"Open services" is the new open source? We were just discussing this last night and Tim O'Reilly blogged about it this morning – with Web 2.0 and "software as a service," open source licenses are, if not obsolete as Tim says, certainly less relevant than open architectures and APIs. [Link] Ian Betteridge comments on Tim's post, saying

I'd question your assertion that Web 2.0 and software-as-service form "many of the most important types of software today." They're certainly important in terms of an interesting (and growing) niche in the overall software eco-system, but not important enough in terms of revenue to make the bold claim that "open source licenses are obsolete".

Cory at boingboing notes that emusic, where I do most of my shopping these days, is the second largest online music store in the world. Cory links to a USA Today article that says eMusic has 11% market share, second after ITunes at 67%. The site, which provides mp3 files without copy protection, focuses on independent music, cool cutting-edge stuff that you might never find on the other sites. The truly great if obscure stuff is visible on eMusic because they find ways to tell you about it - reviews and a site 'magazine,' as well as reviews ported over from allmusic.com. Best news: it's cheap... 25 cents per track!

So what if we make the Earth uninhabitable – we'll just move to the moon! The Alliance to Rescue Civilization wants to create a kind of lunar Noah's Ark where DNA for all species will be stored, as well as "a compendium of all human knowledge." I think they're missing something: if "civilization" can't prevent the destruction of human life through war or indifference, a project intent on sustaining civilization doesn't seem all that promising. [Link]

Good quote of the day from CNet, about the contention that young people become video game "addicts." [Link]

"If a little girl spent hours reading Nancy Drew books, no one would send her to a book addiction clinic, because people perceive books as nutritional," said Jason Della Rocca, executive director of the International Game Developers Association.

Full story here.

Nicholas Lemann has just published an essay called "Amateur Hour: Journalism without journalists," which inspired Jay Rosen to write a long and pretty rich PressThink. I was going to blog Jay's comments, but I've tripped over my issues with Lemann's piece.

Lemann says

In fact, what the prophets of Internet journalism believe themselves to be fighting against – journalism in the hands of an enthroned few, who speak in a voice of phony, unearned authority to the passive masses—is, as a historical phenomenon, mainly a straw man.

Lemann builds his own straw man here – who are these "prophets"? I know many bloggers advocate or practice citizen media, and none of them seems dedicated to this fight that Lemann describes. Many are authors and journalists themselves, and their vision is not that they and other bloggers would "fight the enthroned few," but that they would at best partner with established journalists, or at least augment their reporting. Lemann goes on to say

Every new medium generates its own set of personalities and forms. Internet journalism is a huge tent that encompasses sites from traditional news organizations; Web-only magazines like Slate and Salon; sites like Daily Kos and NewsMax, which use some notional connection to the news to function as influential political actors; and aggregation sites (for instance, Arts & Letters Daily and Indy Media) that bring together an astonishingly wide range of disparate material in a particular category. The more ambitious blogs, taken together, function as a form of fast-moving, densely cross-referential pamphleteering—an open forum for every conceivable opinion that can’t make its way into the big media, or, in the case of the millions of purely personal blogs, simply an individual’s take on life. The Internet is also a venue for press criticism (“We can fact-check your ass!” is one of the familiar rallying cries of the blogosphere) and a major research library of bloopers, outtakes, pranks, jokes, and embarrassing performances by big shots. But none of that yet rises to the level of a journalistic culture rich enough to compete in a serious way with the old media—to function as a replacement rather than an addendum.

I don't agree with his assumption that "the blogosphere" aspires to "replace rather than add." I'm not so sure bloggers are conscious of either intention, actually. I don't start my day thinking I'll one-up the traditional media, or add to its body of "objective reporting."

Suffice to say, I don't think Lemann quite gets blogging, probably because he devotes his attention elsewhere. This wouldn't be a problem if he wasn't so eager to generalize about what "most" bloggers believe, and what "most" blogs represent. He quotes a few small "citizen journalism" efforts, then trivializes citizen journalism, saying that it mostly "reaches very small and specialized audiences and is proudly minor in its concerns." This is like sampling a few smalltown newspapers to support an argument that traditional journalism is "proudly minor in its concerns."

Criticisms aside, I agree with Lemann's conclusion: "As journalism moves to the Internet, the main project ought to be moving reporters there, not stripping them away." I would also add "help interested bloggers learn more about the craft of journalism," and I think that will happen. I also spoke with a friend who's a journalism professor at a state university recently, who said they're rethinking their entire curriculum as a result of new media developments like blogging.

As Jay points out, regarding his project NewAssignment.net, the real future of journalism is in "bring[ing] full-time reporters into productive alignment with smart mobs of citizens." (See "Blogs grow journalism," January 30, 2005.)

Arthur Lee was the creative force behind the band Love. Love's first three albums were a significant part of my life's soundtrack, especially the remarkable "Forever Changes," one of the greatest rock albums, if rock is the correct classification. (It was really unclassifiable.) Lee was difficult, made some wrong turns, spent time in prison... then made a triumphant return to the stage in 2002, touring and performing the complete Forever Changes, though his backing band split with him in August 2005, evidently frustrated at his mental and physical issues and a resulting decline in the quality of his performances. He was treated for acute myeloid leukemia.

Arthur Lee died yesterday, August 3, 2006.

This is the time and life that I am living
And I'll face each day with a smile
For the time that I've been given's such a little while
And the things that I must do consist of more than style

This is the only thing that I am sure of
And that's all that lives is gonna die
And there'll always be some people here to wonder why
And for every happy hello, there will be good-bye
There'll be time for you to put yourself on
— Arthur Lee, "You Set the Scene"

Love performs My Little Red Book:

A couple of insightful posts following on the Nick Lemann "Journalism without journalists" piece in New Yorker. After posting about it, I was thinking that further discussion would be a waste of energy – thinking it's pointless for those of us who are stewing in the rich juices within the blogosphere stewpot to spend energy wrangling with those who stand outside, watching the pot boil, reluctant to jump in.

However there are a good couple of follow-up posts, from Jay Rosen and Rebecca MacKinnon, that I should mention here.

In "The Pros Gonna Blog You Under the Table," Jay Rosen questions the contention within some circles that professional journalists are inherently better at the blog sorta thing; that independent blogging will collapse and the web will become an "ordinary media space."

But what the sweaty champions of “journalism as a form of blogging” overlook is how hard it is for your average reporter to thrive in the link-filled, argument-rich, emotionally-present, here’s-where-I-stand style that traditional bloggers have cultivated over the years. It takes time. Perhaps the hardest part is you actually have to be interested in what other people are saying.

Jay notes that "some of the most prominent press bloggers, faced with the rigors of posting every day, have quietly abandoned the form...."

Rebecca, in "'Real' Journalism on the Read-Write Web," responds to Nick Lemann's concluding statement in his New Yorker piece, "As journalism moves to the Internet, the main project ought to be moving reporters there, not stripping them away." Rebecca agrees:

Absolutely. Journalism schools are not going to be doing their jobs unless they're doing everything possible to help students get comfortable alongside bloggers and everybody else here on the Internet. Bloggers hang out here every day, ready to engage journalists in debate and conversation, and even to collaborate with them for the sake of a more informed public discourse. The most effective journalists of the future will find ways to utilize the Internet's read-write potential, as opposed to 20th-century media's read-only capacity.

Rebecca points to another excellent responses to Lemann's piece, written by Jeff Jarvis, a successful convert from traditional to citizen media. Jeff writes about "Bigger, Better Journalism," providing a list of new possibilities for journalism on the web.

I would argue that social media is evolution, not revolution. Dinosaurs may resist evolution, but eventually they get what the mammals are trying to tell them, and become birds.

Salam Adil compares two Iraqi blogs commenting on the Middle East war. The comments are quite different, but "there is a common thread. A deep hatred of the hypocrisy of media and governments. and a recognition that the days of peaceful negotiation are over." [Link]

The Boston Globe has a new definition for Web 2.0: "...the second wave of Internet start-ups, based on Web content, social networking, digital media." In an article that focuses on Web 2.0 as VC-funded business, Robert Weisman writes

Since the Google offering, however, venture investors have been disappointed by the dearth of successful exits by Web 2.0 start-ups that have gone public or have been sold to established companies. An exception was MySpace.com, the popular social-networking site snapped up last year by Fox Interactive Media for $580 million.

The search for niches that can generate substantial paydays for their venture backers is intensifying as many traditional high-tech sectors, like computers and software, have matured.

Tim O'Reilly writes about some Open Source wrangling at OSCON, but the real story here is about the meaning of open source in the world of 'software as a service.' We need an open services model. [Link]

While Joe Lieberman's minions were accusing Ned Lamont and unnamed bloggers for the collapose of the Lieberman campaign's web site, Kos and his readers found some interesting facts. Lieberman's site is hosted by a bulk hosting provider called MyHostCamp for $15 per month. The site was on a shared server with 73 other sites, and with a 10GB bandwidth limit. Other sites on the same server are working, so there clearly was no denial of service attack. Kos asks "Will the Lieberman campaign reimburse state and federal investigators wasting resources to confirm that the site went down because the campaign was too cheap to hire a quality hosting provider?" [Link]

RU Sirius' latest NeoFiles podcast includes an interview with Austin's Chris Nakashima-Brown, who "has been compared to J.G. Ballard, Mark Leyner, William Gibson, and Jorge Luis Borges… on 'The Love Boat.'" [Link]

Rupert Murdoch's analysts found that devoted MySpace users tend to leave the site for one reason, to use Google's search engine. Never one to lose a pair of eyeballs if he can help it, Murdoch's made a deal to incorporate Google Seardch at MySpace and other Fox Interactive Media sites. [Link]

In one stroke - or, to be more precise, in billions of key strokes - Rupert Murdoch has paid off the $US585 million he spent acquiring MySpace last year and has gone a long way towards paying off the $US1.2 billion he has forked out in his attempt to convert his newspaper, movie and television empire into a major presence on the web.

Kyle Johnson notes that Bumperactive.com has produced a set of bumperstickers for the Crawford Peace House, founded in 2002 as a firm antiwar presence eight miles from George W. Bush's "Western White House." The Peace House "offers a culturally diverse environment for spiritual growth and intellectual understanding that gives hope to humanity by providing peaceful alternatives to war.... Our Vision is to make the Crawford Peace House a culturally and religiously diverse center for spiritual growth and intellectual understanding that offers hope to humanity by providing positive alternatives to the cult of war."

Shoult out to Kyle, who's kept Bumperactive, "the world's finest bumper sticker cooperative," happening over the years and built it into the source of choice for adhesive expression!

Gartner Inc. says some of the technologies that will have the greatest impact on business over the next ten years are in the Web 2.0-social software realm... e.g. social network analysis and collective intelligence (which they define has individuals working together with no central authority to produce intellectual content... which is commons-based peer production, aka open source methodology).

Other high-impact technologies: location-aware applications, event-driven architecture, and semantic web. [Link]

Western (as in American) values are literally driving the Japanese crazy, and one result is that the population is shrinking because the birth rate is falling and the suicide rate is rising. [Link]

A spokesman for the Mental Health Institute said that the emphasis on individual performance was driving Japanese workers — particularly those in their thirties — to mental turmoil. “People tend to be individualised under the new working patterns,” he said. “When people worked in teams they were happier.”

If my homage to the late Arthur Lee piqued your interest and you want to learn more about him, check out allmusic.com's tribute.

Twenty years later, it's hard to believe that any list of the greatest albums of all time would not include Forever Changes, which is a testament not only to the strength of the album but to how Love's reputation has only grown over time. And frankly, although they are a band that captured the sunny, hazy vibe of the Summer of Love, they seem to be a band that was almost designed to be appreciated at a later date. Their music seems to float out of time -- there are strands of folk-rock, garage rock, and of course psychedelia, yet they don't comfortably fit into any of those styles. They were too mystic for folk-rock and never were as earnest as the folkies, either. They could rock hard, as the rampaging "Seven & Seven Is" proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, but they were also too beautiful and precious to be categorized as just a garage band. And while they certainly were a mind trip to hear -- they dove head first into side-long explorations, like "Revelations" on Da Capo -- the lush orchestrations of Forever Changes are far removed from roiling acid rock, as was the irrepressible cheerful vibe of "¡Que Vida!" for that matter. Love was simply like no other band and that's why it's easier to marvel at their achievements from a distance; separated from the time and judged on the music alone, it's easier to hear how they were special, and even if you can wonder why any of their first three albums weren't huge hits (and there were good reasons why, chief among them their lack of touring), you kind of know that music this unique is better heard at a later date.

When the Wall Street Journal starts talking Apocalypse, that's gotta be a bad sign.

A passage from the Ayatollah Khomeini, quoted in an 11th-grade Iranian schoolbook, is revealing. "I am decisively announcing to the whole world that if the world-devourers [i.e., the infidel powers] wish to stand against our religion, we will stand against their whole world and will not cease until the annihilation of all them. Either we all become free, or we will go to the greater freedom which is martyrdom. Either we shake one another's hands in joy at the victory of Islam in the world, or all of us will turn to eternal life and martyrdom. In both cases, victory and success are ours."

In this context, mutual assured destruction, the deterrent that worked so well during the Cold War, would have no meaning. At the end of time, there will be general destruction anyway. What will matter will be the final destination of the dead--hell for the infidels, and heaven for the believers. For people with this mindset, MAD is not a constraint; it is an inducement.

Actually, you know Google video's not really new, but it's replaced Froogle on the set of links hovering above the Google home page's search box, and it's certainly improved after a messy beginning. Google's not about to concede this market to YouTube. [Link]

Unlike the other choices Google lays out on its Homepage and internal search results, Google Video has become its flagship offering which represents what may materialize as the future of Google when it comes to 2.0 Style Web Community, Multimedia Advertising, Behavioral Targeting beyond search, and Google’s direction beyond our mobiles, laptops and PC’s; and into our TiVo’s, Cable Channels, Satellite & Traditional Radio, and Friendship Networks.

Somebody told me once that I shouldn't mention "Internet access as public good" in debates about municipal networks because that creates a frenzy of resistance in the minds of the duopolistic telcos/cablecos and the legislators they've lobbied so successfully over the years. I can understand the resurrected Ma Bell's concern: they understand that their real value is in their networks; bad news if upstart municipalites start building their own. And this concern isn't new: when Austin, Texas tried to build it's own fibre-to-the-home network in the 1980s, telcos lobbied the Texas legislature for a law that would end the project.

In a world where network access has significant implications for economic development, public safety, education etc., there's a growing sense among smaller rural towns and cities that they'll be left even further behind than they already are if they don't have robust networks, and they're generally underserved by private providers who realize rural networks will be expensive to build and not particularly profitable.

Which brings us to Powell, Wyoming, which is building its own fiber-optic network "capable of delivering ultrafast Internet, cable TV and telephone service to virtually every household and business...."

The rise of community-backed projects has sparked debate about whether it's proper for government to compete with private enterprise, and whether broadband technology is a luxury or a virtual necessity that cities should provide, the way they do water or garbage service.

''Is it a commodity where you pay for what you use and leave it to the private sector? Or is it a utility, as important to today's lifestyle as water and electricity?'' said John Anderson, a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who has studied and written about the debate.

''A lot of communities feel it's in their interest to step in and offer it,'' he said.

The local telco (Qwest Communications) and cable provider (Bresnan Communications) oppose the project, of course. But more cities want to do this because they're not getting what they need from incumbent providers. And they're not going to wait around. [Link]

Bruce Schneier says the measures implemented at airport security gates aren't making us any safer; they're just for show. [Link]

But only temporarily. Banning box cutters since 9/11, or taking off our shoes since Richard Reid, has not made us any safer. And a long-term prohibition against liquid carry-on items won't make us safer, either. It's not just that there are ways around the rules, it's that focusing on tactics is a losing proposition.

It's easy to defend against what terrorists planned last time, but it's shortsighted. If we spend billions fielding liquid-analysis machines in airports and the terrorists use solid explosives, we've wasted our money. If they target shopping malls, we've wasted our money. Focusing on tactics simply forces the terrorists to make a minor modification in their plans. There are too many targets -- stadiums, schools, theaters, churches, the long line of densely packed people in front of airport security -- and too many ways to kill people.

Security measures that attempt to guess correctly don't work, because invariably we will guess wrong. It's not security, it's security theater: measures designed to make us feel safer but not actually safer.

Future technologies are suddenly present, especially robots. We don't have Robby to synthesize umpty-gallons of whiskey (a la "Forbidden Planet"), but we do have Roomba to tidy up the house, and we have a whole dheap robots appearing, like Idog, which "resembles a collision between a bag of marshmallows and a cell phone, with vague canine overtones. " [Link]

Kiko Calendar - the web site, the software, and the domain name - is for sale on ebay. Evidently the competition from Google Calendar was ... disheartening. [Link]

Justin wrote that one of the lessons he learned from Kiko was not to get distracted by side projects. It's true they burned up a lot of time working on other ideas. Perhaps if they hadn't, they'd have been so far ahead by the time Google Calendar launched that everyone would have used Kiko instead. Perhaps, but I doubt it. The killer, unforseen by the Kikos and by us, was Google Calendar's integration with Gmail. The Kikos can't very well write their own Gmail to compete.

While I don't think this case implies the party's over for web startups, it is significant in one respect. It seems to be the first example of Google benefiting from the Microsoft Office effect. In the 80s and 90s, Microsoft gradually killed off the competitors of its individual applications by making them tightly integrated. Obviously this works for web apps too.

"Signs of Witness" is John Shirley's new web site, "devoted to compiling apocalyptic and 'apocalyptic' events, observations, eccentricities, etc, all with an end-times flavor." (Thanks, John!)

Some politicians are joining "businesses, news organizations and others looking to exploit the growth in user-driven sites." [Link]

Russ Kelly, spokesman for GOP gubernatorial candidate John Binkley in Alaska, questions how these efforts will translate into votes. He recalled how Democrat Howard Dean had embraced cutting-edge Internet tools during the 2004 presidential race, but ''couldn't even get out of the primary.''

Even more relevant: the Dean campaign, despite its evident appeal to younger voters, failed to get them to the polls in Iowa. On the other hand, Dean leveraged his supporters in a successful attempt to take control of the Democratic party, so his efforts didn't exactly fail.

The real question is not whether politicians use the tools, but whether they understand the tools they're using. Most won't, because they're steeped in the culture of broadcast politics. I'm still waiting to see a politician that understands the Internet, and understands how the Internet and a new kind of society are coevolving.

The music industry's found a new reason to fire up its cease-and-desist machine: guitar tablature sites "where users exchange tips on how to play songs like 'Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,' 'Highway to Hell' and thousands of others." [Link]

Assuming a tablature site musters the legal resources to challenge the publishers in court, some legal scholars say they believe publishers may have difficulty arguing their complaints successfully. Jonathan Zittrain, the professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University, said “it isn’t at all clear” that the publishers’ claim would succeed because no court doctrine has been written on guitar tablature.

Mr. Zittrain said the tablature sites could well have a free speech defense. But because the Supreme Court, in a 2003 case involving the extension of copyright terms, declined to determine when overenforcement or interpretation of copyright might raise a free speech problem, the success of that argument was questionable. “It’s possible, though, that this is one reason why guitar tabs generated by people would be found to fit fair use,” Mr. Zittrain said, “or would be found not to be a derivative work to begin with.”

After spending some time editing the Enterprise 2.0 article at Wikipedia, Ross Mayfield saw it disappear, a victim of speedy deletion because it failed to meet Wikipedia's neologism criteria. [Link]

At one point every term was a neologism, language evolves, faster for some people, and the new becomes mainstream.  What's interesting is that Andy McAfee's initial Enterprise 2.0 definition (freeform social software adapted for business) still stands, but is being extended in consistent ways.  Jeff Nolan's insight that enterprise mashups are of processes, while Web 2.0 mashups are more simply data, is significant.  Vinnie challenges us further.  Dion Hinchcliffe offers up a definition of Enterprise 2.0 (richer than what I quote) as liberation....

Great reference: danah boyd is compiling a list of everyone doing research on social network sites. Goal: bring them all together at some point. [Link]

Asronomers demoted Pluto today from planet to "dwarf planet."

The decision at a conference of 2,500 astronomers from 75 countries was a dramatic shift from just a week ago, when the group's leaders floated a proposal that would have reaffirmed Pluto's planetary status and made planets of its largest moon and two other objects.

That plan proved highly unpopular, splitting astronomers into factions and triggering days of sometimes combative debate that led to Pluto's undoing.

Sony just paid 65 million genuine dollars for Grouper, a video sharing company nobody's heard of and nobody uses (they have one percent of the market). We're pumping air, and it's really hot. [Link]

The latest Web Zen: travelling zen, for the armchair traveller, and for those of us who're too busy to take a real vacation:

http://www.quietamerican.org/vacation.html
http://www.turnhere.com/
http://www.driveproject.com
http://www.yutakaloveslondon.com/
http://www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/29/
http://www.alphalink.com.au/~richardb/page4.htm
http://www.lostamerica.com
http://www.roadsideamerica.com/

I was especially interested in the Lost America site, where Troy Paiva notes that he's been posting his latest at Flickr. It's great stuff. He says he's "been doing night photography/light painting in abandoned places since 1989 and have been running the 'Lost America' Website since 1998."

Our Bootstrap Austin Web Subgroup met last Monday for more discussion of new web paradigms (aka Web 2.0), continued from last month's meeting, where we focused more on definitions of the various aspects of Web 2.0 that Tim O'Reilly included in his seminal article on the subject. We were going to talk this time about business models; while preparing earlier in the day, I decided that "Web 2.0," while important, is more about infrastructure than direct wealth creation. I.e. don't expect to get rich by developing clever Ajax widgets or sites based on the architecture of participation. A few new companies, like Google and Basecamp, and established companies, like Yahoo, will make real money from products that they develop. However most of the Web 2.0 stuff is going to be cheap or free, and while you might make a living from some innovation you've created, you won't get rich. Consider email, which was the killer app for the Internet - everybody does email, but I can't point to any company that's built a tower of wealth on an email product. Email platforms are commodity, and there are great free packages like Thunderbird and Google's ad-driven Gmail.

We also discussed how the new paradigm is tech-driven, but it's really more social than technical, and it's not exactly new. I've been preaching for years that the real character of the Internet is interactive, its real value in the way it supports connection and communication. What we now call Web 2.0 acknowledges that aspect of the Interweb, but it's not so much that we're onto something new; rather, the movers and shakers of "Web 1.0" missed the point; they were building according to media/broadcast paradigms that never played to the Internet's real strengths and advantages.

We recorded the meeting; a version of it should appear on Bootstrap's Bootrap podcast... or you can check out the raw 44MB (90 minute) MP3 here.

Mark Warner appeared for half an hour or so on Second Life this afternoon – actually a test run for his planned virtual Town Hall. I sat quietly on the front row until it was over... then I started floating, couldn't resist.