David Pescovitz reports that Loren Coleman will have to take a break from his great cryptozoology blog, Cryptomundo, due to financial hardship. [Link] You can help by posting a donation or buying something at Cryptomundo.

Stewart Brand was a big influence on my thinking (and doing), so I

was interested in Jamais Cascio's response to a Sunday NY Times piece about Brand, "An Early Environmentalist, Embracing New Heresies." The article says Brand "has become a heretic to environmentalism, a movement he helped found," but Jamais notes that the environmentalism of the article no longer exists; it's been replaced by the "bright green" movement a bunch of us have been pushing, more or less beginning with the Viridian Design Movement. We wouldn't necessarily find Brand's thoughts heretical, at least not for the reasons he thinks. [Link] My own thought about Brand is that he's never been a great thinker, but he's drawn out some great thinking from others... kind of a catalyst.

Jamais really is smart, and he reads other smart people, such as David Roberts. Jamais paraphrases a Roberts argument re. nuclear:

the Bright Green reluctance about nuclear power has far more to do with it being centralized infrastructure and dated technology than with any fear or loathing of atoms. The environmental situation in which we find ourselves demands a fast-learning, fast-iterating, distributed and collaborative technological capacity, not a system that bleeds out investment dollars and leaves us stuck with technologies already on the verge of obsolescence....If we're looking for resilience, flexibility and innovation, the nuclear industry is not a good place to start.

Jamais' conclusion about Brand:The conventional meaning of "heretic" is one who goes against dogma, and the positions that Stewart takes here just don't meet that requirement. There's no doubt that it would be possible to find self-described environmentalists who fit the stereotype that Stewart is responding to, but one of the hallmarks of the modern environmental movement -- and the reason why the "heresy" model is arguably obsolete -- is that, when it comes to solutions, nothing is a priori off the table. All solution options can be considered, but they must be able to stand up to competing ideas. Even if some of us believe that some of the solutions he advocates don't stand up to the competition, we aren't going to try to claim that Stewart Brand somehow isn't an environmentalist. As long as he recognizes that the Earth's geophysical systems are under extraordinary duress, and that business-as-usual is driving us headlong into disaster, he's one of us -- even if the ways we want to avoid that disaster vary.

I wrote a feature about Open Source in Austin for this week's Austin Chronicle.

We took a break today and hung out at the Zilker Park Kite Festival. I shot some videos of the kites, including the one below. It was nice to spend some time offline, not thinking, just hanging out. A bazillion kites were in the air, every imaginable shape and size. The few really massive kites were spectacular.

Its publishers have revamped the USA Today site to improve user experience and add new features for increased participation. From a glance at the site, the overhaul seems clueful: it's easy to navigate and easy to interact - read and add comments to each story, and add recommendations. They also invite readers to contribute photos, and they've added Pluck's Blogburst (which might already have been there - it's a service that allows traditional media sites to add content from blogs.) This is an upgrade that'll make all the other news organizations stand up and take notice. I'm wondering what the recently-overhauled NY Times will do - do they have any budget left to add more features? [Link]

Here's a few places you'll find me at SXSW Interactive this year:

• Sunday at 11:30am, I'll be moderating a session called "Blogging where speech isn't free."
• I'll also be showing up at sessions I helped coordinate (with Dean McCall and Ed Cavazos) via the Digital Convergence Initiative.
• Sunday, March 11 at 5pm, there's a Worldchanging gathering at Opal Divine's Freehouse.
• Monday, March 12: EFF-Austin's Steampunk Extravaganza, Futures of the Past
• March 14: Creative Commons, an Introduction

One place you'll find me during SXSW Interactive that isn't SXSW Interactive: BarCamp II, which is sorta the Open Source alternative (though many of the folks at BarCamp are also signed up for SXSW Interactive; having two places to go plays to our attention deficits). The sessions are looking pretty interesting... I love this one, being of a diverse age:

Aging In Community - How can we support the aging process and welcome age diversity (both young, old, and inbetween) in our design process and implementation?

BarCamp venue's finally been announced: Bourbon Rocks at 508 E 6th St.

Austin 360 listed the panel I'm moderating at SXSW Interactive as a "pick," referring to me as "Blogger emeritus Jon Lebkowsky." The definition of emeritus is "retired." Okay, I may be showing my age, but I'm definitely not "retired" or anything close to it! [Link]

Since reality was deprecated anyway, Baudrillard quit the scene. His death doesn't mean anything. His life meant too much. [Link]

Ethan Zuckerman blogged a panel I put together for SXSW Interactive. [Link]

Blogging is important because it breaks the monopoly on information claimed by the press, letting people get around the dictum, “Let’s not talk about certain things.” [Shahed Amanullah] argues that “the freer the discourse, the more moderate the Islamic practice is,” and hopes the sort of discourses that take place in blogs will eventually be a moderating influence. To allow this to happen, we need to “use technology to pry the doors open from the outside”, using tools like Tor and Psiphon. We need to read and publicize the work of bloggers, showing governments like the government of Egypt that the world is watching. And it’s incumbent upon us to advocate for persecuted bloggers.

Last night Shahed received the Dewey Winburne Community Service Award for his work at alt.muslim. (Photo: Shahed and Ethan in the green room before the session.)

Brad King has a good summary of Bruce Sterling's closing rant at SXSW Interactive. [Link]

"Mash-ups are in vogue," Sterling said. "People on the Internet like to think that mash-ups are incredibly great. Mash-ups are like novelty music. They are like The Monster Mash. It's bad music. Just because you can do it with a laptop and find an audience for it doesn't mean it's a cultural advance."

The audience sat quietly throughout much of the rant. The SXSW crowd, after all, is made up of the very people who are populating YouTube with videos, who submit mash-ups to YouTheManNowDog.com, who download music using peer-to-peer networks before reassembling it into new music. And here was one of their heroes telling them that what they were doing was no good, unworthy of being shown to sophisticated artists and craftspeople because their art--their culture--was a bad knockoff of other people's hard work.

A non-SXSW music note: my brother's been telling me for years about Gina Saputo, who grew up in his Springfield, Oregon neighborhood and went on to be a very solid jazz singer. I've heard her recordings before, and they were always good, but he just sent me a link to an online music video that's a very tasty bit of jazz rock. This is great, hoping to see her play Austin sometime.

SXSW has posted a snippet of the Jon L./Bruce discussion at Studio SX. It's short, but the url suggests it's a trailer, so maybe the whole thing will pop up. Two observations: Bruce is in high rant mode as the conversation progresses, and I really need to lay off the nachos. [Link]

Mark blogs how Make Magazine, which he edits, was going to run an article about a high-voltage antigravity device, but they canceled the article because the magazine's advisory board thought the project too dangerous. The explanation's pretty interesting. [Link]

Interesting long week at SXSW Interactive, wherein I had the persistent feeling that I was missing something, because there was always so much going on. Great meetings, great friends, too little music, a few movies, and lots to think about on the interactive side, where I primarily focus. Honoria Starbuck and I were talking today over pozole about how, after years online pushing for an Internet bursting with art and community, we're seeing it happen everywhere we look, and especially at SXSW Interactive. Honoria incidentally has great watercolor notes she's taken at various sessions, and she's considering how she could make those available. (I've posted a sample above, a piece of her notes page from Bruce's talk at the conference).

Standard technologies are falling into place as part of "web 2.0" (though I had a web 3.0 discussion the other day...I don't know that those labels with version numbers are very meaningful; it makes more sense to me to talk about what they represent, the evolution of the Internet as a machine with an operating system, data, and many innovative applications beginning to emerge, as long as some fairly standard way of doing things: blogs and other messaging systems, including Twitter, which was background noise for the Interactive conference this year; wiki and other tools for collaboration; avatar-based virtual realities like Second Life, etc. Mark Meadows told me about the work he's doing (with my former partner, Paco Nathan) building autonomous avatars, though I wondered whether graphically high-end systems will ever be pervasive; I tend to think not. In a way sustaining lifelike representations seems like a waste of cycles.

From the Moleskine:

• I heard stats to suggest that ecommerce sites with community features sell more products, and I heard a lot about the need to be authentic online
• Think like a human (!!).
• The key to passionate users is helping them learn.
• In mitigating Y2K, we learned that Open Source is embedded in many systems because the engineers love it. They love it because Open Source leverages the power of (development) communities.
• More and more companies are forming around Open Source and succeeding at the margins, outsourcing R&D to the OSS community.
• Revenue models that reward the user fairly are the next frontier.
• A relatively small number (8%) of Open Source users actually make code changes.
• Legislation before congress (DOPA) would remove social networks and online communities from school computers. therefore ensuring that teachers and librarians won't have an opportunity to teach kids how to handle participation on line.
• (From Henry Jenkins) We need democracy to be a lifestyle, and we need to change the language we use to talk about engagement. The language of fan culture will be the language of political activity in the near future.
• Knowledge is process, not product.
• The political candidate just serves. The Internet gives us effective input into the direction and quality of that service.
• "You are brilliant and the world is hiring!" – Paul Hawken quoted by Alex Steffen.
• You don't get people to change by criticizing them. You have to show them a better way that they want more.

Cross-posted from the Polycot blog.

At Worldchanging, Sarah Rich writes about Design for Social Innovation, noting a Business Week "backlash" piece that "discussing the possibility that the term 'innovation' has really passed a tipping point of overuse and lost some of its poignancy."

... the article points out that there is a distinction between throwing the word around and achieving real, measurable improvement through forward-thinking design. It's not so much that consumers don't want innovation in their products as they don't want to be told something is "innovative" when it's really just retooled or modified for a change in user perception.

Sarah expresses concern that the word "sustainability" is also losing it's meaning, as it "is now so commonly splattered across pages and screens in the public's view that it's hard to know if anybody sees the words 'sustain' and 'ability' inside the buzzword."

No doubt we use both innovation and sustainability all day long at Worldchanging, but hopefully that key distinction is there. It's possible to hold a buzzword to the integrity which initially brought it into common usage, but the more it becomes a tool for selling product and roping in followers, the more caution must be employed. You can't coin a new term every time a useful word starts to lose its meaning. While plenty of jargon exists in the green sphere, the reality is that we are looking for ways to keep ourselves going, to empower ourselves and each other, and to find inventive ways to create conditions that foster longevity for the planet.

There's an inherent problem, I think, in trying to make concepts seem new, contemporary, and sexy so that they'll sell. "Innovation" means new, but saying that something is innovative=new it doesn't necessarily imply that it's effective. If you want to use Web 2.0 technology, for instance, because it's "innovative," you could be overlooking more effective technologies that lack the Web 2.0 buzz. At Polycot, we focus on clear requirements and best technologies. We use innovative technologies (such as Ruby on Rails), not because they're new, but because they're more efficient and effective given the requirements for the site.

For many "sustainability" is somehow associated with "being green," but the real meaning of the word is less clear. According to the dictionary, sustainable means using a resource without depleting or permanently damaging it. One key to sustainable thinking is making the distinction between income (which is renewable) and resource (which doesn't renew and can be depleted). I thought I learned this distinction many years ago, but it's proved easy to forget. For instance, I inherited a small amount of money once, and I should have put it away and regarded it as a resource, spending only income (interest) it generated. Instead I spent it as though it was income, and now it's gone with no hope of recovery. I also, with you, inherited a planet, and I'm dipping into its limited resources rather than learning to use only what's renewable. Fossil fuels are a resource, for instance, that we spend every day, and that will eventually be depleted. It's also possible to "spend" land until it's depleted.

Just to reiterate, though I knew how to treat a particular cash resource, I didn't use it wisely. I believed that it was easily replaced, but it wasn't. We make the same mistake every day, in assuming that our planetary resources can be replaced, even though we know what sustainability means, and we may know the difference between income and resource. Years from now we (or our children or grandchildren) may ask, "What were we thinking?"

Maybe the answer will be that we were too busy innovating to get serious about sustainability.

This year's SXSW panel on net politics (featuring Republican blogger Patrick Ruffini, Mark SooHoo of the McCain campaign, Texas Rep. Mark Strama, and Clay Johnson of Blue State Digital) was very smart, but I had a queasy feeling about it. Why?

Having thought about the source of my discomfort, I realized that candidate politics creeps me out. It's exciting, and it can be lucrative for those in support roles, including developers of technologies to support political campaigns. (Blue State Digital seems to be doing well, for instance; Clay told me they're managing 70 or so campaign sites, including Obama's and Richardson's).

But at a time when we so desperately need authentic solutions, "doing well" in this sense is a problem. Candidates and their campaigns are not really about governance. They're business first, like any company, a way to raise cash and create jobs. Despite the breathless talk about technology driving democratic solutions, business comes first, even for developers of political technology who in 2004 were more idealistic about the potential for their work to make a grassroots difference.

Campaign consultants, handlers, media flaks and technologists may be affiliated with particular parties or issues, but are they really amoral opportunists who focus on specific problems or issues only insofar as they provide ways to advance the specific campaign? Their business doesn't even require them to get candidates elected - they're paid, not for winning elections, but for raising money. Why do you see so many unwinnable candidates vying for the presidency? If they have any possibility of a constituency and can engage competent handlers who know how to work the system, they create a business. It's a living.

Their positive cash flow is unfortunately related to dysfunctional aspects of politics. Working within an axis of moneyand power, it's hard to avoid the taint of corruption, however subtle. I have a friend who's a political consultant, and he does care about ethics and good government - but he puts that aspect of his personality in the cold-steel lockbox when he's working a campaign. In conversation he'll admit he has a sleazy side, but it's his job, and it pays well.

I'm pretty much a realist, so this isn't meant to be an idealistic rant about how the world should work. It is what it is. However I write this because many of you will consider working for politicians and their campaigns, and I think there's a better way.

Instead of working for candidates, you might consider building organizations and technologies that serve the interests of citizens, that connect them with the political process so that they can have audible voices in a conversation that is often completely controlled by lobbyists and larger interest groups.

I acknowledge that it's not enough to get connected. You also have to be smart about political process and the issues du jour. For instance, effective global warming activists should understand that mitigation has economic consequences, because without that nuanced understanding, it's hard to have meaningful, multidimensional input. Effective solutions emerge from deep understanding.

I.e. rather than putting our energies into electing specific candidates, we should swarm elected officials with smart mobs advocating effective solutions to specific problems. Forget ideology, focus on action and results.

I was struck by one comment in particular from the SXSW panel I mentioned earlier. The panelists agreed that their job was not to build online communities, but to drive people away from their computers and into the physical world to recruit, persuade, and get out the vote. I might disagree that you have to leave your computer to connect and persuade, but it's worthwhile to note that no social technology, however sophisticated, will change the world.

People will and do change the world, however; technology may help, but the real solutions are social.

Photo by Jon Lebkowsky: Clay Johnson, Mark SooHoo, Patrick Ruffini, and Mark Strama at SXSW Interactive.

Britt Blaser has a good and useful post about "People Law" vs "Power Law." This is practice, not theory. [Link]

There are five principles I’m playing with lately:

1. The size of your audience confers limited power
2. A network’s value is the square of its nodes (Metcalfe)
3. Network nodes are significant only when they’re verbose
4. Most conversation is among nearby nodes
5. Only interactions count, and the richest count most

... what’s the importance of a big audience of passive readers? In the age of Big Media, It was the only thing we could count, but those times are months behind us. In social networks, everyone is a potential participant, but if your 10,000 readers leave 100 comments but don’t take your ideas and run with them, so what? Leaving a comment is a lot like leaving, because Embrace is not the same as Extend.

Good review of the Worldchanging book in the Guardian. I especially like this quote from Alex: "Cynicism is often seen as a rebellious attitude in western popular culture, but in reality, our cynicism advances the desires of the powerful: cynicism is obedience." [Link]

I just got an email that said my Gmail address was inactive with Yahoo Groups and gave me a way to reactivate it. The mails were bouncing with an "over quota" message though I've only used 44% of my Gmail quota. Checking Google's forums, I found that many were having the same problem, whcih according to Google has been fixed. Google wasn't saying much; there was actually more and better info at Yahoo 360. Interesting message from Anthony P indicating how complex and difficult Gmail has become:

As someone who owns a company that runs a large scale email system, I can definitely sympathize with Yahoo and Google. Our service sends under five million messages a day and we often experience delivery issues that can be nearly impossible to pinpoint. I can't imagine what Yahoo and Google must have to deal with with 10-30+ million emails flying through their system. The general public doesn't understand the work it takes to run a system of Yahoo and Google's scale and the endless maze that merely isolating a problem (not even fixing it yet) can be.

I don't know that I have anything to add to the ongoing conversation about the death threats against Kathy Sierra. It's like something from prime time television, which is really sick, when you think about it. We've evolved from Mayberry RFD to a steady diet forensics heroes tracking serial killers through mounds of gore, so we shouldn't be too surprised to find casual threats of violence in cyberspace and elsewhere. Some anonymous jerk has practiced a random (or not) act of terrorism without considering the real effect on a real person. On the other hand, it appears that a few good people (Jeneane Sessum, Frank Paynter, and Chris Locke) have also been affected because Kathy S., understandably rattled, associated them with anonymous comments posted on a prank site they'd set up. I don't know the whole story here, but I know Frank and Jeneane, and I sort of know Locke, and they're not scary people or misogynists. Locke has posted a response, so has Frank.

Responding to the Kathy Sierra conversation, Tim O'Reilly has posted a "Call for a Blogger's Code of Conduct." (Thanks to Laura Lemay for the pointer.) Tim posts some thoughts that emerged from group discussion at Etech. He begins by getting a handle on the problem with Chris Locke's response, which refers to the WELL's "You Own Your Own Words" policy. Locke chose to take his site down rather than deal directly with offensive comments. He says

I was a conference host on the Well 15 years ago where the core ethos was acronymized to YOYOW -- You Own Your Own Words. This has remained a guiding principle for me ever since. I will not take responsibility for what someone else said, nor will I censor what another individual wrote. However, it was clear that Sierra was upset, so it seemed the best course to make the whole site go away.

Tim responds:

Chris' comment echoes the libertarian ethos that many bloggers and internet pioneers share. However, we now have one more clear object-lesson on what you get when you start a site that not only tolerates but encourages mean comments: there's a quick race to the bottom. It seems to me that there's a big difference between censorship and encouraging and tolerating abuse.... Yes, you own your own words. But you also own the tone that you allow on any blog or forum you control. Part of "owning your own words" is owning the effects of your behavior and the editorial voice you foster. And when things go awry, acknowledge it. It would have been far better for Chris to have deleted the post, and said explicitly on the blog that it was unacceptable, than to have silently shut down the blog and removed all entries and comments without explanation.