in their pockets at the expense of the wider populus. But she points out that filtering occurs in the United States as well, through things like filters in libraries that prevent teenagers from finding out about reproductive health.

Transorbital lobotomy is pretty strange: the guy performing the procedure inserts an instrument similar to an icepick above the patient's eyeball through the orbit of the eye, then into the frontal lobes of the brain, then moves the "icepick" back and forth, disabling the frontal lobes. A psychiatrist named Walter Freeman used this procedure on 2500 patients with mixed results. NPR just featured a radio piece by Howard Dully, Freeman's youngest patient (victim?), now 56 years old. I heard the NPR piece, then checked out additional material at NPR's web site. Dully's story is fascinating and touching, a biographical account of his search for himself. This is a great story; if I was in film, I would be working up the "My Lobotomy" script.

Since I've always thought that social network doesn't work as an end in itself, it's great to see heads turning in the direction of object-centered sociality, which is Jyri Engeström's term, it's good to see MIT Technology Review talking about Social Networking 3.0 as social networking that is "object-focused," i.e. "sites offering 'rich media' -- the big buzzword of 2005 -- by encouraging users to share their own content online, including photos, videos, music, and other digital files." However the article doesn't seem especially well-informed, focusing on Friendster and iMeem and ignoring the site that pointed the way, Flickr. Wade Roush would do well to read some danah boyd as well as the Social Software Weblog, good sources of background on social network platforms.

I'm either too tired or too lazy to post about David Weekly's liveblogging from the World Summit in Tunisia, since Xeni's done such a good job. Maybe I'll have a chance to blog the World Congress on Information Technology in May, right here in Austin.

John Murtha, a Democrat and a hawk who served 37 years in the Marines, is getting the business from other congresscritters of the Republican persuasion, having spoken out in favor of a careful withdrawal from Iraq. The latest: a possible inquiry into Murtha's formerly unquestionable ethics. [Link]

I found myself sending this around to several people and lists... in this NY Times Op Ed, John Battelle nails the business implication of "Web 2.0." [Link]

The Web has since become a platform, and building new businesses on that platform is no longer a multimillion-dollar proposition. Most new Web businesses nowadays are started with less than half a million dollars, and it's rare to find one that wants to use money from an initial public offering to get to profitability.

The reason? Start-ups are leveraging nearly a decade's worth of work on technologies that are now not only proven, but also free, or very nearly so. Open-source software can now do nearly everything that Oracle, I.B.M. and Microsoft specialized in back in the 90's. And the cost of computing and bandwidth? You can now lease a platform that can handle millions of customers for less than $500 a month. In the 90's, such a platform would have run tens of thousands of dollars or more a month.

Yikes! Bill Gates has written one of his memos, this time acknowledging that web services (aka "Web 2.0") are a big deal. I thought we all agreed not to tell him?[Link]

As with previous memos, Microsoft is widely perceived to be late to the party. Mr Gates and Mr Ozzie have announced plans for Windows Live and Office Live, two products intended to become just the sort of free internet services that Web 2.0 is supposedly all about. But both are, in fact, little more than new names for Microsoft's existing offerings, and look feeble in comparison with services offered by its rivals.

This prompted yet another memo from Marc Benioff, the marketing-savvy boss of Salesforce.com, a leading proponent of the “software as a service” model. If Microsoft were serious about Web 2.0 and Microsoft Live, he suggested helpfully in an “internal” memo sent to the press, it should rename its traditional software “Microsoft Dead”. Web 2.0, he said, was not about old companies constrained by their legacy products but new firms such as, naturally, Salesforce.com, Writely, Numsum, Zimbra and Goffice. For his part, Zach Nelson of NetSuite, another software-as-a-service company, says he decided against writing a memo. Writing memos is cheap, he says, whereas “writing software is a whole lot harder”.

Inside the Bowl is a New Orleans blog started by Steve Seebol and Elizabeth Kahn, who've just returned to New Orleans. It's the first specifically post-Katrina blog I've seen, and I think it's going to be a powerful force for the reconstruction of the spirit as well as the physical infrastructure of the city.

....Many older people who evacuated could not deal with the stress. They left, but in many cases their health problems were more then they could handle. These deaths are not in the official death total, which is really just a body count. These people died in Houston, Dallas, Baton Rouge or lord knows where. They might have passed away anyway, but the storm didn’t make it easier.

One of those who died, while evacuated, was my friend and father-in-law Fred Kahn. Fred had been sick for awhile. But when faced with the arduous task of leaving the city that he was born in, he rose to the occasion with oxygen tank at hand got in the car and left for the 7 hour trip to his daughter’s house in New Iberia, LA. We were all staying there for the first 3 weeks, and it was painful to watch Fred’s energy wane and his concentration falter. He knew there was a storm and that the world was no longer the way he remembered it, but he wasn’t sure what was going on directly around him. Fred was in exile 2 months slowly losing ground before he slumped over while watching a football game and left us. It makes me very sad that he had to endure so much hardship at the end of his life. He was a sweet and decent man. We miss him.

This looks pretty critical: congress may allow the patenting of public land. This post to a diary at Daily Kos includes a scary bit of info from the LA Times:

There are plenty of examples of how companies have used the 1872 mining law's patenting provisions to get their hands on public resources dirt cheap. In 1970, Frank Melluzzo "patented" -- bought -- public land near Phoenix for $150. Ten years later, he sold it for more than $400,000. Today, the Pointe Hilton Hotel in Phoenix sits on this mining claim. In 1983, Mark Hinton patented national forest land adjacent to the Keystone ski resort in Colorado. He later sold the parcel for more than 4,000 times what he paid for it. In 1994, American Barrick Corp. patented about 1,000 acres of public land in Nevada. That land contained more than $10 billion in gold reserves. But under the 1872 mining law, it paid only $5,000 for the land and paid not a dime in royalties to the federal Treasury.

I led a discussion with David Kline about his new book, Blog!, on the WELL. David and his co-author, Dan Burstein, interviewed several bloggers in several fields ... primarily politics, business, and media. (David also interviewed me on blogging and activism.) The interview and the book are full of insights about the state and future of blogging, and are a must-read for those who are trying to grasp the depth and breadth of the blogosphere.

Blogs won't change human nature. But to my mind, a world in which millions of people now have voices that can be heard is better than a world in which only the chosen few "experts" or "pundits" or media do.

True democracy is messy. And it's true, there's still a lot of narcissistic "talking at" rather than "discussing with" going on. But I liken that to the ego-centric stage that early toddlers go through. Ordinary people -- people who have no special access or reach -- are learning what it means to now have a voice. As we mature and become more confident that what we say is valuable, if only to ourselves and to perhaps a few dozen of our readers, then I really truly believe the "noise" will be pierced by ever-increasing dialogoue and meaning.

Civility comes from confidence and self-assurance that you do, in fact, have the right to speak. Early practitioners of the new social invention of democracy a couple of hundred years ago were not very civil at all. Per capita, there were probably as many nutcases and angry narcissists as there are now. But by the mid-19th century, the average citizen could think of no better form of entertainment and enlightenment than to spend 12 hours listening to a Lincoln-Douglass debate. These were common men and women who attended these events, who eagerly read partisan newspapers, and who lived peacefully with their neighbors who read entirely opposing partisan newspapers.

Does this save the world? Usher in a permanent era of peace? End war?

No. But at least the world increasingly becomes *our* world, a world that reflects the voices and concerns of many millions rather than thousands.

When I was a mere tad, I went through a phase where I wanted to make films. At times I wanted to be a director, but at other times I wanted to do special effects, inspired by Ray Harryhausen, whose art was stop motion animation, which has pretty much been replaced by CGI. Harryhausen learned his art from Willis O'Brien, who had animated King Kong, Son of Kong, and Mighty Joe Young (Harryhausen assisted with the latter). King Kong was the one to beat... O'Brien had put himself into the animation; Kong seemed almost human. Harryhausen made at least one film based on an O'Brien concept, Valley of the Gwangi, but he never attempted a remake of Kong. Now Peter Jackson's created a faithful remake (unlike the 70s version, which was - yawn - okay), and the Guardian's running a piece about Kong that includes an interview with Harryhausen, now retired (and just beginning to get the recognition he deserves).

A Senate committee has passed a spyware bill - passed it out of committee, that is. The House already passed two spyware bills, but this is the first from the senate. Hopefully this will get traction and lead to actual legislation soon. And hopefully it'll have real teeth. (I haven't read the bill or summary info, but infoware says the bill "would prohibit hackers from remotely taking over a computer and prohibit programs that hijack Web browsers. The bill would protect antispyware software vendors from being sued by companies whose software they block." [Link]

The connection between Wi-Fi and gaming is in transition from visionary to obvious as Nintendo announces its Wi-Fi connection plans for Europe: more than 7500 hotspots in the UK as of November 25, and 15,000 hotspots throughout Europe as the global Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection service is launched. (Via Dave Farber's "Interesting People" list.) [Link]

Pop language may drown us in a sea of irrelevance. Read this excerot from Leslie Savan's Slam Dunks and No-Brainers.

As the late Neil Postman wrote in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Aldous Huxley painted a more probable future in Brave New World than George Orwell did in 1984, because, over the long run, pleasure is more likely than fear to produce compliant citizens. In "Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history," Postman wrote. "As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. ... Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance."

Today, there are clearly attempts by the government and corporations to conceal truth and to insist, as Newspeak did, that War Is Peace and Ignorance Is Strength -- but rarely in so many words. Such harsh notes don't jibe with our vernacular. Much more effective is the let-me-entertain-you language of the mass media; it bubbles and bops, tickles and cajoles until we come to adore it. I'm not saying that pop language is a tranquilizing drug with totalitarian side effects, like Huxley's soma. In its ability to break through obfuscation, which it does every day, pop can be a powerful force for truth. But in its ability to divert thought and numb our imaginations with commercial confetti, pop can also be a force that drowns the truth in "a sea of irrelevance."

Computer R&D is happening like never before, according to EETimes Online. The article "Computer R&D rocks on" assumes that most folks thought hardware development was done (though I can't say that I know anybody who thinks so), but we're just getting into digital convergence, and the new web paradigms labelled "Web 2.0" are creating new tools, new directions, and new demands. The article mentions Google's distributed clusters... I've been thinking of Google as a vertical layer along side the stack of Internet or OSI layers, but maybe it's more like the Sherwin Williams logo - "Cover the Earth."

"If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people. To be born means that something which did not exist comes into existence. But the day we are “born” is not our beginning. It is a day of continuation...." [Link] — Thich Nhat Hanh

Christian fundamentalists have gained so much influence that a Charles Darwin exhibit at the American Museum of National History, essentially a mainstream science exhibit, is too controversial to attract corporate sponsors. However the Creationist Museum in Ohio has raised $7 million. I'm finding this (via Dave Farber's IP list) in the UK Telegraph – it's not getting reported in the U.S. I never once suspected that we could slide back to the dark ages, but that now seems very possible. [Link]

CNet has an article, "Mapping a revolution with 'mashups' ", that explores various hacks using the Google Maps API with other data sources. "Mashup" is a key convergence technology "...first used in pop music when artists and DJs began playing two songs simultaneously. In technology, it refers to a Web site or application that combines content from multiple sources but appears seamless upon use." One item that I would have included: Google's request to the creators of the Google Maps Wallpaper Generator that they take their tool offline. According to a comment at Google Maps Mania, "it's not that Google is being mean, it's that their license from DigitalGlobe doesn't allow that sort of activity, which could potentially interfere with DG's capability to sell data in to the commercial marketplace." It would good to know just what kind of hacks are not permitted.

Earthquakes struck China and Iran over the last couple of days. If you look at the quake map for Asia, there've been several large quakes in the area over the last week. Look at the map of the world, and you can see that there's a whole lotta shakin' going on. The recently launched Dubai Metroblog has more info about the quake in Iran, which was also felt in Dubai.

Evan Williams of Odeo, Inc. (and cofounder of Blogger, which is now part of Google) posts a good, commonsense set of Ten Rules for Web Startups, many of which are very close to the counsel Polycot gives in consultation with our clients, especially the user-centric approach and agile development. (Via an email to BootStrap Austin from Brett Hurt of BazaarVoice).

Doc is building a house, and he says his fantasy is "to make it as Linux-y as possible." He's looking for some last-minute home audio/video/networking advice. (Hey, Doc, hope you're building a sustainable OS house! [Link]

Roger Hodge, a rancher's son from Del Rio who came up through the ranks at Harper's, will be its new editor when Lewis Lapham steps down in April. [Link]

"We have had many talented people here that have gone on to edit other magazines, and I have thought for a long time that Roger was a keeper and that we should make sure that we hang on to him," [Harper's president and publisher John R.] MacArthur said. "And I like the fact that he is from Texas and a ranching family. He was bred to be independent and self-governed, to think for himself, and I think that is a great credential to edit the magazine."

Bees can't possibly fly, they're too heavy to pull it off with those short wings. But they do fly, and an insect flight expert at Caltech has filmed bee flight in slow motion (5MB .avi) to figure out how it works. [Link]

Dickinson and his colleagues filmed hovering bees at 6000 frames per second, and plotted the unusual pattern of wing beats. The wing sweeps back in a 90˚ arc, then flips over as it returns – an incredible 230 times a second. The team made a robot to scale to measure the forces involved. See a video of a bee in a flap, here (5MB, .avi format).

It is the more exotic forces created as the wing changes direction that dominate, says Dickinson. Additional vortices are produced by the rotation of the wing. “It’s like a propeller, where the blade is rotating too,” he says. Also, the wing flaps back into its own wake, which leads to higher forces than flapping in still air. Lastly, there is another peculiar force known as “added-mass force” which peaks at the ends of each stroke and is related to acceleration as the wings’ direction changes.

Bruce Willis is feeling a bit of John Wayne patriotism, planning to make a film about the war in Iraq, about "who do what they are asked to for very little money to defend and fight for what they consider to be freedom." David Kline blogs about Willis's plan, considering it an exercise in futility a la "The Green Berets," the John Wayne film about Vietnam:

Critics at the time called it "unspeakably stupid," and not just because it substituted white men in blackface for the dreaded Vietcong, Georgia pine forests for the tropical jungles of Vietnam, and a sun setting to the east off a beach in Da Nang for the usual place where the sun sets for the rest us in the real world (i.e., the west). The script was godawful, the characters aburd, and as a piece of political propaganda it was about as effective in generating public support for the war as General Westmoreland's "light at the end of the tunnel" speech -- which is to say, not effective at all.

Since the Willis film doesn't exist yet, it's hard to criticize – perhpas he'll make a film that ignores the dubious political motives behind the war and focuses on the bravery of combatants who believe they're fighting for democracy, and not for the schemes of neoconservative think tanks.

Via SmartMobs: Howard Rheingold posts a pointer to Mizuko Ito's position paper on "intimate visual co-presence," where couples leverage the convergence of online photo sharing services and camera phones. [Link]

Just as text messaging created new kinds of modalities for co-presence and communication, we can expect that pervasive photo sharing will lead to a new set of social practices that differ from what we have seen in the PC Internet space and the mobile texting space. I suggest that intimate visual co-presence may be one of these new social modalities.

Just as text messaging created new kinds of modalities for co-presence and communication, we can expect that pervasive photo sharing will lead to a new set of social practices that differ from what we have seen in the PC Internet space and the mobile texting space. I suggest that intimate visual co-presence may be one of these new social modalities.

The current that drives the Gulf Stream has weakened by 30% over the last twelve years, evidently due to global warming (I prefer to say global climate change). The effect of this change may be cooling rather than warming, and "the final impact of any cooling effect will depend on whether it outweighs the global warming that, paradoxically, is driving it." [Link]