Who's making the racket?
Check out my latest Rhythm Track.#
Dave Winer writes about Channel Z.#
The plan for the new software, whose codename is Channel Z, is for me to burn in the editing tool for the next week while visiting the Bay Area, and if all goes well to start a very small beta group on Monday or Tuesday of the following week (December 1) and then offer it to all who come to the Thursday meeting (the 4th). Eventually it will be released broadly and we'll work with others to make authoring tools in other environments (such as OmniOutliner, Joe, Flash, WebOutliner) and back-ends (lots of places). On the back-end if you have code that processes RSS (with categories) and OPML, you're basically ready to go. We're gearing up to cover a big story and to be ready to cover one that may come along any day. The idea is to broaden the pipe, make writing for the Web more powerful and make the structures we build richer, have more lasting value, and integrate with each other in interesting ways.
I'm on the edge of my seat.
Jerome Doolittle on the "Character Issue."#
Before the Republicans make too much of [Howard Dean saying he wasn't in hurry to get into the military], they might want to consider what didn't appear on the front page of the New York Times during the 2000 campaign — or ever:
Governor Bush got his coveted slot with the Texas Air National Guard, but in a recent interview he said he probably could have qualified for active duty as a pilot in Vietnam had he enlisted in the air force.
"I guess that's probably true," he said. "I mean, I was in no hurry to get into the military."
Those words could not be tortured out of Mr. Bush in a Syrian prison. It is interesting, from the 'character issue' point of view, that Dr. Dean volunteered them to the New York
Kristyn linked me to a Local6 story, Sun Sets on City in Alaska Until January 23.#
The sun is setting on America's northernmost city and won't be seen again for two months.
After Tuesday, residents of this city of 4,400 people on the Arctic Sea, about 330 miles from the Arctic Circle, may see a snippet of sun above the horizon for a few more days, depending on their elevation and the distorting effects of the atmosphere. But after that, the sun will not be seen again until Jan. 23.
"The sun is greatly overrated," said Bob Bolger, who works with computers.
Lisa Williams writes the best characterization of what RSS is about.#
Oddly, what this all makes me think of is a remark by my old boss Harry Tse on Chinese food (it's dinner time and I am pretty hungry. Maybe that's why the food metaphors!). He noted that most Chinese food is plated in such a way that knives aren't neccessary for the diner. Western food, he said, involved a different division of labor between the cook and the eater -- western cooks might put a steak on the plate, but a Chinese cook would be more likely to slice the steak into bite-size pieces easy to handle with chopsticks.
In a similar way, development of RSS is changing the division of labor between the author of web content and the reader of web content. Right now, the author is responsible for almost everything including the visual layout of the page. In an RSS world, the reader has much more control over how to display their information to themselves, slicing and dicing incoming information from different sites, displaying it in ways far beyond simple reverse-chron, and putting the visual "sauce" on it that they like best.
Later, Lisa writes about the future when syndication is commonplace.
As I see it, the nice thing about Our Syndicated Future is that everybody could participate regardless of where they stood on the issue of "hub" sites vs. "everybody with their own decentralized presence, assembled ad-hoc by a reader." As long as everybody adds an RSS feed (or the developer of the software they use kindly does it for them), it'll happen on its own. This is an advantage because it doesn't really require anybody to make a big philosophical decision or even necessarily change platforms -- just add some features to their platform that are good for much more near-term uses than the eventual development of a new layer of the Web. As such, its a change that can and will be accomplished the only way anything of substance gets accomplished in technology (or society): by the incremental actions of many people seeking some new good for themselves and their audience of friends.
The Agitator has a great comic in it today.#
Jay Rosen writes about "Spin Alley" on The Blogging of the President#
The absurdity is well known, admitted to by journalists. Spin Alley goes on. Yet it would be easy to abandon by the time we gear up for the big debates in Fall 2004. A major candidate could say: no one from my campaign will show up. "The American people don't need my people telling them who won," X says in a statement. "Journalists are entitled to form their own conclusions. If they need someone to quote in their stories they can quote what I said in the debate."
Unlikely? Then how about this. Journalists don't show up.
No? Here's another idea. Pauline Kael wrote a review of The Warriors (directed by Walter Hill, 1979) in which she explained street gangs as "kids who think they own the streets because they keep other kids out of them." I think this is one sense in which the campaign insiders "own" the process of electing a president-- and of interpreting the election. Spin Alley does not admit just anyone. You have to be credentialed. The insiders think they own it because they keep outsiders out. (Witness Nader being led away by police.)
Jeff Jarvis responds.
If established media were smart, they would not to go spin alley after the debate. They would go to blogs to hear what opinions and fact-checking and new information the people, the voters, the citizen journalists have.
I say that's a good path to follow in all coverage, not just of debates. As I've said here before, if I ran a newspaper (not likely) I would declare flack-free days and trumpet it on the front page and even raise my price: All the information in today's paper came because real journalists went out to hunt it down on your behalf. That would be information you couldn't find on your own. That wouldn't be no stinkin' commodity. That would be real news.
If you turn around and read weblogs and forums and such and print what they say and ask them what they think, you wouldn't just be reporting out; you'd be listening back and responding and joining in the discussion. That would get you closer and closer to what the people think and want. That would actually be good for democracy. For as I've been all too fond of saying here lately, news is a conversation. Democracy is a conversation, too.
In the old days, pre-Internet, if you wanted to hear what the people had to say, you had to (a) go to a bar where they were watching the debate or (b) hold an expensive survey. But now, thanks to the Internet and weblogs, all you have to do is click. No spin alley. No spin surveys. No spin spam.
Welcome to the unspun zone.
Kevin links to John Miller who connects Eric Voeglin and Dr. Suess.#
My favorite Seuss book is one that many people don't know about: I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew (1965). Seuss may not have realized it, but the theme of Solla Sollew is powerfully conservative.
Unfortunately, it was not Seuss's most commercially successful book — sales were disappointing, even though it was written and issued during his heyday. The Morgan's describe the book this way: "a somber morality tale, a Seussian Pilgrim's Progress with the message that one can't run away from trouble." Yet it's far deeper than that. In truth, Solla Sollew is a warning against what Eric Voegelin called immanentizing the eschaton. Put in plain English: Don't seek heaven on earth.
Jon Buscall writes about the ideal academic situation.#
I really love teaching; but juggling so many courses doesn't allow you time to give cogent feedback/teaching/support. It also doesn't give you time to read much other than course books and as for research/writing? I have to steal time for that.
Ideal scenario? I'd like to teach four courses a term and meet my students more than once every couple of weeks.
Hossein Derakhshan writes about Iran recognizing alcohol as existing in Iran.#
According to ISNA, high rate of car-accident-related fatilities, has made the official to reinforce the traffic laws.
Thus, for the first time after the Islamic revolution, the government has announced a penalty of over 100,000 Rials (about $140) for drinking and driving, which had never officially admitted to even exis. For the first time they will use equipmets that can measure the amount of Alcohol.
Can other social facts can lead the Islamic goverment to recognize the basic rights for Iranian people to live however they want?
bmo recognizes beauty and love when he sees it.#
It was probably around ten in the morning when I went in for my large fair trade tall cappaccino. Sitting at a table side by side were these two teenaged girls. I'd guess around sixteen or seventeen. What was fairly obvious was that one was an exchange student, from somewhere in Europe - she had that Danish/Dutch look about her - perhaps she was a Finnswede. She was struggling with her English.
The most striking thing about the pair was the intensity of their conversation, the way they were looking at each other, reading each others lips, looking into each others eyes - the pair were in love. (And I'm not talking about lesbian love here. And if the two were lesbians who cares. In fact if the pair had suddenly engaged in a kiss I would have been quite surprised - their body language was not sexual. This love was something else, somewhere else.)
It was the sort of intensity you can only find or see with people who do not speak the same language, who have just met, who are determined, by some force of nature, to create a bond. An extra effort has to be made. There's a concentration, an attention. This intensity. It was electric.
A must read for today: Scott Rosenberg writes about the expanding domain of the "War on Terror" and the slippery slope that it is while commenting on Daniel Henninger's column in the Wall Street Journal.#
But Henninger has to write this way if his definition of the war on terror is going to cover the Bush administration's Iraq adventure. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. And we now know with near-certainty that Iraq had essentially no weapons of mass destruction and posed no imminent threat to the U.S. Ahh, but somewhere in Iraq was "the technical knowledge beneath" such weapons, and in time that could be turned against us.
It's a slippery slope, Mr. Henninger. Once you leave behind the clear-eyed truth that al-Qaida attacked the U.S. and al-Qaida is who we should be fighting, there is no end to the mischief you can get the nation into. President Bush cast us in a global war with the Axis of Evil; suddenly, thanks to 9/11, we were fighting Iran, Iraq and North Korea, too. Now, according to Henninger, we are at war with nothing less than "the proliferation of technical knowledge"!
Alas, wars undertaken against the proliferation of knowledge don't have a very good track record in human history -- just ask the book-burners of the Reformation. You could lock away all the nuclear-bomb formulas and recipes for sarin, you could shut down the entire Internet, you could plunge half the world into the Stone Age -- and angry, dispossessed or malicious people could still figure out ways to kill and destroy on a frighteningly large scale. The real war is against ignorance, not knowledge.
Cosma Shalizi writes about Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon and small weapons proliferation.#
Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon is really two novels. One of them is about World War II, code-breaking and computation, and is superb. The other is about the perennial geek fantasy of pirate off-shore data-havens and untraceable electronic money, and is really not very good at all. (People have tried to explain to me why the scene with the breakfast cereal is supposed to be funny; I remain unamused.) One of the things which contributes to the badness of the contemporary story is that various characters expound irritatingly stupid theories about economics, finance, politics, et cetera, ideas so dumb that they would embarrass the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Worse, they are, pretty obviously, acting as Stephenson's mouth-pieces, and he should know better.
One of the more astounding of these ideas is that put forward by one of the engineers of the data-haven. He is doing this, he explains, because as an Orthodox Jew, he wants to ensure that there will never be a recurrence of the Holocaust, that persecuted minorities will never again be defenseless. Therefore, the data haven will distribute a manual on low-tech guerrilla warfare, improvised weaponry and explosives, sabotage, etc., and the electronic money will provide a way for resistance groups to obtain more serious military materiel. (Stephenson tossed in some cutesy acronyms, which I'm insufficiently motivated to look up in my copy of the book.) To put it mildly, this does not sound like a very effective way for unpopular groups to defend themselves against a functioning modern state with a decently-organized army, but it does sound like a recipe for promoting third world civil wars, terrorism, Marines getting sent home in body bags, and, indeed, genocide.
Rory Blyth writes about metawork and Mini Coopers.#
It's been a week of what I call "metawork."
Metawork is defined, by me, as "the work that you have to do in order to get your real work done."
On Monday, this meant watching the movers destroy my desk. On Tuesday and Wednesday, it meant spending every free moment outside of work hauling the non-moved portions of my worldly possessions to the new place in a Mini Cooper - A car which I've determined was never meant to be used in a cargo carrying capacity, unless the cargo happens to be really, really small. A box of tissues, for example, might be acceptable cargo for the Mini. A tiny dog might be all right, too, provided it doesn't leave any doggy oopsies anywhere in the car.
Peter Merholz writes about Naked Economics.#
As a bleeding heart liberal, it can be difficult coming to terms with what seems to be agreed upon as sensible economics. Not that Wheelan stumps for total libertarian laissez-faire-ism. He recognizes that markets are amoral, and, well, humans aren't, and we need systems to bridge that (like, say, government). But he's awfully convincing on the need for pretty much unrestricted free trade. Or rather, that free trade should not be restricted by issues of job displacement -- the pain in the short run of having people out of work is more than made up for the fruits of a worldwide increase in economic standings that free trade provides. (Though we still need to keep a watchful eye on the externalities of unbridled trade, things like environmental degradation, and make sure that we're not letting things get out of hand.)
And I found it interesting that Wheelan, who definitely promotes freer trade and less restricted markets than we have now, pretty much comes down on the side of universal health care as the only way to manage what is otherwise an unholy mess.
Danah Boyd writes about all the diverse presentations of self - what we present and what others see.#
During the early days of cyberculture research, many folks argued for a utopian reading of the digital domain. People could be whomever they wanted. Race, sex, sexuality - it would no longer matter. But, through The Turing Game, Amy Bruckman and gang found that people are not actually able to construct entirely different presentations of self.. much of who they are physically seeps through into their digital presentation. In Sexing the Internet, i argued that coarse profiles are problematic because we interpolate the information we're given to derive a much more detailed (but often inaccurate) image of the other person.
Together, this creates an interesting dilemma for digital presentations of self. Many of us would love to live in a world where issues of difference were to be celebrated, not loathed. But simply wishing for that world doesn't create it. Identity issues play a significant role in how we interact with others and, even when it is not immediately obvious online, it plays into how we present ourselves.
Furthermore, our readings of others' presentations are hugely dependent on our own experiences and our own expectations. The readers of this blog know that we are women and couch all of our statements in this identity. But, in some places in the blogosphere, you might not know the complex identities that come into play when someone posts something. Yet, you still envision the person on the other end. What do they look like? How often do you assume them to be like you?
Michael Feldman instructs to give this girl a hand:#
Bethany Hamilton, 13, rising surfing star who lost her arm to a tiger shark while surfing on Halloween is interviewed on Wed. Nov. 18, 2003, at Kilauea, Hawaii. She said, 'I wasn't that scared.' Hamilton said she will continue to surf and the worst part of losing her arm to a shark was seeing her loved ones cry.
Michael Feldman describes his vision of the future blogging world.#
if the Blogosphere is ever going to offer a viable alternative to the Major Media Monopoly is needs to act like a neural network and a cognitive filter for information which bubbles up from the bottom into collective consciousness.
The Blogosphere is like a circulatory system for information within the body politic. Not all of the conduits can be or should be arteries. Some are capillaries, relatively tiny information streams reaching into every nook and cranny of both the physical and virtual worlds, and funneling streams of data onward and upward, potentially into the very heart and mind of the collective body politic.
Hopefully, someday whenever a newsworthy event or idea happens there will be a blogger nearby. The ideas and information streams which resonate within whichever corner of the blogging universe they origibate in will be picked up and relayed, by nodes with increasingly high rates of connectivity and flow. Information objects which are timely, informative, uniquely positioned, well-written or aesthetically designed will float to the top and eventually come to the attention of a significant proportion of the wired public.
Shelley Powers says that the people are not stupid.#
I've been visiting some weblogs lately where the discussion ranges about the ominous similarity between the Bush administration's use of PR and spin doctoring and the Nazi's use of the same before the WWII -- with some implications of the awful consequences of said actions on gullible ne stupid populace.
[...]
Here's a flash for you: The American people are not stupid. We may be conservative, or frightened, or insecure, and this combined with our beliefs may make us rigid or gullible at times, but we are not stupid. Nor are we especially self-centered, or no more so than any people in any part of any country on this earth. The only reason that the American people are getting so much attention right now is that the American government is the power, the Bitch with the Pull if you will. However, fifty years ago it was Germany and Japan. About two hundred years ago it was Britain, and about two thousand years ago it was the Romans. Throughout the ages there have been people who have used their superior arms to invade or control, and they've usually been led by a man (or a woman) who knows how to use PR effectively. But that does not make the people being led, stupid.
This ability to play on people's fears or to people's vanities in order to dominate or invade was not invented by Bush. [...] Og saw that Nu had more meat and fertile women than he did, and he desired these. He told some of his people that Nu wanted their women, and scared them. He told others that they were strong and invincible, and flattered them. He then convinced all of his people to go to war so that he might have this meat and screw these women. Og, you might say, is the inventor of tools used to propagandize war and greed used by men like Bush and the Nazis. Og is also the inventor of brutality, genocide, persecution, fear, avarice, and the death of hope.
Richard writes about tolerance and "zero-tolerance" policies when reading my comments on The Yeti's viewpoint of tolerance.#
People describe Canada as a "tolerant" nation, which says something not only about Canada but the people describing the country. Tolerating something, as Jay suggests, means that we think something is abnormal and wrong but either we don't have the energy to oppose it or there are forces constraining us from opposing it. There are things I tolerate amongst my friends—like certain people's behaviour towards people other than me, something I don't have the right to be upset about in the first place—because bringing up the subject comes at the cost of the friendship. (A true friend would bring it up, you say? Well, in my experience, bringing it up oft loses both sanity and friend.) Tolerance means putting up with something that you look upon with disdain because the cost of making a fuss is greater than shutting up.
Richard annotates the Picture from Six Apart's announcement... so funny.#
Ben: We're gonna be rich, richer than astronauts!
Mena: Just keep smiling and nobody will notice that Ben's not wearing a tie.
Tatsuzumi Furukawa: Joi Ito owes me dinner: it IS possible to do a three-way handshake!
Peter Lindberg writes about scientific paradigms and constrained universes of expression.#
A shared paradigm is a shared vision for a scientific community. It guides research, but it also constrains it—in a good way, as scientists become more focused on articulating the paradigm, refining the theories, filling in the blanks; in a bad way, because it makes it difficult to see things not anticipated by the paradigm.
[...]
To explain this, Kuhn uses as example a psychological experiment, where test subjects were shown a series of playing cards. Some of the cards weren't normal cards, but cards such as red six of spades or black four of hearts. The anomalous cards were identified as normal cards, until they were exposed more often. Then, Kuhn writes, the subjects did begin to hesitate and to display awareness of anomaly. … Further increase of exposure resulted in still more hesitation and confusion until finally, and sometimes quite suddenly, most subjects would produce the correct identification without hesitation.
[...]
It seems that a shared vision is important because it allows us to focus. It might not be a correct vision, but because it enables us to focus on the details, the esoterics, and because we're inclined to see anomalies only after having been exposed to them for a while, this ensures that we, in time, will find the correct vision.
Perhaps, if we would immediately notice anomalies, we would never be able to focus on something long enough to produce anything persistent. [...]
Dan Sugalski writes about syntax highlighting and the uncertainty of its benefits.#
Like so many other programmers, I use a syntax-highlighting editor. (Well, OK, I'm an emacs user, so technically I'm using a syntax highlighting operating system, but we'll let that one slide) I have noticed one interesting thing about using it, though--I comment my code less.
I noticed this the other day when I printed out the code for the compiler module I'm working on. In the editor, with colored highlighting enabled, it makes sense what's going on, and everything's reasonably obvious. On paper, though, in black and white with no highlighting the lack of comments was much more obvious, and the code itself didn't make a whole lot of sense. It's not even the amount of code that's visible, as I've got a near-obscenely sized set of monitors on my desk.
Daniel Drezner writes about "the perils of creeping protectionism" with must linking.#
The story also highlights a recent speech by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan (sponsored in part by the Economist). The entire speech is worth reading -- it's about how increased financial globalization has permitted greater flexibility for the U.S. to run a large current account deficit. However, it ends with a cautionary note:
Should globalization be allowed to proceed and thereby create an ever more flexible international financial system, history suggests that current imbalances will be defused with little disruption. And if other currencies, such as the euro, emerge to share the dollar's role as a global reserve currency, that process, too, is likely to be benign.
I say this with one major caveat. Some clouds of emerging protectionism have become increasingly visible on today's horizon. Over the years, protected interests have often endeavored to stop in its tracks the process of unsettling economic change. Pitted against the powerful forces of market competition, virtually all such efforts have failed. The costs of any new such protectionist initiatives, in the context of wide current account imbalances, could significantly erode the flexibility of the global economy. Consequently, it is imperative that creeping protectionism be thwarted and reversed.
Compared to Greenspan's usually tortured prose, this amounts to a clear warning.
Richard links to Josh Marshall's rare personal post.#
To the best of my recollection I once was one. But in the age-group isolation of my thirty-something bachelordom it's a species with which I realize I've become almost wholly unfamiliar. Yes, of course, in their ones or twos, I see them all the time. And that's fine -- wonderful folks. But when they're running in herds, that's an altogether different experience. And one I now realize I've become weirdly unaccustomed to.
Slashdot links to A List Apart and their retooling of Slashdot with Web standards.#
Joe Clark writes "Nearly a year after an interview with this correspondent highlighted a few problems with Slashdot's HTML, Daniel M. Frommelt and his posse have recoded a prototype of Slashdot that uses valid, semantic HTML and stylesheets. Frommelt projects four-figure bandwidth savings in the candidate redesign, were it adopted, not to mention better appearance in a wide range of browsers and improved accessibility. Next he needs volunteers to retool the Slashdot engine. And yes, he did it all with CmdrTaco's blessing." Slashdot has kept its HTML 3.2 design for a long time ("because it works"), but perhaps this effort will be a catalyst for change...
Cirilla writes about college and being "out."#
was out last night, "out", what everyone is obsessed with at college. "Did you go out last night??" "I haven't been out in two days..."
What I learned was I have little need to "go out." Hockey game ended in a futile tie, which was perfect, the whole night felt like a stalemate chess game. I was playing mental tennis with myself, freaking out about quitting, wondering if I could get back on the team, all this stuff...then trying to talk myself back into why I felt I needed to stop in the first place.
I didn't realize how much I liked being an athlete, and having all that structure, and forced exercise.
[...]
But I'm wallowing. I just feel like it's going to be hard to find a group of decent people to hang out with who don't subsist on 30 packs of watery beer. Another thing I'll truly miss is the all-purpose excuse, "I can't, I have crew." No matter what the situation, it works, and is often true. Sigh.
It's shitty to read people having tough times but when they write great and say interesting things I feel bad liking it. Oh, the joy of living vicariously.
Michael Williams blogrolled me. Thanks Michael.#
Erin Judge blog rolled me too. She loves indie rock boys. Sweet deal.#