We watched a stroke-damaged Dick Clark, still struggling with aphasia, bring in the New Year last night, and I realized how his appearance was symbolic – after one of the worst years ever, a year of war, disaster, plague, political corruption, economic volatility and spiritual confusion, I think we're all feeling damaged ... but, like Dick Clark, still hopeful that we can overcome overwhelming adversity. I've never said this with more sincerity or more concern: have a Happy New Year.

I've posted several items about Wikipedia as a work in progress that draws unfair criticism (and incidentally responds well to constructive criticism). David Weinberger has a longer piece, Why the Media Can't Get Wikipedia Right, (via Cory Doctorow.)

With Wikipedia, the balance of knowing shifts from the individual to the social process. The solution to a failure of knowledge (as the Seigenthaler entry clearly was) is to fix the social process, while acknowledging that it will never work perfectly. There are still individuals involved, of course, but Wikipedia reputations are made and advanced by being consistent and persistent contributors to the social process. Yes, persistent violators of the social trust can be banished from Wikipedia, but the threat of banishment is not what keeps good contributors contributing well.

I subscribe to quake notifications via email, and earlier today I noticed a 7.3 earthquake near the South Sandwich Islands. About an hour ago I got notification of a 7.1 quake in the Fiji region. These quakes are the large orange squares on the quake map posted above. (USGS also has a list of quakes that are magnitude 5 or greater). Given the magnitude of the quakes and the fact that they're both at sea, I wondered about tsunami potential. According to the Pacific Tsunami Center, no tsunami resulted from the Fiji quake... but there's still no tsunami warning system for the Atlantic. I did find an article saying tsunami is unlikely. It's been a year sense the devastating Southeast Asian Tsunami, so I'm surprised there's no warning system for the Atlantic... evidently there's a plan, at least.

Evidently Google is quietly ignoring the failure of it POP feature, as reported by Steven Johnson, who says the problem's existed since mid-December and "here are hundreds of posts about it in the Google forums." Felix Salmon posts a comment saying he doesn't know what he can do when he reaches the Gmail limit, other than start a new email account. I haven't tried the POP feature, and I don't have critical mail going to Google, but I point some of my spam-ridden and list-intensive email accounts there and review for the occasional jewels. I've only used 5% of capacity so far, but I make occasional runs where I delete old mail. Might be interesting to watch the piles accumulate and see how searchable they are and how much spam's in the mix.

I'll remember 2005 as the year I'd been sucked kicking and screaming into the world of candidate politics because the current crop of politicians seemed exponentially worse than any that had gone before. Most of us read Plunkitt at some point and accept a bit of honest graft, but the current combination of crooks, bozos, and bizarre fundamentalists sorta creeped me out. I'm better now, realizing that American Democracy for all its warts and weirdness is still resilient and still supported by persons of principle like the Fitzgerald, Ronnie Earle, and the prosecutors that've shined a light on Jack Abramoff's misdealings, and Tom Delay's, and whatever others will be found to have abused power and privilege. Those of us who'd prefer to avoid candidate politics really can't afford to; I figure we have a responsibility to ourselves, our children, and our communities to do our part to keep the political process as clean, accountable, and honest as possible. I started this post thinking I was going to say I'm ready to forget politics altogether, but I've talked myself out of it. None of us has that luxury.

Via usgs.gov: A magnitude 6.7 earthquake IN GULF OF CALIFORNIA has occurred at:
28.10N 112.07W Depth 10km Wed Jan 4 08:32:31 2006 UTC. [Link] According to the San Jose Mercury-News, the quake is unlikely to have caused significant damage because there are few people where it was most severe. Interesting to check out quake activity for the North American Region over the last week – one other mag 6 quake farther south, near Panama, with a few mag 5s clustered nearby.

Inevitable: marketers are beginning to plant ads in syndication feeds. [Link]

One attraction of RSS ads may be that feed syndication is still in the "early adopter" phase -- meaning that feeds' audience members are not typical Web surfers. For the most part, they have actively set up feed readers and subscriptions -- they've "raised their hand and said ‘I'm interested'," as Ben Fox, senior product manager in Yahoo’s search marketing division, puts it. "You know from a marketing standpoint that they've invested in their content."

John Perry Barlow has reappeared, sending a new rant his email list and promising more. It's not posted at his site yet, and no excerpt out of context seemed adequate, so I'm reposting the whole thing here, because it's especially eloquent and resonates so well with my own sense of the times.

THE FLOATING WORLD

Ok.

In my New Year's BarlowSpam a few days ago, I indicated that I might be about to break my long silence. Now I guess I will. But, before I go back to spamming you again, I will offer a word (or several) about how this came to pass.

Throughout the Uh-oh's - and I'm more convinced than ever that I called this decade right from the get-go - I've watched with growing stupefaction as successive tsunamis of surreality swept through the world, macro to micro, from the icy works of Darth Cheney to disruptions in my own little life that were as nonsensical as they were either menacing or exhilarating. I began to feel like Kafka, or maybe Nietzche, had become my invisible friend - but if Nietzche, then one whose God is not dead, but crazy.

Now it seems my life - indeed, the world itself - has become manic depressive.

But I am not. Not yet. Disoriented, perhaps, and certainly susceptible to occasional bouts of chemical self-immolation, but not crazy. Why bother to go crazy when reality has already done it for you?

I know. This is not the first time you've heard this sort of thing from me. After four years of raving at you about how outlandish things seemed to be getting, I've come to feel like the boy who cried, "Weird!"

But then we entered the strange dream that has been 2005. By the end of January, I had run out of psychotic superlatives and, not being Hunter S. Thompson (thank Satan), I chose to dummy up. I quit writing BarlowSpams, aside from the occasional announcement or invitation. I threw in one bland blog post from the utterly surreal Madrid conference on Terrorism in March and thence ran on radio silence. As any BarlowFriendz who've been on the list since before March would know, I made no further public pronouncements. For 9 months, Tar Baby, he say nothing.

New theory of the Cuban assassination, based on new evidence. A documentary called Rendezvous with Death says Kennedy's "assassin was directed and paid by Cuba." [Link]

Veteran US official Alexander Haig told the film-maker that Kennedy's successor, Lyndon B Johnson, believed Cuba was to blame and feared a pronounced swing to the right if the truth were known that would keep the Democrats out of power for a long time.

According to Mr Haig - a US military adviser at the time and later a secretary of state - "he [Johnson] said 'we must simply not allow the American people to believe Fidel Castro could have killed our president'.

"He [Johnson] was convinced Castro killed Kennedy and he took it to his grave."

JD Lasica has created a torrent file that combines all the excerpts from his fine book Darknet: Hollywood's War on the Digital Generation that he's published online. [Link]

The Dover (Pennsylvania) school board voted to drop a policy requiring a statement on "intelligent design," saying that the theory of evolution is "not a fact" and referring students to a book that promotes intelligent design as an alternative theory. A U.S. District Judge recently ruled that intelligent design is religious, not scientific; teaching it violates the establishment clause in the First Amendment. [Link]

Telcos are trying to figure out how to charge companies like Google and Vonage for competing successfuly and taking away their business. They're talking about a "two tier" Internet and an end to net neutrality - the point being that the Internet and its technologies are becoming so pervasive and effective that they're killing the telcos. In the USA, of course, we should have no right to compete so effectively that we kill business models that have been flowing huge profits into various money bins, hence the various moves by telcos and others to preserve their turf via protectionist legislation. [Link]

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Once again, I'm leading a State of the World discussion with Bruce Sterling on the WELL. Bruce has just finished a year-long gig as Visionary in Residence at Art Center College of Design, and is in Austin for the holidays before setting out for Belgrade and other parts of the world.

India and China are tremendous stories. Even big pieces of Eastern Europe are getting onto the EU carousel. America's being run by corrupt Lysenkoist morons, but, debilitating as that may be for us Yankees, it also means that the remaining 94 percent of the planet has some chance at the limelight. Hey, South Korea could have been full of cloning superstars -- if they could just get over their endemic Asian urge to cook the books.

The USA right now is the buried shadow of the Confederate States of America. You can watch GONE WITH THE WIND, and it's the secret textbook of the Bush Administration. The South lost that war for a reason. The South didn't have it in them to be a major power, because they were bold, gallant, devout, crooked, dumb and full of unexamined anxieties.

The thing is, though: when a culture is "gone with the wind," it's never utterly and entirely gone. You can't make things go away by distributing them into the wind. It's just... up in the atmosphere. The emissions of the past form a smog. A breathable compost. You can't throw the past away and start over with a Year Zero. There is no "away." Tomorrow is this place, at a different time.

China's popped up in several conversations I've had recently; the nodding assumption being that China is ascendant and will become the dominant world economy, especially where technology is concerned. China has a couple of advantages over the current USA – relatively strong leaders and an emphasis on education, especially in the field of science and technology. Chinese leaders tend to be engineers. They're also Communists, and some believe that their market experimentation will fail because markets won't thrive without democracy. This may be so, but on the other hand, it takes more than a democratic intention and the wave of the executive wand to create thriving markets, and it'll be interesting to see how China evolves and whether the U.S. is devolving. More about China at technologyreview.com

Good news for John Shirley fans:

The Weinstein Company, the new company built around the producers of The Lord of the Rings, has optioned John Shirley's Del Rey books novel DEMONS for a "high five figure sum". Jim Sonzero has committed to direct. Shirley's novel IN DARKNESS WAITING is in development at Gold Circle productions ("My Big Fat Greek Wedding" and "White Noise"), and the script by Matt Venne ("White Noise 2") has just been completed. A third production company, part of a major studio, has inquired about the rights for his novel CRAWLERS but details are under wraps as of now. John Shirley's new novel THE OTHER END will be out in its first edition from Cemetary Dance in 2006. His novel John Constantine, Hellblazer: War Lord will be out from Pocket Books in February 2006.

Amazon link to the book Demons

We're at a point in the web's evolution where adoption is high and growing, and the daily accumulation of potentially useful data is daunting, as is the greater accumulation of noise. If we had tools for finding, indexing, and analyzing for useful research, that might lead us faster to connections and synergies that facilitate knowledge and innovation. Realizing this, the UK has created a National Centre for Text Mining "the world's first centre devoted to developing tools that can systematically analyse multiple research papers, abstracts and other documents, and then swiftly determine what they contain," using AI to look for entities and concepts. [Link]

The Austin Chronicle has a good piece by Kevin Brass about the Statesman's blog experiments, with a quote from yours truly. [Link]

Newspapers want to maintain a level of control in a format that thrives on a lack of controls, says Jon Lebkowsky, an active member of the local blog community. "The editor filter has value in the journalism context, but the lack of those filters is valuable for blogs," Lebkowsky said. To attract dedicated bloggers, he says, newspapers would have to alter their fundamental mindset, "to change their sense of what journalism is." If they can't let go, "it's not really blogging. It's just a newspaper using a different content management tool."

While the idea of "citizen journalism" is a quaint idea for college professors to bat around over lattes at Starbucks, the best bloggers – the ones drawing interest and audiences – tend to be, at the very least, semiprofessionals, laser-focused on a particular industry, company, or community, not soccer moms with a zest for writing newsy diaries. Bloggers like DailyKos, Wonkette, Gawker, and even the slimy Matt Drudge provide a daily blizzard of insider information and tips, serving as repositories for gossip and buzz as much as hard news analysis.

There's a European concept of "broadcaster's right" that suggests TV and radio stations can control the dissemination of their broadcasts. Now the U.S. delegation to the World International Property Organization wants to extend this control to the web, and as Andy Oram says, "this is a new threat to the public domain."

What would a webcaster's right mean? It would mean you couldn't retransmit content put up by someone else on the Web without permission. The proposal tries to indicate that the restriction covers only images and sound, but it's not clear that a line can be drawn between such content and other things, including text. At any rate, the idea of extending the broadcaster's right to the Web is bizarre and fundamentally out of sync with how the Web works. The whole basis of the Web is making links; people don't normally copy and retransmit material.

I take it back. Copying and retransmission happens on the Web all the time. It's call caching, and it's crucial to the efficient operation of the Web. Even if the webcasting treaty leaves a loophole to allow caching, the treaty may hamper another promising way of reducing the load on servers: chained downloads that piggyback on intermediate nodes, the basis for useful protocols such as BitTorrent.

The U.S. delegation is pushing for this strange new right under the catch-all rubric of "harmonizing" the Web with broadcasting, and, of course, that shibboleth of regulators, "technological neutrality." But because equating Web distribution with broadcasting is absurd on the face of it, one has to wonder what is really on the minds of the large portals who put so much energy into forcing this radical change on the public....

Recovering the canister of comet dust.

NASA's Stardust Mission ended successfully early this morning when the return capsule carrying samples from Comet Wild 2 landed in the Utah desert.

The sample return capsule's science canister and its cargo of comet and interstellar dust particles will be stowed inside a special aluminum carrying case to await transfer to the Johnson Space Center, Houston, where it will be opened. NASA's Stardust mission traveled 2.88 billion miles during its seven-year round-trip odyssey. Scientists believe these precious samples will help provide answers to fundamental questions about comets and the origins of the solar system.

A Chinese map supposedly drawn in 1418 shows the Americas, and if the date of origin is confirmed, we'll have yet another group claiming to have discovered America before Columbus. All pretty meaningless – I mean, there were people in America when the Vikings, Chinese, Italians et al arrived. What did they discover?

Nikon is doing away with most of its film cameras, which means that my old Nikon F will become a real museum piece. (I no longer use the Nikon or my Canon EOS, favoring the very portable digital Nikon Coolpix 3100 – I'm on my second one, in fact, having worn the first out by carrying it everywhere in my pocket. Why would anyone use film when digital is cheaper, generally easier, and immediate? The only down side I see with the 3100 is lag, but I've factored that into my thinking by now – and I can always upgrade to a higher-end digital SLR where the lag is barely noticeable. [Link]

Failing incumbent telcos have a new model in mind to boost their profits: charge certain kinds of broadband services providers more for moving their content across the telco's network. [Link article at MarketWatch] Mark Cuban agrees, saying that multiple tiers of service are necessary to ensure quality of service, sorta like toll roads and HOV lanes. Randall Stross had a different opinion, in the New York Times. That's the piece you should read and think about. Stross notes that both Bell South and Verizon are pushing the concept of a broadband fast lane, and he explains why it's a bogus request.

Woe to us all if the Internet's content is limited by the companies who also handle the plumbing. "The Future of Ideas," by Lawrence Lessig (Random House, 2001), shows how innovation and creativity associated with the Internet are the byproducts of its openness, its role as a commons that is accessible, by design, to all. Professor Lessig, who teaches law at Stanford, said last week that even now, broadband carriers have failed to demonstrate their commitment to the principle of network neutrality. "They've fought it at each stage," he said, "and they have never embraced the principle."

An illustration of his point popped up the same day. In an interview, William L. Smith, the chief technology officer at BellSouth, described to me his company's trial offering in West Palm Beach, Fla., last year of a speedy download service for Movielink content. When asked whether BellSouth would offer its special service on an exclusive basis to a particular content site and agree to exclude the sponsor's rivals, he did not hesitate in treating the question as a matter of simply settling on the right price. The N.F.L. and Nascar strike exclusive distribution deals, he said. Why not network carriers?

The largest Internet companies are the ones that could easily afford whatever terms the carriers demand for exclusive deals that would lock out smaller rivals and new entrants. But they have not done special deals with the carriers and instead have joined together to try to persuade Congress to protect the principle of network neutrality and prevent the Bells from striking exclusive deals with anyone. Last November, Amazon, eBay, Microsoft and Google, among others, formally registered their concern with a House committee that is revising the basic telecommunications law; they noted that a draft version of the bill failed to make network neutrality a matter of policy without exception. Whether the committee has responded positively to the suggestions from the Internet players should be known soon.

So we don't have network neutrality by accident, but by design, and attempts to balkanize levels of service threatens to stifle innovation while linking the telcos' pockets and rewarding their inefficiency (Stross notes that other countries, like Japan and Sweden, have much faster broadband service as a matter of course).

I should note that the incumbent telcos are not necessarily bad guys in all this; they're doing what they think they have to do to survive and serve their interests, as any business would do. The problem is that they've evolved from the monopoly culture of the old phone company, which included a believe that "what's best for Ma Bell is best for the country." The telcos have never got comfortable with competition in open markets - they prefer to use legislative power to create and protect profitability. They're not bad people, but their culture, if I've read it correctly, is both archaic and counterproductive.

Clever Koreans expect to have a robot-assisted police force and army in five years. They're using their robust network capabilities to mitigate expenses. [Link]

Smart robots need three basic functions of sensing, processing and action. Thus far, robotics researchers have tried to cram the three into a single dummy, causing expenses to soar.

Instead, the planned robots will be receiving most sensing and processing capabilities via a Web connection. Only the ability of movement will be located in the robot.

The Digital Convergence Initiative of the Texas Technology Corridor is holding a mobile content festival March 14, at a humdinger of a party we're putting together – I say we because I'm part of the DCI team, working on the party and a convergence track. The festival's awards will be presented at the party, which will also include music, convergent art/media/technology, and a lively bunch of technophiliacs. [Link to requirements for festival submissions.]

Interesting things pop up in Google's Earth's satellite views, such as a Lancaster bomber spotted flying over Stukeley Meadows in the UK. [Link to Cambridge Evening News]

Clear images available on Google Earth have sparked contests among users for spotting unusual objects such as the Lancaster. Other sightings include a ghostly apparition of Jesus in a Peruvian sand dune and military ships at sea.

The Washington Post turned comments off at the post.blog. According to Exec Editor Jim Brady, the comments included too many personal attacks. More than the Post could handle... though I wonder if they were trying to use existing staff to moderate? High-volume comment areas, like forums, generally need skilled moderators, or at least experienced monitors (monitors, unlike moderators, do little to drive conversation but remove posts that include trolls or personal attacks). It's economically difficult, though, for a newspaper to staff up with 24/7 moderators, who generally get $30/hour or more for their work. Hopefully the Post will find a solution; the interactivity is vital. [Link]

Inspired by Bruce Sterling's grounded response to James Lovelock's mind at the end of its tether, Jamais coins a new term, apocaphilia. Perfect. [Link]

Jonathan Alter hits the head right on the nail:

...his is not about whether it's right or wrong to wiretap bad guys, though the White House hopes to frame it that way for political purposes. Any rational person wants the president to be able to hunt for Qaeda suspects wherever they lurk. The "momentous" issue (Alito's words) is whether this president, or any other, has the right to tell Congress to shove it. And even if one concedes that wartime offers the president extra powers to limit liberty, what happens if the terrorist threat looks permanent? We may be scrapping our checks and balances not just for a few years (as during the Civil War), but for good.

Wow, here's a clear sign of mainstreaming: CBS is podcasting soap operas!

AP has an interesting bit of inaccurate reporting:

The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the collaborative Web encyclopedia, reached a temporary settlement with a Berlin court that will let users access the German-language version of Wikipedia at http://de.wikipedia.org, hosted in the United States, instead of its usual http://www.wikipedia.de.

Actually the site was always available at http://de.wikipedia.org/, without disruption. Some German Wikipedia users own the domain http://www.wikipedia.de/, and had a page there that referred users to the correct domain. Those users were ordered to take their page down breifly, but the order was reversed. The German courts never had any contact with Wikimedia foundation. [Link]

Jesse Garrett calls this the last blog story angle.

The label blog describes the form, not the content. Blog is a universal container for many kinds of content: correspondence, articles, essays, notes, novels... and if everybody's blogging, the term "blogger" doesn't mean much.

Or, perhaps, the meaning will change... we don't call everyone who can write a writer.

Darpa's wanting a prototype of a monster blimp for hauling soldiers and equipment. The blimp, called Walrus, a

"tri-phibian" (air, land, sea) zeppelin with a range of 6,000 nautical miles, ready to go aloft by 2008. "The program will not repackage 1930s technology or upscale the more limited commercial dirigibles of today," Darpa promised in its proposal. The Walrus will rely on new technologies, like static ion propulsion, says Preston Carter, the program manager.

Dan Gillmor's been posting about the Washington Post's removal of comments capabiltiy from its blog. In his latest on the subject, Dan says that the Post failed to set up its comment system with sufficient due diligence. They allowed freeform comments without authentication/accountability, as noted in a comment from a reader at the Center for Citizen Media blog. My own comment:

High volume comment sites, just like sites with forums, inevitably need some form of moderation or monitoring, but that need is mitigated somewhat by an authentication requirement. The need's still there, though, and often overlooked. My guess is that the Post didn't budget for comment moderation and didn't know where to find skilled moderators, so they backed off. An authentication requirement and 8 hrs/day of moderation, along with a real commitment to interactivity, would solve their problem.

Weblogsky pal David Kline asks "why did the much-predicted 2005 stampede by corporate America into the blogosphere fail to materialize?" I didn't know anybody'd predicted such a stampede; I would've told 'em it's unlikely. Even in the most open and loose corporate tribes, there's trepidation about various forms of interactivity online. Transparency is hard, and once you open yourself up, you have to clarify, and clarify your clarifications, and it seems like an infinite time/energy sink, impossible to control. Some of us like that sort of thing, most don't seem to. Especially those who've been programmed to believe in one way, carefully-controlled information flows. It's just gonna take a while. And, responding to Jeremy Wright's issue of a clear ROI: eventually a business that doesn't blog will be a business that doesn't sell, so it's worthwhile to kick the tires on the Cluetrain, even if you're not quite ready to board.

What I like about this piece by Scott Canon at KansasCity.Com is that he addresses the the real complexity of "fixing" the Internet.

“There’s no silver bullet,” said Tom Leighton, the chief scientist and co-founder of Akamai Technologies, which makes sure its clients’ Web pages remain available online even when they come under organized attack. He is also a member of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee. “We have to change as we go. The problems aren’t going to go away overnight.”

Neither, say some, will the system crash in an instant. “Look at the history of the planet. The sky falls very rarely,” said Bruce Schneier, a cryptographer and the founder of Counterpane Internet Security Inc. “We adapt. It’s not fun. It’s expensive. It’s pretty bad out there now. But it’s not critically bad out there.

“Nobody,” he said, “is going back to pen and paper.”

In a comewhat related story, the Washington Post published a good overview of the net neutrality question and the attempt by carriers to take some of the profits that companies like Google and Yahoo are making by making them pay more to push high-bandwidth content over their networks. See my earlier post on "the broadband dance."

Yahoo! doesn't "think it's reasonable to assume we're going to gain a lot of share from Google," according to CFO Susan Decker. "It's not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share." Indeed... this sounds realistic, and I have to admit I haven't even been thinking of Yahoo as a search company. I consider it more of a media aggregator. If Yahoo's smart, it'll move to the intersection of media and interactivity - more community-based. For instance, if I was Yahoo, I'd be trying to buy Salon and its online communities, Table Talk and the WELL. [Link]

Meanwhile Yahoo! says it's not giving up on search... just search dominance. I guess you could call that a capitulation.

My last post, about Yahoo's supposed decision to give up on search market dominance, drew a quick response from Qi Lu and Eckart Walther at Yahoo Search, noting "conjecture and confusion" about "Yahoo's commitment to being the world's best search engine." Great point - the CFO's comment didn't say Yahoo had given up on being the best, but that "it's not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search." Best and first aren't necessarily the same. Meanwhile Caterina Fake, now a Yahoo insider, posts about her irritation with bloggers who, she says, took the Decker quote out of context... accusing them of "piling on." I didn't read what others were saying, personally, but I can see where people might've read "abandonment of search" into the quote... but that's clearly not what Susan Decker was saying.

Its Q4 earnings report describes what Yahoo's up to:

First, we are expanding our content match services through the Yahoo Publishers Network to take advantage of the growing number of small publishers on the web. We plan to add new features to beta over the coming quarters including search and enhanced ad targeting. We believe the service will ultimately position Yahoo as one of the preferred advertising partners for small and medium-sized publishers.

Second, we are focused on improving RPS to better matching in relevance algorithms. While our matching initiatives will largely benefit coverage, we’re also focused on improving tools to drive higher relevance and click through.

And third, we are increasing the number of easy-to-use tools for advertisers and publishers, so they can buy more keywords, touch more creative and add more listings faster.

Meanwhile, to Caterina's point about bloggers and media getting it wrong, I think the bloggers were following media on this one (headline: "Yahoo! gives up quest for search dominance"), and her real beef should be with Bloomberg, and not with bloggers like Steve Rubel.

From the Guardian Unlimited , an eloquent argument for the restoration of Stonehenge.

I cannot see the point of Stonehenge in its present form. It is a monument to the cult of the picturesque ruin. Even for neo-ancients, the aura of crumbling, overgrown antiquity was lost when the stones were twisted, propped up and rearranged by the Ministry of Works and the site turned into a municipal rockery over the course of the 20th century. The remains have been thoroughly surveyed by excellent archaeologists and their findings have been published. The stones are disappointingly small, coming alive only at solstice and through the filtered lenses of coffee-table books. Avebury's stones are more evocative and the great Rudston monolith in Yorkshire more imposing.

Stonehenge is a place of pagan worship and as such should be handed to those for whom it means something, the druids and astronomical clock-watchers. They should be given a lottery grant and told to put the stones back in working order. The henge's essence is the astronomical alignment of its circles and avenues. It needs to be complete. We do not leave sundials out of line or watches without escapements or grandfather clocks without chimes. There is no difficulty in this. The missing sarsens came from Marlborough Down and the missing bluestones from Pembroke's Preseli Hills. Reconstructed, Stonehenge could make sense again, other than just to archaeologists.

In a welcome precedent, a federal district court in Nevada has ruled that Google's practice of caching web pages is fair use. [Link]

Jeff Jarvis has a good post about the real value of interactivity. "Interactivity is about more than reaction. It is about creation. It is not about controlled authority. It is about sharing authority." Indeed. (This resonates with a conversation I had recently with a reporter from the Austin Chronicle.)

Digital Convergence creates confusion about the future of media; many smart people are trying to grasp what's changed, and what those changes mean. Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 aggregates the thinking of several "2.x" usual suspects, and finds some of the best insights in Umair Haque's theory of media economics (link to PowerPoint).

The idea that we’re living in an “attention economy” is nothing new. But unless the media/technology industry starts listening to Umair and focuses on creating new ways to help people efficiently allocate their attention in a world of infinite options, the bubble will pop. And it won’t be pretty.

So let’s focus on the user. What the user needs is help allocating a finite amount of attention. And the solution needs to be personal — perfectly tailored to each user’s needs. The user needs a personal killer app.