Maria Bartiromo said, on CNBC, that Ben Bernanke didn't really mean, in his testimony last week, that the Fed was through raising interest rates. The market went batshit crazy before she'd finished talking. [Link]

With all the innovative "Web 2.0" stuff going on, who saw this coming? Microsoft and the New York Times have engineered a way to more perfectly replicate print design in web browsers. It's all about branding. [Link]

The design of a newspaper is an indelible part of its identity, and while the New York Times, long known as "the Gray Lady," added color in 1997, its print edition is still distinguished by a somber, restrained design and dignified serif typeface for text (Imperial), which are perhaps the most recognizable in the newspaper industry. And the Times' website has sought to mimic that flavor, most recently with a redesign that uses serif fonts, and which is intended to take advantage of larger computer monitors. But with the advent of the Times Reader, the paper's online version will bear a much greater resemblance to its print product.

A month or so ago, I abandoned Mozilla Thunderbird and started using Microsoft Outlook 2003 again. I've been meaning to blog about my reasons for jumping ship and why I feel let down. I don't follow Thunderbird development at all and have no idea why it hasn't grown more robust over the last couple of years, but my expectation when I made the move to Thunderbird was that it would just get better, but it didn't. It's probably great for many folks, but it's not so great for someone like me, with many thousands of emails a day, and many projects depending on email for communication.

I thought I would list my issues here, hoping Thunderbird developers would take note. Then again, maybe Thunderbird's not meant to be an application for professional use, so my case may be irrelevant. Whatever the case, here's what was bugging me:

• Thunderbird's spam filter isn't any better than Outlook's junk mail filter; in fact, Outlook seems to catch more spam. (I didn't do a study, but in Outlook I'm not feeling the same pain from spam.)
• Outlook provides more ways to sort and organize email. In my default view emails are grouped by date, which is very helpful.
• I use a lot of filters, so it's very helpful that Outlook gives me a way to look at all unread mail in one place.
• Outlook, of course, has an integrated calendar.
• I can create a follow-up reminder that will prompt be on a specific date and time to get back to a particular message.

Those are the more obvious issues. (I do miss one thing about Thunderbird - it was faster than Outlook, and search was easier/faster.)

Waiting for a more powerful Thunderbird here, but not especially hopeful. I'd also note that plugin development, for which I had high hopes, seems flat, and more focused on toys than productive tools. And plugins tend to break whenever there's an upgrade.

Dan Gillmor's been channeling the citizen media meme longer than anyone, in fact, he wrote the book. He just made a terrific speech at Columbia University about the democratization of media.

On my blog in early 2005 I posted an essay-in-progress. It was called "The End of Objectivity (Version 0.91)." I suggested that the journalism of the new century would be better served if we all considered abandoning the worthy ideal of objectivity and replacing it with a collection of honored principles, only one of which was not already embedded in tradition. Now, by reinforcing those principles with the emerging tools of a Digital Age, we can create something even better.

By giving that blog posting a version number of less than 1.0, I wasn't just making a techie joke. I was calling attention to another reality of tomorrow's journalism. In a craft that's shifting from lecture to conversation, the publication (or broadcast or whatever) is not The End. It is somewhere in the middle of an emergent system in which we all can keep learning, and teaching.

This is increasingly doable in part because of what has changed so much for so many: the collision of technology and media, which has helped democratize communications and is turning traditional notions of journalism in new directions. Now, I don't mean democratization so much as in the sense of voting -- though collective community thinking is an intriguing and valuable part of what's coming. I mean it in the sense of wide participation.

Adam Green of Moveon.org opens a a post about net neutrality at The Huffington Post by calling out Mike McCurry, who is fronting the "Hands of the Internet" scam. Why do I say scam? Because their message is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," implying that regulation would hurt the Internet. In many cases this is true, but regulation to preserve the Internet's openness, accessibility, and neutrality, Maybe we need a common carrier approach ("undertaking to carry for all people indifferently"), but if the Internet becomes a commercial network with tiered services operated for the benefit of the re-forming telecom monopoly, we may see an end to the explosive innovation of the last decade plus. Web 2.0 may give way to Television 2.0.

I was admitted as a delegate to the World Congress on Information Technology this week because I had served on WCIT2006's technology committee, though I haven't given the conference the attention it deserves – i.e. I haven't had time to participate in most of the sessions, unfortunate because I hear they've gone very well. WCIT, a conference of the World Information and Technology Services Alliance (WITSA), is described as "as a catalyst for social and economic development through the exchange of policies, ideas, and technology" that draws "2,000 business, government, and academic leaders from 80 countries."

This 15^th World Congress seeks to explore issues of impact and create actionable policy recommendations to world and technology industry leaders focusing on three issues of Global Impact: privacy and security, healthcare, and global digital access.

Marsha and I took a quick Bay area vacation since I was invited to speak at MeshForum on Monday. (I'm gathering my wits for a post about the MeshForum gathering.) We visited friends and ran around San Francisco and points north, cramming a lot of movement into a couple of days... our usual hyper-hoppin' vacation mode...

Here's a press release regarding an innovative campaign to free a blogger (Alaa Ahmed Seif El Islam) who was detained in Cairo:

Contact: Mary Joyce (MaryCJoyce@gmail.com, Skype name: demoblogger)

"Some governEgyptments think they can trampEgyptle the rights of those that oppEgyptose them and noEgyptone will notEgyptice. Well, that fact is changEgypting and we are changEgypting it."

From Business Week via /.: "It Feels Like 1998 All Over Again," an article that asks whether we have a new "Internet bubble" forming? The real question is whether investors will lose their minds again with "irrational exuberance." No bulls lurking in the stock market yet, and whole herds of entrepreneurs are bootstrapping, hoping to build "real" businesses rather than investment objects... so I'm not so worried about a bubble – I'm more worried that we'll fail to nurture innovative thinking, which is what it'll take to be globally competitive.

But the rising prices of Net startups are fueling a surge of me-too companies in hot areas such as social networking. With little investment required, these products are easily imitated. "We're in a company-creation bubble," says Joe Kraus, co-founder of Web publisher JotSpot Inc. "A lot of these companies will die."

Over the past decade entrepreneurs and investors have developed a peculiar tunnel vision about what works and what doesn't. That can hinder creativity. Financiers and founders may say they're looking for new Net ideas when, in truth, they're not. "They want only an idea that has been shown to work in the past with just enough twist to make it a new idea," says Edward de Bono, an expert on creative thinking.

Timothy Karr notes that telco front "Hands Off the Internet" uses what looks like an amateur animated cartoon to argue against "government regulation of the Internet," i.e. regulations to prevent tiered service and preserve net neutrality. [Link]

By way of followup to my "Outlook vs Thunderbird" rant: after traveling with my laptop and suffering long email downloads, it struck me that Gmail might be the right solution, so I started forwarding my primary mail stream to that account. Result was pretty good, actually, but I found some deal breakers:

• You can't paste rich content into Gmail and send it as an html mail, something I need to do for some of the lists I manage. (You can create html emails in Gmail, but only using Gmail editing tools.)
• Gmail lets you set up any email address as your reply-to, so I could continue to send emails as though from my primary address. However lists where I subscribed with that address wouldn't accept my message if they were set up for member posts only. This is because the better list management systems know not to look at your reply-to, which you can always manipulate... it looks at a sender address that's elsewhere in the header and usually not visible or accessible to the user. I was therefore going to have to change addresses in a bunch of lists to continue using Gmail.

I'm also using Google Calendar instead of Outlook's... it's a little easier to use but they haven't worked out data sync yet. An easy sync with Outlook or Palm, either one, would be handy.

From Information Aesthetics blog: "a set of aesthetic lighting displays on top of 9 buildings that visually samples the real-time activity levels from the inside of the buildings. the installation measures the movement & energy within buildings & makes them ambiently visible outside, so as people walk around the South Main gallery district of Memphis, they are able to see each building node & it's activity before they enter them." [Link]

James Sensenbrenner is proposing legislation to require ISPs to store records of user activities so that police will have access, ostensibly to assist them in tracking and catching pedophiles. Mitch Ratcliffe says the real target is "the American people's freedom to explore the Internet and ideas in privacy, because a few people in government think they know better what we should be doing." [Link]

Before the critics of anything anti-surveillance jump in, again, to point out that I suffer from a "pre-9/11 mentality" or that tracking user surfing isn't surveillance and that only the guilty have to worry, let's be clear: Recording and reporting what everyone does on the Net is surveillance. Surveillance is a function of government the United States has strictly controlled in order to minimize the government's, or an individual who gains access to surveillance data, ability to restrict individual choices or facilitate the use by a political party of data gathered by government to blackmail or intimidate citizens.

For all his good intentions with regards the security of the United States, President Bush suffers from an idealism that is much more dangerous than the pre-9/11 mentality, because he apparently ignored the 20th century. He has repeatedly said that he can look into the hearts of others and determine whether they are good or evil, the same kind of niavete that led Neville Chamberlain to appease Hitler at Munich. He actually suffers from a pre-Auschwitz mentality that refuses to acknowledge the critical lesson of the 20th century, the extraordinary depths of evil man, especially when left unrestrained by law, can acheive. Hannah Arendt, in her essay Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility, wrote that "realiz[ing] of what man is capable…is the precondition for any modern political thinking."

From CNN:

Gen. Michael Hayden told his Senate confirmation hearing that the controversial National Security Agency wiretapping program he helped institute would have caught two 9/11 hijackers in San Diego, California, before they carried out their mission.

Very mysterious... Movable Type includes Spam Lookup to control comment and trackback spam, and Spam Lookup includes default IP blacklist services bsb.spamlookup.net and opm.blitzed.org, and default domain blacklist services bsb.spamlookup.net and sc.surbl.org. Unfortunately, these services seem to be unreachable or nonexistent, so I'm assuming the lookups don't work. Movable Type still lists these as the defaults. Please comment if you know of other suitable blacklist sites.

Like Kevin Kelly, I'd like to make a yurt. Kevin reviews a guide to yurt construction called Mongolian Cloud Houses, noting that a yurt is a "tent house" which, unlike a tent, is not very portable, though you can move it if you have to. You can build a yurt yourself, though there are commercial versions (which aren't has loose and funky).

Procter and Gamble may be washing its hands (ha ha) of Ivory Soap (it floats!), according to a Cincinnati Business Courier article called "Clean Sweep," which says that "some branding experts suspect that Ivory soap is on the bubble." Puns abound. I was drawn to the story because I was just thinking yesterday about Ivory Soap, how I hadn't seen it around. It's still there, of course, but it's not blurbed because it's not sexy, and there's a zillion soap products on the shelves – commodity soaps, store brands, specialties (those $5 patchouli-scented bars you buy at Whole Foods Market). What's kinda sad is this bit from the end of the Business Courier article:

"Companies birth brands that have great lives, and sometimes they bury them," said branding expert Karen Post, author of the book "Brain Tattoos." "It's very normal and acceptable and common."

It's sad to see the old brands waste away, but we have many more choices, which may be a great thing. Then again, remember what the swami in the steambath said (in the film Head, starring the Monkees, written by Jack Nicholson): "... where there is clarity there is no choice. And where there is choice, there is misery." Yikes!

The 2006 Atlantic Hurricane Outlook published by NOAA suggests an 80% chance of an above-normal hurricane season, i.e. as bad as last year. " The main uncertainty in this outlook is not whether the season will be above normal, but how much above normal it will be." Batten down the hatches!

Crossposted from Polycot:

On the onlinefacilitation email list, Christopher Allen posted a link to his detailed post about Dunbar's number, proposed in R.I.M. Dunbar's paper Co-evolution of Neocortex Size, Group Size, and Language in Humans. Dunbar suggests that there is practical limit on group size for humans, generally thought to be 150 (as suggested in Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point and other books on human social networks). Chris sees this as a misunderstanding of Dunbar's work, which "suggests that a community size of 150 will not be a mean for a community unless it is highly incentivized to remain together." He suggests in the email that "there are at least two nodal sizes of non-survival groups, one peaking at 7-8, the other at 40-60." These numbers are relevant to online communities and virtual teams. Large online communites like the WELL actually tend to contain smaller communities (which on the WELL are organized as "conferences"). Observation tells me that communities may have more members than Allen suggests, but many are inactive or "lurkers" rather than active participants. At Polycot we see the Internet as a platform for a "social Internet" or network of many social networks, the molecules of which are generally within the limits Chris suggests, at least where active participation in any one network is concerned. You could build a social movement as a network of individuals and and smaller networks (hubs). Question is, how do you sustain affinity within a network of "small pieces, loosely joined"?

DIY Planner tells how to use a subset of the site's productivity forms to plot fiction, drawing on best practices of fiction writers. [Link]

The plot concept --for which you can use the Story Idea card-- is often the best place to start. The "summary" area is where you should distill your plot into a few succinct sentences. Just a few sentences? But I have lots of great ideas! I need more than a few sentences! Sure, it's wonderful to have lots of ideas (you did bring your journal or notebook, didn't you?), but the idea here is to bring focus to the task. Too many stories wander off in a dozen different directions with no coherent plot or theme, and the writer often becomes so frustrated with attempting to say so many things that he or she will often drop the whole endeavour. So, right now, your primary duty at this early stage is to tie all your little vague threads together into a unified whole.

We haven't seen much deployment of fiber to the home in the U.S. because of the costs involved, but MIT Technology Review says circuits that integrate electronics with optical components may speed things up. [Link]

Today, fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) is available in only about 15 U.S. cities, as well as some urban areas in Japan, Korea, and China, in part because it takes a huge investment of time and money to build all the infrastructure: to dig new trenches, to lay new fiber, and to install the fiber utility box on homes.

But there's another hold up: it's expensive to manufacture and deploy all the individual optic-fiber devices, called "triplexers," that must be affixed to houses. These triplexers, which come into play where the fiber connects to the home, contain the electrical and optical components that guide and collect the data-carrying photons that become Web pages, telephone calls, or video.

While new technology may do little to solve the problem of ditch-digging, it could make it much cheaper to produce triplexers, by integrating multiple functions onto a single chip. This technology, called a planar lightwave circuit (PLC), is already used in some fiber network applications. But there it integrates only optical components -- for applications such as triplexers, the chip needs to incorporate both electrical and optical components.

Austin's mourning the death of Clifford Antone, who put Austin on the blues map by creating what for years was considered the world's best blues venue. Yesterday there was a long wake at Antone's ("just stick around, music will happen" was the intro). [Video]. I waited 'til today to blog about Antone so that I could include links to the memorials at the Austin Chronicle's web site:

• Okie Dokie Stomp by Joe Nick Patoski
• This Be an Empty World Without the Blues by Bill Bentley
• Buried Alive in the Blues by Ed Ward
• I Saw the Light by Margaret Moser

Clifford Antone might not have set out to be a wise man of music, but he did just fine. Then the light went out. Just like that. But the sound – the pounding, strumming 12-bar march to the lowdown, the dance that so many of us in Texas have known for 100 years – its life extended in no small part by a kid from Port Arthur, is still coming across loud and clear.

"It was a hard time for blues," he continues. "The hardest time was right around '75. That's why we became so close with Jimmy [Reed], Clifton [Chenier], Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Walter Shakey Horton, and Sunnyland Slim. Some of them had never been to Texas. Some of them no one wanted anywhere, and here's this club of kids devoted to the blues. It just blew them away...."

I didn't know Antone, but ever time I saw him he was nod and smile, greeting me like I was an old friend. And I suppose the great thing about his career was that, by the time he died, he had so many old friends, and was completely intimate with the blues he loved.

Thomas Holmes of the University of Minnesota has charted WalMart's growth. You can also see an animated version of the progression as a .wmv video.

David Brin writes about the "bright fools" at the Cato Institute, but what he's really writing about is the current conspiracy to use free market arguments to divert more wealth to the wealthy. [Link]

... the Cato Institute has long promoted the worst social, economic and political conflation of modern times. A delusion that Adam Smith warned against. The notion that ownership of capital is the prime correlate with wise market capitalism. A very different concept, fundamentally, than saying that markets are themselves wise at allocating, rewarding or promoting innovative goods and services.

O'Reilly has a claim on Web 2.0 as a trademark when used in the name of a conference. Cory has a thoughtful post suggesting that O'Reilly reconsider. O'Reilly always tries to "do no evil" (or has that been trademarked by Google?), so they might agree with Cory, but I personally wish the term would go away. At Polycot we're starting to get requests to build "Web 2.0 sites" as though the term represented something more tangible than an evolution in our thinking about the web (as more like an operating system, and emphasizing its power as a platform for group-forming and collaboration). What's gonna happen when talented people start putting their time and energy into "web businesses" that are built around utilites that would've been Open Source projects a year or two ago? The various pieces that Dale Dougherty and Tim O'Reilly associated with Web 2.0 are important to understand, and I argued before that it's useful to have label for that rich set of memes. But now I'm thinking I'd like to see the term's use limited so that people can zero in on specific elements and patterns.

I made a brief post at WorldChanging.com with links to Yogyakarta Quake Resources.

pighed writes an account of his experiences in Second Life, with plenty of screen grabs to show you where he's been. People write stuff about Second LIfe all the time, but pighed, bless him, has illuminated the experience like nobody else I've read. Read this and see if you don't wanna go there.

having been on the road so much in Real Life, and having had an emotionally exhausting fekkin wreckage of a year, it was nice to have a place where i could build something for myself. it was a sort of spiral thing i made, learning how the system works (whenever you are born you have to learn The System) and so i called it Tenaya Spirals. when i got it completed, or in a stage where i wasnt thinking about it as much, Sparrowhawk would come over and we would sit down and talk with each other for hours on end about love, or history, or books, or what it means to enjoy a virtual glass of virtual wine, and if the brain, that is stuck inside of a dark, dank lockbox we call a skull can differentiate between the real and the virtual. we talked about her lover, the one she had to bow down to, who was really having an impact on her life, and how love does not need to be a thing that is in the real world (who hasnt spoken to their lover on the phone and felt satisfaction?) and we would watch the sun set.