Author, consultant, and acknowledged thought leader focused on social media and the Internet, technology and technoculture, sustainability and "bright green" environmental action.
This has been a good week for WorldChanging, where I''m a regular contributor. I also contributed to the book WorldChanging: A Guide to the 21st Century, and I've been under contract since August to build a WorldChanging blog network with a presence in nine cities (and counting). WorldChanging's staff (Executive Editor Alex Steffen, Managing Editor Sarah Rich, and Alex's assistant Tessa Levine-Sauerhoff) were in Austin this week for a private gathering Tuesday night and a public book signing Wednesday, both organized by Solar Austin (where I'm a board member and helped pull the events together, along with Solar Austin co-chairs Jane Pulaski and Bee Moorhead, and board members Chip Wolfe and Mark Yznaga.) Both events had great turnouts – the book signing was SRO, and Book People sold out all its copies of the book. At the public event, May Will Wynn proclaimed November 29 "WorldChanging Day" in Austin. We had great reception afterward hosted by Austin's new REI, which is conveniently next door to Book People.
It's pretty wonderful to see how the WorldChanging solutions-oriented message lights a fire – people are ready to stop complaining and start working to build a sustainable future, and they're psyched to encounter a vocal crew who insist that we focus on what works. WorldChanging has never been merely optimistic – we embody a very practical kind of optimism that says
the tools, models and ideas for building a better future lie all around us. That plenty of people are working on tools for change, but the fields in which they work remain unconnected. That the motive, means and opportunity for profound positive change are already present. That another world is not just possible, it's here. We only need to put the pieces together.
Sarah Endline was in town last night, offering samples of Sweetriot's chocolate at 219 West. Marsha and I dropped by for chocolate and conversation - ran into Mason Arnold from Greenling and Vinay Bhagat from Convio as well as organizers Bjorn Billhardt of Enspire Learning and Bijoy Goswami of Bootstrap Austin. I'm not sure what we talked about, I'm deaf as a post. We did gobble some chocolate, though.
Bjorn Billhardt, Marsha Lebkowsky, Jon Lebkowsky, Bijoy Goswami
For those of you who are monitoring Weblogsky via RSS or email: I'll be offline for a bit. I have to move the site to a different host, and it's not clear how long that will take - I'm insanely busy with other stuff, so it might be after the first of the year. If I have something to blog in the interim, I'll do it at livejournal: http://jonl.livejournal.com/
The move's completed - Weblogsky is now reposing comfortably on a server at Midas Networks, now with a mysql back end. The move was relatively painless though, as always, there were several glitchy moments. It's a relief to be relaunching.
I've got the Christmas spirit, too, hence the candy cane, above (shot at Mozart's a few days ago).
During the move I made one post (this morning) at LiveJournal; maybe I'll get the LJ habit. Also, day before yesterday, I posted at Worldchanging about Fred Turner's new book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture.
Silona and Doryan, while organizing the EFF-Austin party for SXSW Interactive, got on a Gogol Bordello kick - and they've got me into it, too. Once you get this song in your head, it won't leave.
Rebecca MacKinnon blogs a new report from The Committee to Protect Journalists. She says the report provokes "some important questions about how the Internet is impacting the relationship between governments and journalists - especially now that the Internet makes it easy for just about anybody with an Internet connection to commit acts of journalism." Though more print journalists are in jail, "... internet journalists are a growing segment of the census and now constitute the second largest category, with 49 cases."
The report goes on to say "We’re at a crucial juncture in the fight for press freedom because authoritarian states have made the Internet a major front in their effort to control information." Rebecca suggests this is because Internet journalism is harder to control than print journalism.
Why? Because Internet journalism is harder to control than traditional journalism. It's much easier to create dissident news organizations online with a hope of reaching wide audiences across fast distances, and it's easy for anybody to blog what they eyewitness around them. An individual blogger can report a police crackdown he witnessed in his hometown, despite the fact that official media organizations have all been forbidden from reporting it. With traditional media, the main mechanisms used by governments to control journalists tend to be pre-publication or pre-broadcast: the issuing and withdrawal of media licenses without which a news organization cannot operate legally; political and economic pressures by authorities on editors and publishers to avoid or emphasize certain topics; and hiring processes that try to weed out journalists whose reporting would cause too much trouble. Imprisonment is the last resort when all else fails, or when people persist in setting up unlicensed or dissident publications.
John Shirley discusses his new book, The Other End, with RU Sirius on RU's podcast. The book is a left wing response to the Christian fundamentalist "end time" stories ("Left Behind"). John's pretty level headed for a transdimensional being. If you're interested in pop culture, horror, mysticism, or politics, you'll like this interview.
Last Tuesday I spoke about democracy to the Central Texas Chapter of the World Future Society. There's a recording of the talk (MP3). I talked a little about the history of politics on the Internet, and the distinction between democracy and advocacy. I also talked about tools for deliberation.
danah boyd has a longer piece on friending and community in social networks (published at First Monday). danah's writing on social networks is authoritative (and she's probably very busy, since social networks are the fad du jour). Everything she writes is insightful. [Link]
Part of what makes the negotiation of Friendship on social network sites tricky is that it’s deeply connected to participant’s offline social life. Their choice of Friends online is not a set of arbitrary personal decisions; each choice has the potential to complicate relationships with friends, colleagues, schoolmates, and lovers. Social network sites are not digital spaces disconnected from other social venues — it is a modeling of one aspect of participants’ social worlds and that model is evaluated in other social contexts.
Signal to Noise blog lists the 10 most popular newspaper typefaces according to an article at creativepro ona study by Ascender Corporation, font developers based in Chicago. As a long-time student of typography, I found this pretty interesting. (I worked nights as a proofreader for a large typographer based in Austin for several years, just to learn more about the field.). In web development, I find the constraints on font selection pretty frustrating. An interesting fact I didn't know before: many newspapers have custom fonts developed specifically for them, and see it as part of their branding. This reminded me that, when Paco Nathan and I started FringeWare, Inc., one of his first projects was to develop a FringeWare font. Our art director, Monte McCarter, developed at least one other font, called Denaturez. (The thorough and dedicated Paco, having found a whole new technology to bang round on, pretty much learned everything about the technology of magazine publishing, which is why Fringe Ware Review looked so great).
Thinking about this almost makes me want to start another magazine!
Internet Identity Workshop 2006b was December 4-6. [Link] I haven't read much on it yet, but wanted to point to the schedule, which has links to notes on various sessions. This was an unconference, documented on the fly by parti;cipants. Other links:
I think the "Thrill of the Hack" (TOTH) is a key factor in the success of technologies like RSS, tagging, and XMPP and I see it making OpenID successful even as I write this blog. I don't think I'm overstating the value TOTH to say that the web wouldn't have happened without TOTH.
But TOTH doesn't just happen by itself. Its enabled by "busy developer guides", robust open source development efforts, community support, hangouts for developers and curious users, and friendly easy-to-understand IPR policies (see sec 10.2.3). All of these things take deliberate effort, and yet in isolation may not seem to have any direct value for those investing time and effort. However, I think the evidence is clear that one of the best ways to enable a new open network technology is to enable TOTH and open source development around that technology.
Gabe goes on to express his concern that "the INames community has failed to enable TOTH."
Much of the effort on inames has focused on communicating how inames are usable to end users. But we haven't enabled developers to make INames (and even XRI, which doesn't necessarily rely on the global root directories) ubiquitous and we haven't enabled developers to go beyond what we've envisioned and come up with the really killer apps.
The distributed identity framework is still clearly a work in progress.
Gravy: here's a piece I wrote years ago about how we should all have ownership of our data... a viable identity framework could be a solution to the data sharing problem.
Yesterday even residual, almost poetic pain from removal of ingrown toenails couldn't stop me from catching The Resentments' low-cost, high quality (two hour) gig at the Armadillo Christmas Bazaar. This is, after all, the best rock and roll band in the world, and it wasn't hard to snag a chair on the front row, right in front of Jon Dee Graham, who nearly blasted me out of my chair with his lap steel guitar runs. The best news, though, is that I shot a bunch of photos, and you can check 'me out on Flickr. The band would also like you to buy their great new album, On My Way to See You, which they were playing (and selling) yesterday. It won't be released officially 'til January 23. While you're at it, you should also by Jon Dee Graham's new album, Full.
“This agreement between NASA and Google will soon allow every American to experience a virtual flight over the surface of the moon or through the canyons of Mars,” NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said in a statement.
Keith Olbermann ran four of his "special comments" on tonight's Countdown. These are his brilliant op-ed commentaries on the state of the USA and the disturbing vagaries of the Bush regime. Check the Countdown web site for links to all of the comments.
At Worldchanging, Serge de Gheldere presents a journal of his experience with Al Gore's training on presenting the global warming slideshow. Gore is using something like Buddha's direct transmission to spread the word. Key phrase: “People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.” [Link]
It's not the sugarplums, but the visions that dance in your head.
I'm trying to find that Christmas spirit again... neither the Christian festival, nor the commercial extravaganza, but the underlying swirl of magical energies that gather around solstice, a sense that seems to emerge as well in other traditions (Chanukah, Kwanzaa). It's in the air, not in the packages.
I found an interesting piece on Buddhism and Christmas at About.com, which says "though Christmas is a Christian religious tradition, the virtues it extols also feature quite strongly in Buddhism." It talks about Buddhist traditions of dana or giving, metta or loving kindness, karuna or compassion. These are part of the real tradition of Christmas, thought we all know they can be totally, completely absent from the holiday as redefined as a commercial driver. Black Christmas, indeed.
The visions that are dancing in my head right now are all about a possible future that sustains human life on earth, in a future where everybody has a shot at a decent existence; enough food and shelter for all, positive work experiences, economic justice, fair trade.... sugarplums.
Wired 15.01 (January 2007) lists Austin as one of the top ten geek cities in Texas. Reasons include the city's EFF connection, Dell, Whole Foods, South by Southwest, and our happening dorkbots.
Marsha and I went to some Christmas parties last night, including Andrew Donoho's famous annual nog party, where he serves tons of homemade eggn nog (great stuff) to a diverse mix of people that he knows from tech and alternative energy communities in Austin. Sufficiently lubricated by nog, Andrew and I were having a discussion of various technologies we've been thinking about, and when I mentioned digital identity, he talked a little about an idea he'd had for very secure identity management. It's called Papillon. I found a blog entry at The Escapist that includes an explanation of the technology...
Papillon will give users the power of "persistent anonymity." Those of us who inhabit virtual worlds already enjoy this power, to a certain extent. In one sense, it's nothing more than the identity of your avatar: Those who know the avatar Walker Spaight count on the fact that the same person (me) is behind him each time he appears in Second Life. What's important, here, is merely that it's the same person, not which particular person it is. Walker's identity is persistent, but at the same time it's anonymous in real-world terms.
The problem is, how can you know for sure? Passwords aren't the most secure pieces of information in the world. Of course, not many people are too concerned about who's at the controls of Walker Spaight. But if Walker were up to anything interesting - like selling Second Life currency on eBay, for example, or developing a project for someone in the virtual world - you'd at least want to know Walker was always Walker, and you'd probably want to know Walker was always me.
Papillon will allow users to make connections between their online identities that can verify both those claims. Rather than storing passwords or real-world identity information, Papillon will only store associations between identities in different contexts, encoded in such a way that the information is secure, even if it falls into the wrong hands. It seems a trivial thing on the surface, but the tools it makes possible could change how we think of our identities in online worlds. With Papillon, knowing eBay's WoWSalez0r is really the World of Warcraft toon he says he is becomes a trivial matter of simply asking at a Papillon-enabled Web site. If WoWSalez0r has registered there, you have your answer. And if he hasn't, you can make your own decision as to whether or not to do business with him, just as we do today.
Andrew mentioned that he hasn't had time to do much more work on Papillon, so it hasn't really been developed much further. If it's as powerful as his nog, it could be very useful.
Note the Charity Badge for Worldchanging in the right column on my web page (or follow the link). Says Alex Steffen:
I need to hit you up for some money. Not much, only $10, but still, your donation is critical for us, and here's why: Yahoo! is offering a $50,000 matching grant for the nonprofit which gets the largest number of donations before the end of the year using its new "charity badges." What matters is not the number of dollars, but the number of donors. Right now, you need 70 to be in the lead, but things are moving fast and we'd like 500 to be safe. We currently have three (though we just started a couple hours ago). If we're winning on Dec 31st, we think one of our major donors may step in and help us with a large donation, so we'll get the full $50K from Yahoo! $100,000 would be a major portion of our annual budget and you can help us win it.
So please follow the link and make even a small donation... they'll add up.
With a tumultuous 2006 ending, Alex Steffen asked Worldchanging contributors and allies "what's next." In my response, I ask for "a clear plan that explains how 6 billion people coexist on earth with a very high-quality standard of living."
I posted a set of Greezy Wheels photos on Flickr, shot at their terrific Christmas Eve show at the Armadillo Bazaar. Also sitting in: Maryann Price, Barbara Kooyman, Zhenya Kolykhanov, and Tony Airoldi.
Whacky Brits predict that "robots could one day demand the same citizen's rights as humans." Light switches and blenders will be next in line, no doubt. [Link]
Oddly, I was thinking about James Brown a day or two before he died, wondering how he was holding up and whether he was still touring. I was a James Brown fan starting 'round 1966. I'd heard his music before then, but it was "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" that got under my skin. I bought the album, a King record with a wild cover, and played it 'til it wore out. I've been listening to him ever since, Check out his discography at Allmusic – this was one hard workin' man.
Come here sister.....Papa's in the swing
He ain't too hip...about that new breed babe
He ain't no drag
Papa's got a brand new bag
Come here mama....and dig this crazy scene
He's not too fancy....but his line is pretty clean
He ain't no drag.
Papa's got a brand new bag
He's doing the Jerk....
He's doing the Fly
Don't play him cheap 'cause you know he ain't shy
He's doing the Monkey, the Mashed Potatoes, Jump back Jack, See you later
alligator.
Come here sister
Papa's in the swing
He ain't too hip now
but I can dig that new breed babe;
He ain't no drag
He's got a brand new bag
Oh papa! He's doing the Jerk
Papa...he's doing the Jerk
He's doing the twist ... just like this,
He's doing the Fly ev'ry day and ev'ry night
The thing's....like the Boomerang.
Hey....come on
Hey! Hey.....come on
Hey! Hey....he's pu tight...out of sight...
Come on. Hey! Hey!
Time Magazine made all of us "Person of the Year," and I've been thinking I should blog some articulate comment or other. Frankly, I'm just relieved. When Time last focused on the 'net, it was all about Cyberporn. At least this latest issue explores worthy and productive aspects of our New Life Online. Ethan Zuckerman writes a longer assessment of the Time piece and its various aftershocks, and he includes a d'oh quote that I kinda like (and missed, because I didn't wade through Time's article): Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. The older I get, the less I see wisdom, especially in crowds, and especially in media, either broadcast or interactive. But that's okay, we can't be smart about everything.
Seriously, so much of this stuff is buzz, and its like meringue - it's evaporating even as it sets. Time Magazine knows something's happening, but it doesn't know what it is. You can't really think it, anymore than you can approach surfing (either kind) as an intellectual exercise.
The Internet is popping up everywhere and more and more people are connecting. I think that's a god thing. I live and breathe Internet and media and live by those connections, even though I don't believe much of anything these days. What I think about these days is how to make those connections work, and how the connections might work to preserve the things connecting, all those eager minds. Perhaps a noösphere is forming.
One of the original aspects of the noosphere concept deals with evolution. Henri Bergson (1907) was one of the first to propose that evolution is 'creative' and cannot necessarily be explained solely by Darwinian natural selection. L'évolution créatrice is upheld, according to Bergson, by a constant vital force that animates life and fundamentally connects mind and body, an idea opposing the dualism of Rene Descartes. Later thinkers such as C. Lloyd Morgan took this work further, elaborating on an 'emergent evolution' that could explain increasing complexity (including the evolution of mind). Morgan found that many of the most interesting changes in living things have been largely discontinuous with past evolution, and therefore did not necessarily take place through a gradual process of natural selection. Rather, evolution experiences jumps in complexity (such as the emergence of a self-reflective universe, or noosphere). Finally, the complexification of human cultures, particularly language, facilitated a quickening of evolution in which cultural evolution occurs more rapidly than biological evolution. Recent understanding of human ecosystems and of human impact on the biosphere have led to a link between the notion of sustainability with the "co-evolution" [Norgaard, 1994] and harmonization of cultural and biological evolution.
Some people don't want schools to teach evolution, but they can't stop us from evolving. We can evolve with and without wisdom, with and without loud flashy and beautiful media. We can evolve with or without Time Magazine.
Web Design Journal says Google has ended the Web 2.0 era by taking Blogger out of beta. Onward, they say, to Web 3.0! This is just wrong on many levels. First and foremost, Web 2.0 is a convenient label, not a real project with a clearly defined beginning and end. Though Google is a prominent practitioner of Web 2.0 voodoo, no single company can bring an end to the fuzzy conceptualization, and Web 3.0 doesn't necessarily follow (what happened to Web 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 etc.?)
Meanwhile Tim's attempted a new definition of Web 2.0. This light definition, and the paragraph that follows, makes a lot of sense, though it doesn't have to be called "Web 2.0"... I don't know that it's a change so much as a realization (which is pretty much what Tim is saying in the paragraph that follows the definition).
Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. (This is what I've elsewhere called "harnessing collective intelligence.")
(Eric Schmidt has an even briefer formulation of this rule: "Don't fight the internet." That's actually a wonderful way to think about it. Think deeply about the way the internet works, and build systems and applications that use it more richly, freed from the constraints of PC-era thinking, and you're well on your way. Ironically, Tim Berners-Lee's original Web 1.0 is one of the most "Web 2.0" systems out there -- it completely harnesses the power of user contribution, collective intelligence, and network effects. It was Web 1.5, the dotcom bubble, in which people tried to make the web into something else, that fought the internet, and lost.)
In the nineties, when some of us were ranting about bottom up/community/online social networks/interactive and participatory, most of the business people who were ready to call the Internet an industry and monetize every bit were missing this point, and it worked against them in a big way. Many who got the point failed, too, because there wasn't enough air to breathe; they suffocated. "Web 2.0" is just a label, but it represents new sources of oxygen, room to breathe again, and everybody breathing in the same direction.
Take a look at Go2Web2.0 – "the complete web directory" – if you want to find innovative stuff that's been popping up in the wake of the 2.0 meme. I find myself wondering by what criteria a site is selected for this index. There's a go2web2 blog... recently launched and tech crunchy. (As you probably know, Tech Crunch has its own index – I don't know the criteria for selecting those, either. I suppose the criteria can be pretty loose. If Web 2.0 is an era defined by a way of thinking about the web, and not some specific set of technologies, you could include just about anything developed since the 2.0 meme appeared.
Ars Technica reports that comScore will "take Web 2.0 seriously" and get away from page views as the metric for determining a site's popularity (since many Web 2.0 sites are built with technologies like Ajax that don't generate page views for many uses of the site). Site metrics have always been a bit of a problem; creating a better way to determine popularity could be a very good thing.
... I know of more than one major acquisition deal involving hot Web 2.0 sites that have been stalled on this account. Site owners aren't about to leave money on the table because of what an analytics firm says, but companies in acquisition mode aren't always looking beyond the metrics. What's worse, the inaccurate numbers give a false impression of what's really attracting and retaining users online, and it's particularly unfair to the most cutting edge sites. Consider MySpace: do they really deserve the #1 spot simply because to do anything on MySpace, you have to load many, many pages? MySpace was built to generate page views. Other sites are built to minimize them.
To make matters worse, many of these traffic measurement services use data collection methods which are known to undervalue certain classes of users, including those dedicated to technology. comScore, for instance, tracks users who voluntarily participate in an e-commerce tracking system, and then it uses behavioral data from those opt-in users to extrapolate trends on a massive scale. As you might guess, this means that some sites are under represented. Ars Technica, for instance, attracts highly savvy readers who by and large do not opt in to such systems. The same is true for most technology sites online, and their scores suffer; comScore does not truly know our audience, only a small portion of it. Other metrics might rely on a toolbar or similar opt-in systems, which immediately raises the question of what qualifies as a "standard" Internet user. If that definition remains "guy who buys things online using Internet Explorer with this special toolbar installed," then you can see the problem.
In another world, the Wall Street Journal is questioning whether Web 2.0 is another "bubble." This is a debate about markets between two vcs, Todd Dagres and David Hornik. This is probably a good place to wrap...
Mr. Hornik: I think that you aren't giving Web 2.0 entrepreneurs enough credit. Sure, there are some "me too" sites out there. There always are. But the amount of rapid innovation in online services has been staggering -- from Skype to Digg to Six Apart to YouTube to Flickr to Facebook... The list goes on. They aren't microprocessor companies with years of patent-protected intellectual property. On the other hand, they are innovating around things that matter to consumers today. And I believe they are being appropriately valued, not just by potential acquirers but by the consumers themselves.
You say that billions are going to be lost. I think that overstates the potential problem. Certainly billions haven't been invested to date. It takes a whole lot of companies to get to billions when investing a few million dollars at a time. On the other hand, if a few billion dollars are lost in the face of exits like Skype and YouTube, and others that I see making hundreds of millions in the future, then the market is doing well and investors and entrepreneurs alike will emerge decidedly net positive. That doesn't sound like a bubble to me. That sounds like a vibrant market for innovation.
Mr. Dagres: Aha! We agree on what may be the most important point -- great entrepreneurs are the key to building valuable companies. If you invest in great people, you have a good chance of making money. In the current market there are gifted entrepreneurs that will benefit and thrive. These people will start disruptive companies that look for what will be hot rather than what is hot. They won't be lumped into the Web 2.0 category; they will define their own categories. This is what will separate the few winners from the many losers. So in closing, I am leery of Web 2.0 but I am always going to invest in great people pursuing big ideas.
Mr. Hornik concludes: I was recently asked by an entrepreneur what I thought would be the next great technology in the coming year. I told him I thought it would be the Internet. We have just started scratching the surface of the enabling power of the Internet. Whether it is called "Web 2.0" or "New Media" or "Enterprise 2.0," Internet services are going to drive the world's economies for the foreseeable future. To me that doesn't spell bubble, that spells opportunity. [Italics mine]
How many Second Lifers can dance on the head of a pixel?
This is like a joke that starts, "two avatars walk into a bar..." Clay Shirky, who happens to be a human being (though I'm sure his avatar is out there somewhere), exposes funny numbers in media reports on Second Life, a graphical online community that's pretty hot at the moment, or seems to be. If you look at Second Life's web page, you see that it has over two million residents; Clay thinks that figure overestimates the number of actual participants, and he explains why. I've wandered into Second Life several times, and it appears to me, based on the numbers of avatars I see standing around, that there are only handfuls of people logged in, yet that trusty SL home page says there are over 18,000 logged in right now. I suppose that means they're on many different islands... I assume an island is a server, and each server has a limited capacity... we know that graphical virtual realities are constrained, especially when served over networks and carrying a lot of traffic.
A lot of people really like Second Life. I know several people who seem to spend a lot of time there, especially my friend Wagner James Au, who's become the official blogger for the Second Life community. He doesn't get into the funny numbers controversy, though an unofficial SL blog, Second Life Insider, is all over what Tateru Nino calls "a new media firestorm." In fact, I suspect only a very small group of people know that Second Life even exists, and a tinier number still will know about Clay's complaint (which is really more about the press playing fast and loose with numbers, than about Second Life). I only know about the controversy because Xeni blogged it at bOING bOING, which I seldom have time to read, though I read it more often than I read Clay's stuff. (Lamentably, because Clay's always a great read.) So who has time to follow all the various tempests and all the many teapots? And how do 18,000 people (let alone two million) find time to hang out at Second Life? Shouldn't these people be in a lab somewhere, curing cancer?
I know I should be writing a year-end summary, even though I'm put off by all the top ten lists and summaries of others. It's just what people expect. A good start might be a poem in the New Yorker that came today, Blue Song by Tennessee Williams. I never met Tennessee Williams but I knew his sister in law Joyce, Dakin's Wife, who was born in my hometown and hung out with my parents. She was very pleasant... it was hard to imagine her in a Tennessee Williams play. Here's the poem:
I am tired.
I am tired of speech and of action.
If you should meet me upon the
street do not question me for
I can tell you only my name
and the name of the town I was
born in – but that is enough.
It does not matter whether tomorrow
arrives anymore. If there is
only this night and after it is
morning it will not matter now.
I am tired. I am tired of speech
and of action. In the heart of me
you will find a tiny handful of
dust. Take it and blow it out
upon the wind. Let the wind have
it and it will find its way home.
I suppose by including that poem here, I signal that I'm depressed. I suppose it's normal when you get older to start losing your enthusiasm, to wonder what it's all about, to feel a little tired and a little depressed. That's really okay.
The poem has a literary feel to it and reminds me how I once thought that I would be a successful writer. I never dreamed that I would spend so much time writing and giving it away, as I do here at Weblogsky. Then again, I was pretty innocent about life's financial demands back then. This was before I understood business and thought people could just do things.
That's a long digression – I should get to my summary. I thought at various times that I would be a writer or a film director or an attorney; each phase was driven by high hopes. Ultimately I've become an Internet professional, which means I have a career no one could envision when I was in college. I was an English major and I wanted to write – somehow I think that ideally suited me to become an Internet pro. I was fond of publishing, wanted to learn all about it. I worked for years with typographers learning about their craft, and the process of printing books. That was good preparation for web publishing, though I have to admit the web is a bit of a letdown, design-wise, after you've studied how to make books. The web doesn't let you much control over the appearance of your publication.
My year end summary is about the web. 2006 was a transitional year, it seems to me. The Internet and the web seemed to sink into the fabric of our reality more than once before, but this year it really seemed to become Important. This was the year of convergence. All media is data now, and it can be transported from one device to another with relatively little effort. The web is replacing everything. It replaces television, radio, records, newspapers, magazines, books... all those things are still around, but they've leaked onto the web, and the web is where they really exist, despite the legacy of paper and analog media devices.
Every year I give advice and help to the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Conference, part of the larger set of conferences that include music and film. Interactive was like the bastard child, small and sort of ignored by the others, until 2006. Last March it was a different conference, larger, more professional, more of a scene. More THE scene, I should say, because music and film are leaking or converging, becoming part of the interactive world. I think that was a key story in 2006, and I'm surprised that others aren't mentioning it, though Time Magazine did try to kill it with an acknowledgement ("label it, and you dispense with it.")
Another big 2006 story: people finally accepted that global warming is a very real phenomenon. Some people didn't, but most people did begin to see the problem and want to do something about it. Green thinking is more common. I think much of this can be traced to the work Bruce Sterling started in 2000 with the Viridian Design Movement. He had the right instinct: at the time environmentalism was not a compelling interest, it was boring, and too much of it was doom and gloom. Realizing that global warming was seriouis enough that it had to get into our heads and stay there, he proposed a design movement, because design movements really can transform consciousness. I helped a little by building and maintaining the Viridian Design web site, so I was in a position to gauge the movement's effect. You could see Viridian thinking grow and spread, so that people who had no idea who Bruce Sterling was and had never heard the word Viridian were influenced by it, if indirectly. We waited too long to do much about it, we're probably really screwed, but at least we're a little more conscious about it.
2006 was, in fact, a year that I tried to be more conscious of a lot of things. It was the year I realized I had grown up – you don't realize it til your life is 2/3 over. It was a year I started reading more and listening to more music, listening closely. It was the year I could finally acknowledge that I'm not a nice person (but no one else is, either, not really). It was the year that Tom Ferguson and Larry Lockard died, and each death in its own way forced me to confront something profoundly wrong in the way I'd been living. Confront and admit it, though I don't know that I changed anything. It's still good to be aware.
It was the year I realized how totally committed to the Internet I've become. I just live and breathe it. I'm not even sure why anymore, it just fits. I get how it works, and I spend my time helping other people leverage its power. I stayed with it even when there was no money in it; that's how I know I love this work. Like a good musician or mechanic, I've got it in my bones now, I have muscle memory about the Internet. I walk around in it and I don't get lost. 2006 is the year I realized I'd made my choice, though it's a choice I made fifteen years ago. I realized that the future is all present now, and this is what I'm doing.
Was Tennessee Williams really depressed when he wrote that poem? Or was he just doing what he did best?
Thanks to Boing Boing for posting a pointer to a comparison of Digg and NewsTrust at Mercury News. I'm not a Digg fan, but NewsTrust is intriguing. – stories are rated on ten factors. Will I read it? Not sure. Newscloud is similar and even more interesting than NewsTrust, I think. It's a news-sharing community.
Someone's actually written a serious book about the "wonderfully absurd" UFO whacko George Adamski, reviewed at a ufologist's blog, The Orange Orb. The book, Looking for Orthon by Colin Bennett. Follow that link to Amazon, and you'll find a review of the book (by Rory Coker of Austin) that's probably a much better read than the book itself.
The typical pseudoscience book has the characteristic that each chapter deals with a different topic and is completely unconnected to previous and subsequent chapters, and to the book's supposed title or theme. Colin Bennett has found a new paradigm! Each of the 17 chapters in this book, supposedly about 1950s "contactee" George Adamski, is THE SAME! Each chapter starts with a bit of completely unreliable "information" about Adamski, and then veers into precisely the same diatribe, reworded only slightly from chapter to chapter. The word "pandimensional," as a result, occurs on just about every page in the book. Invariably, we hear about the irredeemable and total evil of science, scientists and indeed scholarship or scholarly integrity of any kind in any context. Then we hear about Lee Harvey Oswald, JFK and Marilyn Monroe. Then we hear about Uri Geller, the long forgotten Ted Serios the bellhop and "thoughtographer," Pacific Cargo Cults, and the same few Adamski followers. And then we get an incoherently presented Fortean account of a saucer sighting or a haunting or whatever pops into the author's mind at that particular moment.
When I was a teen or preteen, I forget which, I read an Adamski book, the name of which I forget, but I always wanted to steal the title of one of his other books, Flying Saucers Farewell, for a film script I never wrote. (I was fascinated with flying saucers after seeing the scifi classics, This Island Earth and Earth vs the Flying Saucers). I still occasionally run across Adamski references because pursuing Forteana is one of my guilty pleasures. My favorite Charle Fort quote: "If there is a universal mind, must it be sane?"
Terry MCarthy at ABC News blogs an "uncut" account of Saddam's hanging. [Link]
There are five men in black face masks who are visible on the gallows platform around Saddam, acting as guards. As they guide him towards the trap door and put the noose over his head, they start chanting religious slogans with the names of Moqtada al Sadr (the head of the Mahdi army, accused of organizing death squads against Sunnis) and Baqr al Sadr (the father-in-law of Moqtada). Saddam, a Sunni, is outraged at this last-minute provocation, and tells them to “go to hell.” This is generally where the two TV stations cut the video, but on at least one occasion that we saw, Arabiya allowed the video to keep rolling: The cell phone camera is jerked down to the ground, as if the person holding it had to conceal the camera, then it is slowly raised up to Saddam again, and suddenly his body shoots down through the trapdoor. At this, the Arabiya anchor came on and made a scissors symbol with two fingers with a mischievous grin on his face, as if to say that they really shouldn’t have shown that, but so be it. A cynical voyeuristic ploy, nudge nudge wink wink...
The online version of The New Yorker reposts a fascinating 2002 piece about James Brown, by Philip Gourevitch. [Link]
A thousand people had gathered in the midday sun to see him, most of them white, and around the periphery marched several hundred protesters, chanting, "James Brown sold out." Suddenly, a very loud, thumping beat blared from the sound system, and Mr. Brown appeared onstage, rapping out a karaoke version of his new song, "Killing Is Out, School Is In," with a vocal accompanist, who barked back, "I don't think they heard you, brother. Say it again." Despite the volume, their voices were barely audible over the chants of the protesters. From here and there in the crowd, people began hurling pennies at the stage. Two young black men looked on, discussing James Brown's presence in tones of disgust: "He's done. . . . He's finished. . . . Out the window with all them records—like Frisbees."
All at once, with the song still playing, Mr. Brown spun around and walked offstage. He did not wait for applause, or return for it. One second he was there, and the next he was gone. Protesters surged toward him as he climbed into his limo. Mounted policemen moved to hold them back. An old man screamed, "Bring Elvis back—they both dead now." James Brown got back out of the car to hug a well-wisher. A few protesters rushed forward, and he ducked back inside. With the police cavalry as an escort, the car finally began to move off. A new chant began: "Say it loud, we got him out now."
YouTube is late in delivering a content identification system to prevent users from posting content that infringes copyrights. Richard Waters, writing for Financial Times, suggests that this will irk traditional media companies that were holding off on lawsuits against the company, which has deeper pockets since Google bought it. [Link] Though possible lawsuits could be a major hassle for YouTube, I wonder if they would be successful, if YouTube can show a good faith effort to prevent users from posting material that infringes.
