Austin350

I've been blogging at the new Austin350 web site. We're looking for more bloggers for that site - if you're interested, contact me.

Fair use "whispering campaign"

While the digital world makes it increasingly tough to control access to content, content owners push for stronger and more restrictive copyright law and enforcement. ars technica reports a "whispering campaign" against fair use exceptions. If you, like so many people, don't understand fair use, they define it:

Fair use and fair dealing put limitations on these otherwise exclusive rights, and they do so on the theory that copyright is not an absolute right to control and profit from every single use of a particular work. News reporting, classroom use, commentary, parody; in the US, at least, these don't require either permission or payment.
They report that "copyright expert William Patry believes that a 'counter-reformation' is in the works to crimp worldwide plans to expand fair use." In Patry's blog, he says
ministries in countries are told that fair use (and by extension possible liberal fair dealing provisions) violate the "three-step" test. And who wants to violate the three-step after all? The appeal by counter-reformation forces to external and abstract concepts like the three-step test is a time-worn tactic: when you can't win on the merits, shift the debate elsewhere to grounds on which you think you can win. Given that few ministry officials are experts in copyright law, much less arcana like the three-step test, these appeals -- made by those who claim to be such experts -- can be effective. They shouldn't be. National governments should make policy decisions based on the merits of the proposals, free from such scare tactics.
Bloggers especially should become more knowledgeable of copyright law and fair use - we're "fair using" all the time.

Windows Live Writer

This is a test post - I'm trying out Windows Live Writer. Even if it works fine, it doesn't feel particularly handy... but after my recent bad experiences with ScribeFire and Ecto, I'll be interested to see if Microsoft got it right.

Firings and shareholder value at CNN

CNN fired Chez Pazienza for blogging at Huffington post - not just because he broke a vague rule by blogging, but because of the content of his blog. [Link]

During my last couple of years as a television news producer, I watched the networks try to recover from a six year failure to bring truth to power (the political party in power being irrelevant incidentally; the job of the press is to maintain an adversarial relationship with the government at all times) and what's worse, to pretend that they had a backbone all along. I watched my bosses literally stand in the middle of the newsroom and ask, "What can we do to not lead with Iraq?" -- the reason being that Iraq, although an important story, wasn't always a surefire ratings draw. I was asked to complete self-evaluations which pressed me to describe the ways in which I'd "increased shareholder value." (For the record, if you're a rank-and-file member of a newsroom, you should never under any circumstances even hear the word "shareholders," let alone be reminded that you're beholden to them.) I watched the media in general do anything within reason to scare the hell out of the American public -- to convince people that they were about to be infected by the bird flu, poisoned by the food supply, or eaten by sharks. I marveled at our elevation of the death of Anna Nicole Smith to near-mythic status and our willingness to let the airwaves be taken hostage by every permutation of opportunistic degenerate from a crying judge to a Hollywood hanger-on with an emo haircut. I watched qualified, passionate people worked nearly to death while mindless talking heads were coddled. I listened to Lou Dobbs play the loud-mouthed fascist demagogue, Nancy Grace fake ratings-baiting indignation, and Glenn Beck essentially do nightly stand-up -- and that's not even taking into account the 24/7 Vaudeville act over at Fox News. I watched The Daily Show laugh not at our mistakes but at our intentional absurdity.

Moveable Type upgrade

Just upgraded Weblogsky to the latest version of Movable Type, 4.1, which is a significant upgrade from 3.x. The upgrade seemed smooth, but because MT4 doesn't support the Rightfields plugin, I had to delete all the Rightfields tags from my templates. I was using Rightfields to facilitate photo upload and positioning, and removing the fields means that many photos will no longer appear on archive pages, once they're rebuilt. Coincidentally I recently stopped adding photos using Rightfields, favoring the native MT upload utility because it gave me more flexibility. (Note: There'll be a Rightfields plugin eventually for MT4.) The new MT has a slick new interface; still getting used to it.

Forget Jakob, blog from your heart and soul

Jakob Neilsen says one should write articles, not blog postings, not far from a conclusion I was, ahem, blogging a few days ago. Like so much of his writing, this latest from Nielsen has some useful info, makes some good points, but (like most pronouncements from consultants) comes across as inauthentic. I think Michael Heilemann has his number:

The problem with Jakob Nielsen–or perhaps rather his audience as it were–is that his articles, top 10’s and ‘usability tests’ are outdated, largely irrelevant and when applicable, made up of nothing but easily thought up logical conclusions aimed at the dull gray ‘we want to be hip with the youngsters, yo’ corporate market, from which he makes his money.

So if you’re hip, down with the beat and ‘happenin’, save yourself the headache, use your brain, not useit.com, and the rest should come easily.

As a blog strategist, I would never tell my clients to write a particular length or depth. The first rule is to be authentic, write what you know, write from the heart. Blogging the All-American Presidential Forum

Taylor Willingham asked me to live blog the PBS All-American Presidential Forum last night. Some people were live blogging from the event, but we were blogging from Austin, where I was at the Carver Library blogging along with Mike Aaron and Tom Moran. I noticed that my friend Liza Sabater was blogging on the scene in DC; when I pinged her she pointed me to a chat room at her site, Culture Kitchen... so I bilocated. All the live bloggers on the scene and in Austin posted to an aggregate page set up by the Media Bloggers Association. I posted quite a bit before the debate, during an hour-long local discussion at the Carver library, where mostly black participants were talking about race and society. The consensus seemed to be that presidential candidates had been ignoring race until last night's forum, where it was a prominent subject.

My posts are pretty buried at the Media Bloggers site, but you can find them more easily at Extreme Democracy. The early posts were mostly transcriptions of the local conversation. (I was all typed out by the time the forum/debate started.) The group at Carver was lively, intelligent, and often very funny... I'm not sure I captured all that, but it was a great discussion... the televised forum was less compelling.

Photo taken at Carver last night by Mike Aaron. I'm the guy by the screen, wearing a purple tshirt.

What? I'm not the only "Jon"?

This had me laughing. [Link]

This got me to thinking about how searchable my name is. Turns out that thanks to this blog and the fact that my name is plastered all over some former employers' websites I'm doing okay. Type in Jon Lowder, even without the quotation marks and my blog comes up first and a bunch of work stuff, my LinkedIn profile and other stuff related to me comes up in the first few pages. So I decided to see how I do with just Jon. There I don't appear until the 9th page of results (54th position) but that's okay considering that there are some pretty web-loved Jon's out there: Jon Stewart, Jon Udell, and Jon Lebkowsky. Wait...who?! I'm being beaten by a guy named Lebkowsky and who names his blog "Weblogsky"? At first I thought maybe it was a fan site for The Big Lebowski but I was wrong. Ends up its just a blog by a guy named Jon Lebkowsky, and from my short reading I'll have to begrudgingly admit that it's a good blog. Okay, it's a better blog than mine, but that doesn't help my ego.

Litterati?

Chip Rosenthal just sent a link to an article in the Austin Statesman that I missed just before SXSW Interactive, called "We lived and died by our blogs; now, not so much." It's an odd article that tries to be ominous/prophetic about the fact that some bloggers drift away from blogging, as though that was a big deal. One interesting quote: "According to research firm Gartner Inc., more than 200 million abandoned blogs litter the Internet." To me that's like saying that books or periodicals litter libraries. People will stop writing, distributing, reading, etc. in any medium, and what does that suggest? I think it's proof of life – as living entities, we change and evolve and, yes, sometimes we move on from some of our pursuits. [Link]

Tempus fugit, dang it.

My usually-persistent blogging has slowed to a drip, not because I don't have anything to say, but because hours are filling with meetings, leaving little time for writing. It's good to be busy and getting a lot done, but it's unfortunate that writing (along with other projects) has been swept aside. Some of the things that are occupying my time lately:

My company, Polycot Consulting. Along with partners Jeff Kramer and Matt Sanders, I cofounded Polycot in 2001 as a web consultancy, but our timing was unforunate (entity formation was filed September 12, 2001). Web technology development, which had been my passion for years, was clearly not in demand following the Internet collapse of 2000, and the events of 9/11/2001 further delayed any revival of interest in web business. The limited demand was for web development, so that was our focus for years. We were consulting, bringing our intelligence about the web to bear on many projects, but almost always in the context of a development project. However not only is there renewed interest in the web, much of that interest is in the realm of what's now called social media, which has always been my real passion. It was only when I discovered that you could build communities in cyberspace that I became a career technologist, and I've always been drawn to projects that were about building social spaces (for communities, virtual teams, online social networks, etc.)

I took a four month sabbatical from Polycot to build a blog network for Worldchanging.com, and when that project ended, I decided the next step was to build a focused social media consulting practice at Polycot. I've been working on that for several weeks now. My Polycot partners, meanwhile, have built a development practice focused on creating social media environments using Ruby on Rails. They're taking a limited number of projects in that space (and we'll have some exciting announcements soon as current projects are completed). Now there'll be two Polycots, and while we may combine consulting and development for some projects, the consulting practice will also stand alone. In addition to social media/online community/social networks, we also consult on user experience and information architecture, findability, and conversion support.

I've also been increasingly involved with the Bootstrap Network, which started in Austin and is spreading across the globe. Bootstrap is the most effective social network I've seen, manifesting fact to face and online, creating a remarkable support framework for entrepreneurs and their companies. Originally created for founders of Bootstrap Companies, the organization now welcomes potential entrepreneurs who're in ideation, and it's been working with established companies that began as Bootstraps via the "Rebootstrap" project, which helps restore the entrepreneurial spirit.

And I've been working via EFF-Austin with Aspiration's Allen Gunn (aka Gunner) and a dedicated group of Austin technophiles to coordinate the first Penguin Day Austin, an April 28 event that will give local nonprofits an opportunity to explore free and open source software. In addition to helping nonprofits, the event will bring local techs together, including members of the revived Open Source Posse (which has connections to Bootstrap, EFF-Austin, and the regional Digital Convergence Initiative).

I'm also getting involved with the
Cleantech Forum for Austin, editing and blogging at Worldchanging Austin, and working on various and sundry other projects... so blogging's been hard to work into the mix. I'll try to do more, but on the run, and shorter posts.

Photo: Hiroshi Inoue (President of NaCl, where Ruby was developed by Yukihiro Matsumoto), Jeff Kramer, and Jon L. at Polycot Consulting.