More wrangling over email tools... though I've generally been happy with Gmail, there's one nagging concern: gmail's use of labels vs separate 'boxes' and the aggregating of related emails as "conversations." I like these ideas conceptually, but practically they've been a hassle, because I often over look email responses that are tacked onto original messages in that conversation style. I thought I would adapt in time, but it's not happening. So I'm using gmail pop access to retrieve email using Outlook, something I'd avoided before because it's such a drain on system resources. C'est la vie - I can't afford to miss messages, so I'm living with the drain, and I'm leaving mail on gmail so that 1) I can use it while traveling and 2) I have a searchable record there. On the other hand, I'm using Outlook to handle mail day to day. Still not an ideal solution.

Another advantage of using Outlook.... it's still works best for contact management. And I'm almost tempted to go back to Outlook's calendar, because it integrates with the Palm, which has been shoved aside since there's nothing in particular I'm doing wtih it right now. I used it almost exclusively as a mobile calendar and contact reference. Google integration with Palm, or with Outlook which then works with Palm, would be ideal.

Even more ideal: an open source alternative to Outlook that's as robust, or nearly as robust. I'm keeping an eye on Thunderbird. If there Thunderbird was better at handling spam and had better tools for tracking messages, it would be preferable. It does have a Palm module, though I haven't tried it.

We visited Midas Networks' gala 4th anniversary party yesterday, and Chris Boyd articulated his zippy elevator speech. He provides various levels of service, from colocation with minimal management to managed leased servers. Chris is a member of the EFF-Austin Board of Directors, and has been our resident expert on network technology (now joined by network topologist John Quarterman).

This fourth anniversary batch even had mariachis!

Matt Bai in the NY Times writes a knowing piece about the real meaning of Howard Dean's campaign and his current approach to leadership of the Democratic party, which is more like creating a whole new party without support of other current Dem leaders. Dean fell into his current role by accident, having tapped into an already evolving Democratic populism that comprised of outsiders who correctly perceived that they'd been marginalized as the party organization became more of a "private political club" for wealthy urban donors. [Link]

Over the course of the campaign, Dean turned into an apostle, in politics, of the economic concept of “disintermediation” — the idea that, in the Internet age, voters could connect with candidates, and with one another, without the party acting as the conduit. In a sense, this is what his candidacy was all about. He still believed, though, that only a strong national party could mobilize voters on Election Day. At the Democratic convention in Boston, six months after he dropped out of the presidential race, he met with frustrated delegations from 18 “untargeted” states, meaning that the national party and its candidate, John Kerry, had completely ignored them. Dean was appalled. “The best window we have to talk to Democrats, the time when they pay the most attention, is in the presidential campaign,” Dean told me, “and we were just saying to the people of those 18 states, ‘We’re not interested in you.’ You cannot be a national party if you say that to anybody. Anybody.”

After the Midas bash yesterday, we hustled over to End of an Ear for a cd release. The band was Praveen and Friends, aka The Happy Birthday Beast from Bananacity Productions... produced by Joe Lopez when he's not engaged in Actlab stuff (his usual). We missed the band's performance, but the tunes are online with a Creative Commons license. Click the Praveen link above to access the downloads.

The title of this post is one of two quotes that Bazooka posted yesterday, but he says the second (posted below) is more important... [Link]

After abstract expressionism, a lot of artists haven't been trained to manipulate material. Instead, they've been taught that what they're supposed to manipulate is concepts or ideas. To me, this is absolutely responsible for a lot of weaknesses in artists' production at this point. I'm an advocate of a return to very fundamental, very basic studio practices, which means that you first spend a lot of your time trying to figure out what materials will do, and in the process of figuring that out, you figure out what to do with them. [...]

Do writers get away with poor construction if their ideas are compelling? They shouldn't. I've been guilty of this though — my first draftism, dismissing craft and publishing poor constructions, focusing on getting the word out without enough attention to the power and clarity of the piece. Easy to screw up when you don't have an editor... as I was reminded via a recent experience with an editor whose feedback significantly improved the final deliverable (a brief article about danah boyd, which will be included in the first issue of the new SXSW magazine).

Geeks often believe that their great idea is enough to make them rich, but at a recent Bootstrap Web meeting here in Austin, we discussed how execution is everything. This appears as a theme in a post by Ron Garret, a top ten list of geek business myths.

Reality: A brilliant idea is neither necessary nor sufficient for a successful business, although all else being equal it can't hurt. Microsoft is probably the canonical example of a successful business, and it has never had a single brilliant idea in its entire history. (To the contrary, Microsoft has achieved success largely by seeking out and destroying other people's brilliant ideas.) Google was based on a couple of brilliant ideas (Page rank, text-only ads, massive parallel implementation on cheap hardware) but none of those ideas were original with Larry or Sergey. This is not to say that Larry, Sergey and Bill are not bright guys -- all three of them are sharper than I can ever hope to be. But the idea that any of them woke up one day with an inspiration and coasted the rest of the way to riches is a myth.

That's the first myth, but all of them are spot on, based on my experience. As I occasionally mention, I'm pretty sure Paco Nathan and I made the first attempt at online commerce with FringeWare, Inc., and we were ahead of the curve with many of our ideas, but we didn't have the right combination of ingredients to build our own version of, say, Yahoo, which began around the same time as FringeWare and was less interesting (IMO). But we focused on the wrong things. We had cool ideas and areas of brilliance - Paco built the first online catalogue, for instance, and a custom listserv. But we couldn't sell products online because there was no way back then to encrypt the transaction, and the bank told us in no uncertain terms that we would not accept credit card payments online. We accepted that because we were more interested in putting our "magalog" (magazine/catalog) together, but if we had pushed to find an acceptable way to sell products online, who knows where that would've gone?

I like myth #4:

It matters not one whit that you and all your buddies think that your idea is the greatest thing since sliced pizza (unless, of course, your buddies are rich enough to be the customer base for your business). What matters is what your customers think. It is natural to assume that if you and your buddies think your idea is cool that millions of other people out there will think it's cool too, and sometimes it works out that way, but usually not. The reason is that if you are smart enough to have a brilliant idea then you (and most likely your buddies) are different from everyone else. I don't mean to sound condescending here, but the sad fact of the matter is that compared to you, most people are pretty dumb (look at how many people vote Republican ;-) and they care about dumb things. (I just heard about a new clothing store in Pasadena that has lines around the block. A clothing store!) If you cater only to people who care about the things that you care about then your customer base will be pretty small.

Sigh...

It's a helluva note that remarkable people too often die broke, often because they've devoted their lives and their energies to missions that enrich the lives of many without too much regard for their own financial stability. The great Robert Anton Wilson, whose ideas and cosmic jokes influenced a whole generation of eyeball-rolling cultural dissidents, in fact reality dissidents, is suffering from post-polio syndrome, has little money and little means to make money. He could use our help. And for more on Wilson today, read this.

In fact, one day this past spring, after Santa Cruz moviegoers had lined up to see What the Bleep Do We Know!? in sufficient numbers to justify its three-month run, Robert Anton Wilson was lying alone, conscious but unable to move, on the floor of this one-bedroom Capitola apartment for 30 hours.

"It really didn't seem that long," says Wilson of his collapse, which ended when his daughter arrived and broke down the door. "And I remember thinking, as I'm lying there trying to move and unable to move: Hey, I may be dying now. And it didn't frighten me or bother me at all."

Wilson's subsequent trip to the hospital, the first of his adult life, was a different story altogether.

"The worst thing about hospitals," says Wilson, who was rescued when his daughter managed to break into the apartment, "is that all the rights guaranteed in the first 10 amendments are immediately canceled. You have no civil rights whatsoever. And the second thing is, all the ordinary rules no longer apply--you are no longer a person deserving of kindness, you're a disobedient child who has to be reprimanded and herded around. My God, I don't know why people put up with such treatment." Wilson, we can presume, doesn't particularly like being told what to do.

"Not by people who treat me like an idiot. Not when I'm 73 years old, I have 35 books in print, I supported a wife and four kids for most of my life. I do not appreciate being treated like a disobedient 4-year-old, the way they treat everybody in the hospital."

Of course, you don't have to go to a hospital to be treated like that, but Wilson's on a roll ...

"I was an editor of Playboy, for chrissake," he cries, as though that, if nothing else, should carry some weight in this culture. "I've had plays performed in England, Germany and the United States; my books are in print in a dozen countries. Why the hell do they treat me like a child? I refuse to tolerate it. If they won't treat me with dignity, I won't go anywhere near them, especially with all the goddamned germs they got floating around there. CNN did a report on it -- the number of people who are killed by diseases picked up in hospitals is much greater than the number who are killed by cars.

"I'm never going to a hospital again. Never, never, never, never! I will lie on the floor and die before I go back to a hospital...."

Doug Block returns to Austin for a screening of his documentary "51 Birch Street" Wednesday, October 11, 7pm at the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown (via the Austin Film Society). I posted my own review of the film prior to its SXSW screening last March. Anne Lewis interviews Doug in the latest issue of the Austin Chronicle. If you're an adult and you had parents, this is a must-see.

AC: What did you want people to take away from 51 Birch Street?

DB: Call mom; call dad. It's that simple. Don't wait until one of them is gone to realize you have stuff to talk to them about or things to say. You're an adult now. I think that there's always the question: Do we really want to know our parents? How do you get past how you relate to them – which is really based on being a kid? Your relationship is based on being 8 years old, and then suddenly you're 30, 40, 50 and still relating to them like you're 8. There's no way to break through that.

The buzz about The Departed is all about Jack Nicholson &ndhash; "Jack's Back!" – but the actor who holds the film together isn't Nicholson or DiCaprio or Damon. It's Mark Wahlberg, whose character Dignan, who has the soul and instincts of a ninja, is the moral center. But the rest of the ensemble is pretty great, and the film is a magnficent, tragic American rock opera. Critics who say the film is "light" for Scorses puzzle me. Based on the "Infernal Affairs," its plot may be a little improbabe here and there, but hey, that's opera. One critic complains that Nicholson's performance is over the top, but I would say "larger than life." It works in context.

Don't miss the New York Times' review of Doug's film. [Link]

“I didn’t make a film just because all this weird stuff was happening and I found the diaries and all that,” he said. “No. It was because my father was talking about himself. The movers were coming, Dad’s in the basement. The light looked really great. And I threw him a question or two. The next thing you know, it’s an hour later and I’m changing the tape.”

Mike Block was not, his son said, the kind of man to express his inner suburbanite. “And it was the first time I ever heard him talk about my mother,” Doug said. “Ever. Or the marriage. It was weird, you know? Kind of uncomfortable. But he seemed to want it, and I picked up on that. I saw a really unique opportunity to get to know my father better.

“But it wasn’t until later, when we were in the car, and I asked him ‘Do you miss Mom?’ and he said no” that Doug Block knew he was onto a movie.

I've seen the article I'm referencing here in a couple of places with different headlines, the gist of which is that young people are having second thoughts about communicating online, but the real story is that they're losing interest in social network sites like MySpace and Facebook. A decision to drop online social networks in favor of face to face encounters isn't the same as a decision to "log off" entirely. As I've said before, online social networks that don't have some point other than hanging out with acquaintances aren't "sticky." Users soon become inactive if there's nothing in particular to do. People will keep coming back to sites like Flickr, where they can share photos; LinkedIn, where they can do business networking; or MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, where they can quest together or kill each other.

The article says there are still many young people hanging out online, but they may be doing less, and not just because they're experiencing social ennui.

They are more wired than ever — but they're also getting warier.

Increasingly, they've had to deal with online bullies, who are posting anything from unflattering photos to online threats.

Privacy issues also are hitting home, most recently when students discovered that personal updates on their Facebook pages were being automatically forwarded to contacts they didn't necessarily want to have the information. Facebook was forced to let users turn off the data stream after they rebelled.

Increasingly, young people also are realizing that things they post on their profiles can come back to haunt them when applying for school or jobs.

Bet you saw this coming... Google's pixie dust never quite worked with video, so they're paying $1.65 billion for YouTube's dust. There's still the question whether YouTube was worth that price, even if it bolsters Google's convergent media chops.

I suspect the price was justfied, but some disagree. Mark Cuban, for instance, believes that YoutTube is an albatross, that it'll fall because it depends on copyright infringement to succeed. He just doesn't get the YouTube model. (Cuban's the guy who wanted to change the Internet from many to many to one to many, so there's a lot more he doesn't get.) [Link]

John Shirley, who with Bruce Sterling was an architect of the cyberpunk literary subgenre in the 1980s, is writing a new kind of apocalyptic novel. As right-wing "end of days" novels proliferate, John's writing "unapologetically" from the other end of the partisan scale, hence his novel's name, The Other End.

It strikes me that if the landlord of this property we call Earth returns and discovers how we've treated it, and how many of the better tenants have been treated, then he--or she or something beyond gender--may indeed wish to do some evicting and rebuilding. But a mythology cooked up in a narrow backwater of the world is unlikely to provide the blueprint for that Day of Judgment. Hence, alternative End Times tales are called for, for the sake of balanced viewpoint, at least, and--not least--in the hope of the beginning of a paradigm shift. This novel offers that alternative judgment day.

While writing the novel, John's developed another project, a web site called Signs of Witness, which "offers an equal opportunity for wry comment, entertainment, skepticism, and passionate belief in the forthcoming transfiguration of the world." A kind of apocalyptic Fortean Times, the Signs site is similarly addictive, filled with accounts of asteroid threats, elephant rebellions, prophecy, environmental degradation, and global destruction. You know... .fun.

Mark blogged a SubGenius rant byt Nenslo called "Act Normal," originally publsihed in '94. Here's the quote I like &ndash it's zenful:

I don't wish it to be thought that "Normal" thinking is essentially a bad thing. Very few people actually require an open mind or the ability to reason in the course of their everyday lives. A donut-shop cashier does not need to consider the ethics of selling blobs of greasy dough, and a philosophical and ethical outlook would be an outright detriment to a nuclear warhead assembly plant worker or oil-company lawyer. It is vital for most people to continue to act "Normal." Without such behavior the wheels of commerce and progress would grind to a halt. The excesses which make life in this modern world so simple for those who are free from the confining systems of dissatisfaction and complaint would suddenly cease to be. Without the ridiculously expensive and painfully loud car stereos, the mindless repetition of pop-song lustmongery, elaborate hairdos, huge jewelry and ten-thousand-dollar wristwatches dangling before the sleepwalking hordes there would be no cheap crummy apartments, discarded art supplies, inexpensive healthfood, or good secondhand clothing.

For the most part, the existence of "Normal" behavior is a good thing for those who require nothing more. But for people who care about things or think about things, who examine their lives and their place in the world, acting "Normal" is insanity, a trap which leads to constant dissatisfaction and eventual destruction. Acting "Normal" for such people is hating, complaining, finding fault, holding grudges, being afraid, and limiting themselves to the small world of everyday existence, the world even "Normal" people pay most of their money to escape from by buying distractions, or getting loaded and laid as much as they can before they die.

Bill Moyers has written a good explanation of net neutrality. [Link]

So why "neutrality?" Because since the Internet's inception, everyone, every site, regardless of the data load, has been given equal-i.e., neutral-treatment by providers, their content transmitted at equal speed. Net neutrality advocates argue that changing this system will give unfair advantage to deep-pocketed content providers, while start-ups, small businesses, and nonprofits who can't pay the piper will be unduly punished. The telecom proponents of the tiered system insist that they need these new fees (in addition to those paid by their users) to recoup the costs of updating their networks to handle all the new data-heavy content. Many also object to the additional government regulation and involvement that would be necessary to enforce net neutrality.

Neutrality supporters worry that without regulation, there's no guarantee that some traffic would move over the net at all. In other words, neutrality supporters say that only with regulation would internet users be guaranteed access to whatever they want to read, listen to, or watch online, and that without regulation, large telecom companies could block or censor things they don't like without consequence.

This post is based on a response I sent to a Bootstrap Austin messages that pointed to "Silicon What?" - an article Bijoy had written for Austin Business District. Bijoy's article explains why Austin shouldn't consider following a Silicon Valley model. My response, slightly improved from the original:

What I see among Silicon Valley and Bay Area tech entrepreneurs is a willingness to collaborate, and there seems to be more support for collaboration within the ideation infrastructure there than we see here. It also appears to me that there's a high degree of business creativity in the area, probably more than we have here.  While I agree that comparison is unproductive, it may be worthwhile to examine the SV mechanisms for innovation, which still seem to be effective. Consider how much of what's real about "web 2.0" originated there.

I've continued to work with the Digital Convergence Initiative partly because its vision is to create an infrastructure for effective collaboration. As you know, DCI understands and appreciates bootstrapping and considers the Bootstrap organization a vital part of local economic development. While reps from Austin's Chamber of Commerce are scurrying around the country trying to find businesses that will create presences here without contributing 100% to the economy of this region, we're looking for ways to support business development and growth that begins here, stays here, and creates something more than the local "farm" we see for some key convergent industries ( e.g. film, games, music).  A strength of SV is that there are so many companies that have their headquarters, if not all of their operations, in the region.

Thanks to Web Zen for noting Steve Reich's 70th birthday. Celebrate by grabbing a copy of Music for 18 Musicians, you won't regret it....

The League of Technical Voters' Code-A-Thon is under way. Kai Mantsch shot and edited a very cool bit of video of the first night:

I also shot a bunch of still photos, posted at Flickr.

At the SoFi Arts Fair in Austin today, Marsha and I visited Honoria and had a conversation (1.46MB MP3). We also bought a watercolor (poppies!).

... and she wants you to register and vote.

OpenID might just emerge as the identity management standard we've been waiting for. Technorati is the latest system to announce OpenID support.

Last Tuesday I was in SF for a meeting with Mark Warner and several techs, including my friend Trei Brundrett, who's been working for Warner's Forward Together PAC. Trei introduced me to Scott Chacon, who's been making political technology via his Open Source Democracy Project. We seemed to be pretty well aligned in our thinking, and in the issues that interest us. Scott posted an account of our post-meeting at the 21st Amendment.

Much of my focus these days is as the lead on an ambitious project for WorldChanging.com. We're creating a WorldChanging Blog Network, which will eventually have regional blogs with local teams scattered all over the globe. The first few to be launched will be aligned with WorldChanging's book tour in the U.S. and Canada. We're looking for bloggers; more information here.

As I work away on WorldChanging projects, the WorldChanging Guide to the 21st Century is #92 with a bullet on Amazon, based on presales (the book doesn't ship 'til Novemer 1). We're getting great reviews, such as Cory's at bOING bOING... Buy a copy!

At last Monday's Bootstrap Web meeting, Miles Sims of Innertee and Kyle Johnson of Bumperactive talked about their ecommerce companies. Both are totally bootstrapped operations. Innertee has just launched its new site, where artists can submit design elements that purchasers can incorporate in mixed design for t-shirts that are then printed through a high quality silkscreen process. The artists get a commission. The site hasn't quite launched yet, but they've worked out production and fulfillment operating as Red Army Surplus Co..

I've long been a supporter of Bumperactive - Kyle and I are friends and former neighbors. He's created a process whereby a user can design a bumpersticker, and order one or more copies. There's an online tool for designing the sticker, or you can upload a design. The bumpersticker is catalogued, and the designer has the option of taking a commission or committing it to a cause. Kyle, a journalist and activist, maintains a blog ("The Bumper Sticker Times") at the site and plans to add discussion forums. Checking the site to research this post, I just got carried away and created three bumperstickers...!

• Images from the meeting
• Complete audio of the meeting

Alex Steffen, WorldChanging's Fearless Leader

WorldChanging and Polycot have been working hard this week to launch a redesign of the WorldChanging site to accompany the release of the User's Guide for the 21st Century, which is looking like a potential bestseller based on Amazon sales. Business Week ran a Worldchanging piece, as did Seattle's The Stranger, which describes the book as "a latter-day Whole Earth Catalog with more than 600 pages of solutions to problems such as climate change, poverty, and the AIDS epidemic." The first comment on The Stranger's post asks "Is this sarcasm? I would love it if such a book actually existed..." It does, and it's beautifully-designed, and chock full of full-color images.

The redesign makes for a more professional wrapper for the same compelling content, and it includes a section on the book including a calendar for the book tour that's under way beginning this month. (I'll be at the Austin signing, along with Alex, Sarah, and Tessa, on November 28, 7pm at Book People. We'll have a reception afterward at the new REI, just next door.)

My own role at WorldChanging has been to create a network of local blogs, beginning with the cities on the book tour. We launched the first three of many localized blogs this week, for New York, Austin, and Portland. The goal at WorldChanging has always been to extend our positive, solutions-oriented conversation and give visibility to WorldChanging projects across the globe. The network we're building will be the platform for ongoing conversation, action and design leading, through many developments in many locales, to a better, more sustainable world.

Friday I took a much-needed break to catch Jon Dee Graham at the Saxon Pub, and he blew my socks off. Just back from a tour with Peter Case, he slammed two sets out of the park, his sound falling somewhere between Tom Waits and X, and I found myself thinking about the Velvet Underground in there, too. But he sounded most like Jon Dee Graham, and that's even better. I was inspired to buy a copy of his latest cd, Full, right there at the Saxon. (It looks like he's back at the Saxon tonight with The Resentments...)

Alex Steffen asks WorldChanging supports to "Help Us Hack the Publishing System" by buying the WorldChanging book on November 1st. As one of the authors, I second that request - and you'll be glad you did, because the book is attractive, informative, and a great read (all 600 pages!) It would also make a great Christmas gift!

WorldChanging is a small nonprofit with a somewhat larger voice. We're asking you to help us turn up the volume even more!