Women and Leadership Roles: How Emotional Literacy Would Solve the Problem of the "Male Dominated" Tech and Business

I just read Sheryl Sandberg's profile by Ken Auletta in the New Yorker (A Woman's Place: Can Sheryl Sandberg upend Silicon Valley's male-dominated culture?).. and some months ago watched Sheryl Sandberg's video on women and success from TedWomen. (For more background, she was also covered recently in Bloomberg or watch her Barnard commencement speech .)

In all these talks, Sheryl notes that women are dropping out of tech and business leadership tracks.

She makes some good points, but only iteratively adds to what we've already talked about for the last 8 years about women in tech.

A little history

About 6 years ago, I came up with a list of things, along with a couple of other women, that we could do to encourage women:
* help women get speaker training
* encourage and submit women to speak at events
* help women pitch their companies to funders and get into the entrepreneurial ring
* help women get mentorship and family support they need to stay on leadership tracks
* help women get into science and technology tracks in school and keep them in those tracks in the working world
* get more women in the room to change the tone of whatever is happening
* when you hire, think about how women will read the ad: kick ass engineer will likely not get women applying
* when you hire, remember the women undersell and the men oversell, and if you even them out they are similarly prepared for the job

... and more recently, riffing on the last two, and I wrote a post last year in response to Clay Shirky's post on how his male students were much more aggressive about asking for help and in pursuing jobs that his female students, where I noted that in tech, often our filter for who gets noticed and appreciated is aggression. In other words, students of both genders need to be aggressive, but if our filters only notice the super-agressive, then we miss out on a lot of qualified people, especially women.

One of the key points Sheryl Sandberg makes is that women need to lean forward. I have seen women lean back even when we have explicitly made space for them. I can highlight one example out of the many I have seen in the 8 years I have been proactively working on this:

In service to the list above, a group of women and I pushed for speaker training by having Lura Dolas who is a premiere executive speaker trainer come to She's Geeky as well as for training for geek speakers at Citizen Space one saturday (coordinated at the time by Tara Hunt). But you know what? We held signups open for women, for a couple of weeks. Few women signed up even though we did lots of personal invites, and eventually opened it to men. All the rest of the spots were gone in a flash. So I get what Sheryl Sandberg is saying: she suggests that encouraging women to "lean forward" would work. I've been trying to get women in tech to do that, with a little different terminology, for 8 years.

I, as well as many others, have emailed (for years) various conference organizers from Mike Arrington to Tim O'Reilly suggesting highly-accomplished women for their speaker line-ups (with links to bio pages from the Speaker's Wiki as well as topic sorts of the many women listed by tags). Mike Arrington is right when he says the very few women at the top of tech are barraged by requests to speak and often turn down event requests. But there are other women who are very well qualified to speak, however the criteria for who is eligible is often heavily in favor of typically male tech behaviors: rabid self-promotion, the ability to speak very early on a new topic or meme, regardless of what they know, and brashness.

Women often eschew these qualities or don't know how to navigate them because they run so counter to women's social norms. So that, mixed with women's usualy less overall interest in having a big "title," which many conferences like to promote in association wifth the event (look: we've got 80 C-level speakers.. come pay several thousand to attend our event !) make women less attractive to conference organizers. Though I would argue that at most events I attend, women speakers share far more data and opinion than the men, and are often much more interesting speakers compared to the men who often hold their proverbial cards to their chests and don't share as much interesting stuff. So to me, the practical reality is that as far as speakers go, women are the brash risk-takers on stage. I often seek women out to get info the guys won't share.

Sheryl Sandberg suggests three ways we can push women in tech and leadership roles:
* keep women "leaning forward" (participating actively) in business, leadership and tech
* stay in the game (ie when they have kids, don't drop out) with a spouse who does as much housework as you do
* think bigger and take more risks

Those three are great additions to the set of things we can all recommend women do. But to me, these lists: our 8 plus Sheryl's 3 (two of hers overlap so it's really about 9 ways to get women more into leadership roles), not to mention complaining about the lack of women speakers at conferences or the lack of women on board's of directors, or lamenting the dearth of women in engineering or getting women to pitch a company, as Women 2.0 tries to support in their annual contest, doesn't get us what we need or want. Which is a healthier ecosystem between men and women in tech and business so that women can more naturally be themselves, contribute, and inhabit leadership roles and overall, products are better.

In fact, over the past three or four years, I'd mostly given up talking publicly about the dearth of women in tech and business. The problem isn't getting solved, despite things like the Speaker's Wiki created so that non-typical speakers could list themselves. For me, the value of that wiki listing is in being able to email a few biographies to conference organizers, which I do often privately. It's a much more positive step than complaining about the lack of women speakers, which I'm so tired of.... But overall, the topic has felt like a waste of time because men in tech look down on women for discussing it, and it doesn't feel like anything ever changes.

Frankly I could see Sheryl getting burned out on discussing the topic (from lack of results) the way so many of us have over the past decade. I give her about 2-3 years to get frustrated and move on to other things, at least as far as speaking out in the New Yorker and at Ted and college commencements and other forums. The topic gets old and you want to be constructive.. so you start thinking about other things you care about that get more traction. It's not that you don't care about women in business and tech leadership roles, but maybe the other things I've done for years like holding personal dinner parties for women business leaders, or the women in tech weekends south of Santa Cruz at the beach, are just more effective at creating connections and support between and for women in tech and business. And they don't have the downside you get when you keep bringing the issue up publicly.

What's new on this topic?

Recently, I've been rethinking: why are we still here in the same place with women in tech? Why is it that our old list of 8 or Sheryl's new list of 3 ways to push women up the leadership and tech ladders may help a little, for the tremendous effort they take, but they don't really effect the overall problem?

What is the deeper problem set here? Why talk about it again? Well, it started for me with a surprising conversation.

I chatted a few weeks ago with a friend who is a man in finance, business and banking (but no tech at all), about the problems women encounter in tech and business generally. I told him I felt often men have been socialized to be on "teams" where there is a team spirit, where they don't look to the coach to discipline someone. Instead, they do it through peer pressure, and they also don't criticize team members unless they violate a big rule that everyone knows.

How does this work in tech? I explained to my friend that often a group of guys will huddle at a conference or some event, and they are playing with their laptops and mobile devices, listening to (mainly male) presenters in sessions, and then back at the group email check and hallway conversations. The guys joke around and mostly none of them looks too closely at what anyone else is doing with their company or their products or pitches. They all joke and get along. There are some guys who do look more closely at products and companies, but you almost never hear them share their real views or anything at all critical of the other tech or guys.

Women, on the other hand, often see the flaws in those companies, or products or pitches and say so. They see how a product or algorithm can exclude or hurt people or create problems for users. How a business model won't resonate with people and why it will take about 2 years to show that no one wants what's on offer. They see what can go wrong. Why? Because we watched our moms and the other moms growing up, and we got socialized to look for the problems and to prevent disasters, and to do things fairly and equitably for everyone involved, because we (the women, the moms) would have to manage the problems, clean up the disasters and take care of anyone who was hurt.

For example, where a Dad might say, "Hey kids, lets climb the tree and we'll jump off onto our new trampoline!" And mom would say, "Wait a minute, the kids are going to jump off an 8' high branch, hit the trampoline at 4', and bounce off onto the ground and probably break things?" She would put a stop to the plan, saying "You can only jump on the middle of the trampoline and not at the edges and no jumping off anything else onto the trampoline." And while mom was a major bummer, she was also preventing broken bones, loss of school days (that might lead to having to repeat a grade if the injuries were really bad), pain and suffering, and oh yeah, if the neighbor kids got hurt, getting sued by their parents for negligence and potentially losing the house and having to move or at least getting into a major fight with those neighbors.

Yeah.. mom is really a bummer here. But in a very good way, because she is socialized to know that she will have to pick up the pieces of problems that get out of hand, nurse the sick, and see 10 steps down the road the implications of decisions. Dad on the other hand, in this scenario, is thinking of the fun.

Now, you can say there are plenty of dads that wouldn't suggest this with their kids, but I actually know a dad, who is a successful risk taker at work who makes lots of money and is considered by colleagues to be very good, who suggested this to his kids, partly because he figured he could manage it and catch any kids bouncing off the trampoline. But his wife put a stop to it. Though one kid did jump off the tree branch later when the parents weren't around and got a compound fracture out of the deal.

When there's disaster, like with the broken bones, it's the mom who usually drives the kid to school every day for three months, instead of having him ride his bike with his friends. She was the one who sacrificed a half hour every morning being late for work, and she knew what the sacrifices might be in advance of disaster striking, when she shut down the jumping-from-the-tree plan.

The real way to think about that mom, and many women's contributions in warding off disaster, is to say those women are caring about the greater good over a longer term. It's a more masculine trait to think about making a splash and more a typical feminine archetype to care about the long term risks.

We all hold both archetypes inside us, women are more apt to express more of the feminine archetype, bringing a way of being conscious of the longer term effects on other people, the longer term business model, the larger effect the business will have on society. Comparatively, men statistically are more likely to embody the male archetype which is often about taking larger, often dangerous risks for shorter term gain in order to break out for the big score and function more in a team mode with the other guys. And our society pushes us through socialization to these gender specific modes by blessing what is socially acceptable.

These gender-specific tendencies translate to a scenario in tech and business where men often show up as more exciting, brash risk takers who if they succeed, shine in the myth of the genius who did it all. Women are often behind the scenes, managing the fall-out of risks, and frankly, putting the kibosh on some proposals (read: bummer) in companies, in tech generally, and in business. And bummer it is if you don't take kindly to women's important role in thinking critically about risks and the consequences.

How many women do you know who you would put in the high-risk-taking category?

But this difference is *exactly* why we want a mix of men and women engineering, directing, creating and sustaining, leading businesses, and shaping policy, so we get a balance of each gender's tendencies which statistically will likely make the company or product or governments far more successful and stronger than if one gender alone works toward success.

So after telling this male friend about men and women in tech, the trampoline story and my general thesis that women are "analyst critics" and that feels like a bummer for the guys, I asked what he thought about the situation.

He said, "Well, whether guys know it consciously or not, most men tend to put women into two categories: bitch or hot. She can be in both, but she has to be very hot to over come 'the bitch' label in terms of whether a guy would talk with her or be 'friends' with her. So, while plenty of guys are socialized better because they are married or with a woman and therefore don't do this 'hot vs. bitch' assessment explicitly, no guy is going to defend a woman if all the other guys decide they don't really like her... no reason given. Or defend her if one guy starts picking on her, either to her or outside her purview, with the guys. Because we are all on the team. However, the unspoken reason is she is in the bitch category because once, once! she 'complained' about something, even if it was done constructively to solve a real problem. She had demonstrated that she could complain any time going forward and the guys know they can't be themselves around her. In other words, they have to be 'good' around her but can 'be themselves' with the guys. So now the set up becomes one where the guys have fun with each other, but are serious when any women are around, even if some of those women have never criticized or done anything to put themselves into the 'bitch' category."

Second, he noted that most men, in the face of even very mild criticism coupled with constructive solutions given from a woman, take her not as her, but rather to a place of fear. This fear is rooted in men's 2-year-old selves, deep down, where their mothers yelled at them or criticized them. So while the woman in a tech project might be saying: "Hey how about doing the project this way where something good can happen, because the other way isn't so good for the users..." the guy goes to a place where the woman co-worker is "his mother," telling him that he's wrong. The man can't hear the woman, because there are too many old filters in the way. And while again, some men have to have more criticism to get that fear going, most men aren't so conscious that they can hear criticism from women of a project, conference or company as being about the actual problem, but rather they take it to be about themselves. The criticism becomes an "ego-threat" and old defense mechanisms kick in. And criticism coming from a woman, well, lands her in "bitch jail", where the man's 2-year old fear is triggered and the woman can't really fix that without changing the larger issue of that man's consciousness about himself.

HIM: "We are all human and feel the emotions similarly in a way: Fear feels the same for men as fear feels to woman. Anger is anger for men and women. But if a man has fear.. he's what: 'a pussy.' If a woman has fear.. 'that's just how women are.' And if a man has anger, 'that's how men are.' But if a woman has anger, 'she's a bitch.' Even if she's just giving constructive criticism. Most men I know interpret any woman's criticism as inches from 'anger' no matter how nicely and constructively it's given, and therefore, she's rapidly entering 'bitch jail.' "

I have to say, I found it pretty shocking that a guy would cop to all this. And he wasn't leaving himself out of the category. Just being brutally honest.

If you're a guy reading this, and you are mad right now, I would ask yourself these questions:
Have you ever felt fear when a woman colleague has constructively criticized your project? Or did you even realize at the time you feared anything? Did you tell her, owning the fear and admitting it was your issue, not hers? Did you make it safe for her to share further criticisms? Or did you just distance yourself from the woman, and not work with her so much anymore, and did she just sort of back off from giving further feedback and instead, move away from the male members of the team? In other words, did she lean back and did you help her to be less involved?

So are you mad because my friend's words hit a nerve.. and this is uncomfortable? Because it only takes a few of these instances for a woman in tech or business to sit back and not participate as much. You may say, she's not tough enough. But she may say: why bother, if no one can take what I have to say.

I have another story, about a friend who is a partner on Sand Hill Road. She never speaks at the weekly partner meetings to review deals, until the end of the meeting (about 4 hours). She's learned that she waits until the chest beating and the competitiveness are over and the guys (the rest of the partners are, of course, all guys) have exhausted themselves and said everything they want to say. Then they look around.. and ask her what she thinks about this week's deals. Then, and only then, are they ready to listen to her. And they do. But she has leaned back. Effectively. I mean, she is a successful partner at a successful and top rated VC firm. But she leans back. Because that's how the guys can take her.

Back to my friend's and my conversation:

ME: Well.. it's true that it's not socially acceptable for a woman to express anger. Most women I know aren't even conscious of their own anger, or how much anger is inside them. They are so used to stuffing their anger, and moving on, that the anger comes out sideways. And men are right to fear that. It's not safe when men stuff fear, or women stuff anger, for anyone, because we are avoiding what is real, but complicated, and not socially acceptable. It comes out sideways for both of us. Men avoid angry women out of unconscious fear, and women try to work with men's fear, but can't, because fearful men won't include women in the real work, reducing women to things that are valued for their looks. That's a lot of sideways behavior.

Certainly I have been guilty of this.. especially prior to doing the emotional literacy work I've engaged in more recently. I have definitely stuffed anger, had it come out side ways, to other's confusion, and not owned what I was doing or feeling. It's probably been scary for men I've worked with, because I've *not talked* about anger, or released the pressure of feeling mad about the unfairness of something ... like not being taken seriously by the men in the room... or like a speaker list where organizers didn't even try to find qualified women, or disregarded dozens of qualified women. Or for example, once when I pitched to a partner's meeting in a Venture Capital firm, and had the senior partner refuse to look at me or ask me questions directly no matter how polite I was. Instead he asked all the questions to my male business partner, who turned every one over to me. Women have all had experiences like this. And we don't get mad. But everyone knows it's in there somewhere. And on and on with examples.

So if emotional literacy is the larger issue, how do we fix this? How do we get unstuck at a deeper level, than suggesting speaker training, or asking women to lean forward?

I'm not proposing we (women) try to change the guys that project the team vibe, consciously or unconsciously, who don't facing their own fear, or aren't honest about their own projections and inability to own what they are doing, or speak and share their fear.

I mean, women could do a big movement to educate men and get them to shift their thinking, a la the 70s, but that's a lot of work for something I don't think, frankly, will work. I don't think women can really change the attitudes and behavior patterns men carry, especially unconsciously.

Instead, I'm proposing we (women) change us. And my friend suggests that he, and other men, have to change men. Because, he too says, "Women can't change men, rather men can only initiate each other and teach each other to feel fear constructively, consciously, honestly and safely, in order to see women as women and not through the many filters they carry now."

So how do we do that? You know when people say: "Change yourself, change the world?" Where if you change yourself, everyone reacts and they are forced to treat you differently and if they don't, you don't care anyway because you've moved on and in a way others are left either changing or being left behind? Yeah. That way to change the world.

So how do we change us?

I'm not proposing that women be more like men.. to be more "fun" or take more crazy risks. Because trying to be something you aren't -- a team player if you've never been on a team, or able to laugh with the guys like a guy, when you aren't a guy, propose highly risky actions -- never works.

Instead, I think the answer lies in facing our own issues, as women, and not only changing ourselves for work, but everywhere. I'm proposing that we look at how we are angry, how we stuff that and don't face it, and aren't honest about it. Which makes us unsafe to many men. I believe that if women were honest about their anger, they would reside in their own power, own it, and reasonable risks and "leaning forward" as Sheryl says, would happen naturally and without a few of us pushing women to do what doesn't feel good to them now. Because most women aren't living in their authentic power which means they haven't faced their own anger or owned it.

As my man friend named it, "Women seem to have slid backwards over the past 20 years.. they are very concerned with their appearance to the sacrifice of their own truths and personal well being." My thought exactly.There's nothing wrong with looking good. But it should be secondary, and yet many young and older women seem to be focused on that to the detriment of their own advancement. It translates into caring more about what others think about you than asking for what you deserve, speaking the truth, and risking criticism to speak what is real and authentic. Which is all pretty much a recipe for holding anger deep down in an unconscious woman.

Not being taken seriously, not seeing women speaking at tech conferences, being on the boards of companies or doing what is high level work, could add even more anger. I know from years ago, challenging the organizers of conferences about how they had none, or one or two, women speakers at an event, didn't work. And women have been angry, when conference organizers react with silence or brush off the issue. But it was an anger women didn't feel they could express, or weren't conscious of.. and yet it was there.. I could feel it. And the men understandably feared that. Because the anger was coming out sideways.. it wasn't clean, owned and direct.

So, HE continued, "If men have taken the feminist messages from the 70s (like "who needs a man anyway?") and defaulted into emotionally illiteracy, where they don't have to own their emotions, or be conscious and share their own fear, then we end up with stagnant gender roles and fear about ever letting those roles shift again. Because the effect of those messages from the 70s have hung around, and a lot of men heard those messages from women as having an underlying criticism of who we are as men and whether we are even needed. For men who come after the 70s, the sons and nephews of men of age in the 70s, those boys are getting their modeling of what men are like, what it means to be a man in the world, how to treat women and how express their own emotions. The effects men felt in the 70s have been passed on to the current generations of men.

"There is a place where it's okay for men to express our emotions in our culture, but there is an invisible line for us, where when men cross it, the rest of the guys all point a stern finger and say to the one guy crossing the line: 'Dude, what are you being such a pussy for?' A guy who isn't emotionally literate will cave. But the guy, if he's emotionally literate, can say: "Hey, I'm feeling some fear / anger / sadness / a threat... " because that man is tired of having to not be himself for the sake of his friends. The truth about this is that there is a quiet revolution in men's circles across the country, THAT HASN'T YET trickled into our business and technology companies across the country.

"And so it's that distinction, that men can't yet be honest and direct. But as men begin to own their own internal emotional truth, to themselves and to each other, they'll realize that women are already there... waiting for them."

The notion is that the genders are secretly eyeing each other, where men look at the women's camp, women look at the men's camp, and if we raise the problem of women excluded from industry (tech, business, etc) and young women regressing to placing their value in the old stereotypical values like: "how do i look, how sexy am i, how desirable to the opposite sex.." this feels like a failure of the attempt women made during the feminism of the 70s to be integrated into male culture, male business and to be seen as equals.

If you accept that that 70s movement failed in a way, then it makes sense that women came into male domains (80's and 90s) and now women are receding from tech jobs from the 2000s on. (There are still women working, but the numbers in traditional male domains are down).

So why is this? Well, one view via my male friend has is that men inherently felt threatened during the 70s and 80s and after. This is partly because of what he called the "fragile male ego" which he says,"...is a reality especially among men who haven't done personal work.. who aren't emotionally literate." But also some of the loudest and clearest women's voices in the 70s and 80s were making men bad and wrong. He says further, "When men talk, we tend to lump all women into one voice.. so the women were lumped together as man-haters in the 70s and 80s."

So to the extent that the women's movement was about "taking power from men" ...this reaction from men happened. And got internalized by men.

So why have men returned to excluding women? My friend says, "Men tended to stereotype what was going on around their own exclusion by 'man hating women,' and reacted out of collective fear, toward women who wanted power." That power being the ability to join men at work, in business, or tech, and be taken seriously.

My friend goes on: "Men have always been at a place of lesser emotional literacy than women, so the dialog men cannot participate in with women is something like this: (to a man) How do you feel about women working in what has been men's world? A healthy male response would be: 'I feel fear of it because there has been incendiary language by a few women and that causes me to want to fight... '."

So in other words, emotional literacy allows for a full bodied conversation, where the whole body is involved in the conversation. Where the emotions in my body can be expressed.. and it's okay on both sides of the genders.

Again, HE said, "But men aren't able to do that yet, with women. But in general they do it with men, but it's limited.. to stomach, sexuality, gut.. but that's it. And many men have been raised by mothers who are emotionally invasive, so there is also a tendency to disbelieve that a women's desire for a full bodied emotionally aware dialog is *not* going to somehow come at a price to the man.

"So men aren't able to have a full bodied conversation with women, and women are waiting on men to get there.. to become emotionally literate.

"The problem is that when men fail to do this work, and when women don't have an equal partner (who is being emotionally aware) then women recede into a place where they try to find their value in the old stereotypical ways: valued for their looks and sexually because an equal dialog isn't really happening and neither party is really seeing each other as fully human."

ME: What about women? Why doesn't it work for us to help men?

HIM: "So if emotional literacy did happen, then men would treat women as more than tits and ass.. and women would feel that and feel able to take the risk of revealing who they are to men. That means women would be intellectually revealing, in board rooms, engineering rooms, with fully available ideas and contributions to the work.

"But the problem is, men can only do this work with men. Women can't help them. Men have to initiate men, men have to work on emotional literacy with each other, men have to make it safe to be masculine and live in their male bodies, and still express fear, even to women."

ME: So while this would change personal relationships a lot, in the context of work, men and women would see each other as humans who all have fear, feel threats, have anger, etc so we could be real about our contributions to projects, technology, development, etc. And women would be included and invited fully into speaking, leadership etc.

So this dialog between my male friend and me gives an idea of how we agreed women generally recede from the business world, because of these generalized dynamics. What my friend said above, and his take on men and women, which we both get are generalizations but also feel are generally true in our working experience, is a way to see that the lists of things women can do, like leaning forward, or getting speaker training, doesn't get at this deeper underlying problem to change what is happening with women in tech and business. Those suggestions are salve covering the underlying tense and uncomfortable relations between men and women in many work and professional situations, and we can see them explicitly displayed on many a tech conference speaker's list.

If men were to become emotionally literate and transparent it would change everything across the board: technology, business, leadership, speaking, conferences, product development, even Wall Street and the recent sociopathic behavior many men there have engaged in with our financial systems, to the huge detriment world wide of our economies and peoples. If women were to become emotionally literate, they would own their anger consciously, allowing men to feel safer in the presence of that anger.

I get that emotional literacy is a very tall order, but becoming aware of the need is a step. Talking about it is another step forward. I get it's very hard work each of us needs to do to face our selves and our emotional truths, so that when we go to work, we are clean and clear.

The upside for our society when men and women become emotionally literate is huge. It definitely extends beyond just tech conference speakers lists. It's just that a conference speaker list is a written testament to the problem at hand. Men and women can't now see each other as just human because of the many thick filters in the way of our communication and shared goals, that hold us in more adolescent gender roles.

One of the challenges with startups and incumbent businesses alike.. is the men are often looking for the splash (an IPO or a big fast score or a big win). But women often anticipate the greater consequences and see the longer term view. If men could invite women into really share the work, with full ability to share emotional and intellectual reality -- without judgements created through a person's own filters and projections, but rather from a place where both sides have emotional literacy -- with full ability to work toward the greater good, and long term success of the company and projects, men would succeed with less risky behavior and achieve more balance, women would succeed by bringing in their more considered approach to receive full acceptance as tech and business co-workers, co-founders and partners, leaders and contributors. And people, society, our economy, would be far more stable and successful by the work of an emotionally literate leadership and creator populace.

Where is the Personal Data Awareness? And what are the Missed Opportunities at QS2011

I'm at the Quantified Self Conference in Mountain View today and tomorrow.

A few thoughts. There are lots of people here from various disciplines: health care, tech companies like 23andme.com that marry personal genomics and tech, apps makers and health and wellness hardware makers. And lots of folks just wanting to track themselves.

Sessions are preprogrammed (in other words, the conference is all done top down broadcast mode), and now and then in people's statements, a person will pass along the vibe of the old style medical industry (that is: we know more than you and we'll tell you what's true.. that mode was in the opening session where we were lectured to). Though I just walked through all the sessions in round 1 and the individual break out sessions are more discussion mode which is great to see.

There was a near complete lack of consciousness about protecting user's data as I walked in and spent a few minutes in each of the first 6 sessions. The impicit assumption was that "we" (builders, companies, etc) can take data and use it for whatever "we" want. Building systems that aren't just about more silos with data lock-in, or building for a Personal Data Ecosystem model where users keep their own archives and data, and then choose where their data goes, what purpose it's used for and control what is happening isn't on the radar. It is especially important that we look at issues of privacy, control, autonomy, choice and transparency for the highly personal, very sensitive data collected around personal wellness and health.

There is a single session, led by lawyers about privacy in round 2. But the rest of the sessions do not seem to be aware at all that they need to build from concept on for privacy, data control by the users, where users keep their data and the applications, devices and monitoring tools "use" the data with permission.

And there is no session about personal data control, where the QS apps would work on a Personal Data Store. I've asked to have one.. but we'll see if they decide to let me do it. The assumption is developers will just build more silos with more data collected, about you, crossed with other data about you, that after combined, creates yet another silo of data. There may be an API available, but effectively, the data is stuck in another silo, that a regular user can't really get at it, hold it, control it, share it, correct it or delete it.

It's dismal.. thinking about how all this highly personal data is just assumed to be owned by apps makers and companies and users are just cows in a big milking system. The participants of QS are just continuing the tradition started by the health industry and continued by tech company silos in making the users say "Moo." Pick your ecosystem and prepare to be milked.

Lastly, I'm really happy to report that the QS organizers decided to order a really healthy vegetable lunch salad (with either chicken or tofu on it).. Great work on that front!

Tracking Do Not Track at Morris + King

A bit of Context
Obviously, this diagram is a little cynical (courtesy of Chinagrrrl), but not too far off from how we manage personal data online today. But there are a lot of proposals on the table to fix this dilemma. One is Do Not Track which industry sees as something they can self-impose on an *opt-in* basis (for themselves) and opt-out (for the users) and self-regulate by having advertising trade org.s monitor compliance, with the FTC stepping in as necessary. There are also a number of DNT bills introduced in Congress and various hearings on tracking where the FTC would regulate implementation. And Johns Kerry and McCain have introduce a Rights and Responsibilities proposal in the Senate, that instead of Do Not Track (Kerry's LA, Danny Sepulveda told me DNT is a waste of time) suggest ways that data collectors would have to be responsible with our data. However, that bill lets 3rd party marketing, data tracking and Facebook's privacy bending ways totally off the hook. Both of these plans / legislative initiatives completely ignore the more than 40 startups and companies building for the Personal Data Ecosystem where users would collect their own data, and make use of the value, which the World Economic Forum recently said was "a new asset class".

That said, the rest of this post describes the Tracking DNT panel at Morris + King the other night.

Tracking Do Not Track
Tuesday night I was on a panel at Morris + King, an PR firm in NYC, called Tracking Do Not Track. Our hosts: Andy Morris and Dawn Barber (who co-founded NY Tech Meetup with Scott Heifferman) were very good about putting together a diverse group of people to talk about Do Not Track and the various issues with personal data and the advertising industry that have so many talking these days. My guesstimate was that about 100 people attended, mostly from industry (tech & advertising).

Our group included:
Brian Morrisey (Editor in Chief of Digiday, an ad industry trade publication) as Moderator
David Norris (CEO of Blue Cava)
Dan Jaffe (Exec VP, Govt Relations for the Assoc of National Advertisers - ANA)
Helen Nissenbaum, Professor, Media, Culture & Communication at New York University
and me: Chair of the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium

We started off with Brian's question: who are you, what do you do in a nutshell, and what do you think of the state of online privacy these days?

I was first.. and gave a quick explanation of PDEC which is to say that we offer a middle way between Do Not Track (DNT) and what is going on now online (Business as Usual). Our middle way offers a market solution to users' wanting control of their data, and the tracking and digital dossier building by shadowy companies to stop..we don't believe DNT will work and don't support it, though we do see that some kind of "Rights and Responsibilities" legislation would help create a level playing field for any company that collects personal data. Those rights and responsibilities for personal data collectors needs to include giving user's a copy of their data, so they can then put them into personal data stores (or banks, lockers, etc) and then use the data as the person sees fit.

Oh, and I said the state of online privacy was pretty dismal, though I was optimistic because it feels like this year, it's actually possible to get personal data some basic protections similar to HIPPA or FCRA where user's can get their data, and we can make the Personal Data Ecosystem emerge as a market solution that finally works for people. Granted, it's a 5-7 year proposition to really create a new market, but we can actually start this year because of the 40 or so startups that are funded and building pieces of the PDE and the push in the US Government to do something about the dismalness of online privacy.

Helen Nissenbaum, whom I've admired for years for her thoughtful approach to privacy and usability, agreed that privacy online was pretty bad, and explained her work around Adnostic, a "privacy preserving targeted advertising" system made with some Stanford folks.

By far, the best comment Helen made all night was that tracking and aggregating data that pivots on people is not ethical, that it's bad for people and for the incremental 1% improvement we might see in targeted advertising, it's not worth the incredible intrusiveness of tracking. In particular she said, "Anonymization does not change intrusiveness."

Dan Jaffe spoke next, and surprise, agreed that online privacy is not good, but talked about how publishers need to support their businesses and that behavioral advertising is helping them do it, and that Do Not Track should be self-regulated by the industry because they know their business best. And government has a tendency to screw up regulations and therefore, we should let advertisers figure out what works.

Next up was David Norris, who agreed with my use of the word, "dismal" to describe online privacy and said that Blue Cava was supporting a self-regulatory model because they didn't feel that Do Not Track as proposed for legislation was a good idea.

We chatted about the viability of Do Not Track, and with Norris, Jaffe and me all agreeing it wasn't a good idea. However Jaffe said he didn't like the idea of any regulation, that the industry could do it themselves, and that my "data rights and responsibilities" support for legislation would be just as bad for data collectors.

Folks in the audience, like Esther Dyson, pushed back on Jaffe, saying that she wanted the ability to choose where and when her data was out at some vendors site, and that's why, she said, "I'm supporting Mary and her organization" because it's a market model that gave her choice.

I was very pleased to hear her endorse us (thank you Esther!)

In the end, I think we got our message out which is that tracking individuals is a bad thing, that users should be the only ones tracking themselves across sites, but that sites can track within the site to optimize business. And that users should have a marketplace to trade data, like they do in mileage accounts, and choose when they trade, as partners, and not have it done for them in secret as is the case now. And that we want to see users data protected with a basic set of rights, like Health, Education and Financial data currently is now.

Curiously, Dan Jaffe made a comment about HIPPA, the health data protection law, suggesting that users get their health data so maybe they could get their personal data too. Given that that is a law, and he was opposed to regulation of any sort otherwise, I wasn't sure what to make of this.

However, I was really pleased with the opportunity to talk about PDEC, the startups and tech efforts to create a personal data ecosystem, and to provide a different view than the usual support for Do Not Track as we try to figure out what is best for our society.

Thanks Andy and Dawn for inviting me!

Living the Contradiction

Clay Shirky and Spot.us are doing a survey on objectivity in journalism. More info here from Amy Grahan.

If you register, $5 will go to a charity (automagically -- apparently -- matched to your IP address -- I'm traveling for a conference and my $5 went to local event coverage where I am). You can share what you think (anonymously.. they won't share your name with the answers).

Below are my answers.. upon doing the survey I realized I did want to share.

Is objectivity in journalism even possible? my answer (chosen from their list of possible answers): It's not possible. Let's stop pretending

Can you explain your thoughts on the subject? It's not possible to be truly objective... however, i do believe it's an ideal to strive for... and that information collectors should be trained to strive for it simply as a personal stance when they collect information.. but also trained to look for their own leading and biased behaviors that will change the collected information.

Articles often don't share the wording of the questions asked of subjects in articles.. they just share the answers. And depending on the way questions are asked.. it's easy for a subject to be led or mislead to an answer that isn't natural or that leads to a very subjective conclusion that readers cannot see.

Fairness is the real goal in articles and other kinds of reporting.. but in order to replace 'objectivity' with 'fairness' as a journalistic goal, I believe we would need to develop a whole school of 'fairness in reporting' the same way 'objectivity' has been articulated and taught to journalism students to date in Jschools.

Is striving for objectivity in Journalism a good thing? my answer (chosen from their choices): Always - it's required

Yeah.. I get it's a contradiction to say that journalists and information collectors should strive for objectivity even as they also are trained to strive for fairness and to filter out their own natural biases. The reality for me is that even when I collect information, mostly as I do usability studies, I know my biases can show through, that the framing of questions can radically alter the answers from subjects, and that in the end, I have to do my best, though there is no human on the planet who can perfectly seek information and attain perfection in the results. Therefore I have to be honest about these imperfections slipping into the work product. I think the same is true for journalists.

Information collection is a tight-rope walk... it's about trying to stay above the bias while balanced in fairness. No one can do it perfectly.. but fairness in journalism is the ultimate goal I believe, followed by the physical embodiment of the objective stance, even as journalists and other information collects realize they can't be truly unbiased. It's as tricky as high wire work.. and I think information collectors and reporters need to respect what this is about.. to maintain the balance while making the ultimate expression in their reports focused on fairness.

At the 30,000 foot level, all collecting and reporting work is subjective. Collecting information, choosing what is fair, what is worthy to include in a report, what to reveal about a reporters' questions and stance involves personal decisions and judgments. In a usability study, I always include in my reports the questions and tests, so that readers can evaluate for themselves what I've done in my report. This is not typically done in journalism reporting.

Maybe the new fairness in journalism should combine a sense of personal objectivity as a behavioral stance at information collection, fairness in the choosing of who and what to investigate, fairness in what ultimately makes the published report, and disclosure of how the reporter did these steps. It means bringing forward the reporter into the context of the story.. but maybe the new fairness is about holding reporters more accountable within the story. Since the internet allow articles to go on with as much backup as possible, this kind of accountability disclosure wouldn't cost anything but the reporters time to add in a little context about who they talked to, what they asked and how it was done. And it would radically change the conversation about what is going on in journalism as an objective or subjective medium.

The Life of a Tweet

Twitter (and the ISchool -- or one of my poor brethern -- I have a masters from UCBerkeley's iSchool) seem to be in the tweetsphere over one ill-found tweet tossed off by a student and found by her summer internship employer likely via search.twitter.com. For background, you can see this: FattyCisco.com. The poor girl is likely humiliated and horrified over what she thought was an innocent and also, likely, a fleeting thought that didn't really reflect how she felt overall.

We've all had those momentary thoughts where when we are ambivalent, we toss something out of our mouths and once it's out there, we think, wow, that doesn't even ring true or, it did for a nanosecond, and now it's changed, or gee, that's about 5% of the way I actually feel about this. But out of mouth, truly ephemeral (unless recorded in some form) is different than written down and searchable in the grand database of the Googlezon and search at twitter. Or maybe it's just a joke.

This is one of the problems with online communities and specifically twitter:

You don't know who's listening, and because of search tools, you are findable beyond your follower list
or your "community" of known tweeters (ppl you @ with or read) unless your account is private.

I don't think we have at all sussed out what it means to tweet in the long term, or what the power of the tweet is, or where the tweet goes and what sort of life it has beyond the first few minutes or hours of it's life in the Twitter / client context.

This is another example of something that happened recently:

A PR exec going to Memphis to meet with a client, Fed Ex, insulted the client on the way to the meeting. The clients wrote a letter to the PR company and him, his bosses, and cc'd everyone at Fed Ex as well. Ooops.

The problem is, tweets go to those paying attention at the moment, those who may save tweets in clients (i leave my twitter client open and check it now and then as I have time -- right now I have 15k tweets from the past couple of days), those pivoting on a single user, those searching for key words, those looking a related conversations.

But when you tweet, in your head, you're often just thinking about those you expect to read it, like only a few your followers paying attention at the time. What happens with some tweets (some reading by some followers) is not what can happen with all tweets.

The interface and interaction at Twitter's website doesn't lead you to believe that what happens most often there will happen in incendiary examples. And different twitter clients (an android or Iphone app for example) don't lead you to understand the permanent nature of tweets, through use, that say, search.twitter.com might, as you see something you deleted appear there anyway.

It takes experience with all these different modalities to inform you because there is no advance disclosure or warning of the elasticity of a single tweet.

What is most interesting is this pushes me to think harder about what the interface of "aged information" online looks like (and I don't mean google search results that move from page 1 to page 3 over time).

And I have to ask myself what it would mean to have what Judith Donath discussed on the panel, Is Privacy Dead or Just Very Confused, moderated Saturday at SXSW by danah boyd. Judith discussed having some kind of a "mirror" for you of your digital self that would reflect all your online presentation and communications and expression... just so you might get a sense of what you show people and what you project at a moment in time. Right now it's really hard to gather that sense of yourself. Right now, you don't really see it in any sort of complete way. But others see pieces of you digitally represented at different times. It would be like re-disclosing for yourself what you've done, discovering how others view you, in slices or on the whole, in order to see the effect you have. It would probably be helpful to know what had reach and where, and what was for now at least, forgotten.

But frankly, the privacy implications of that are huge as well. So, I'm thinking. No answers on that one yet.

Trademark Tyranny by Jones Day: We Don't Like Your Stinking Linking Expression

So it turns out that Jones Day, the utterly clueless lawfirm, sued a small real estate reporting company, BlockShopper, for talking about Jones Day the normal way we all do online: with the name of a person or thing, linking to that person or things website underneath the name. The settlement agreement (pdf) says future linking must to changed as so:

... instead of posting "Tiedt is an associate," the site will write "Tiedt (http://www.jonesday.com/jtiedt/) is an associate." (The agreement also calls on BlockShopper to say that the lawyer in question is employed at Jones Day and that more information about the attorney is on the firm's Web site.) Via Wendy David at Slate

The first way is perfectly normal and the way everyone does it online. The altered version required by the suit is just silly. No one does it that way.

Though some do some creative linking expression like so:

Clueless bullies with no thought but for their own pride

and

Federal ninny making decisions who doesn't get trademark, the web, linking expression or his own ass from a tale pipe.

Groups like EFF, Public Knowledge, Public Citizen and Citizen Media Law Project tried to file an amicus (friend-of-the-court) brief but federal district court Judge John Darrah rejected it. And he denied BlockShopper's motion to dismiss before trial.

The only reason Jones Day "won" is because they are big, litigious jerks who found a judge that doesn't get social norms on the web. 15 years of social norms. Across the world wide web. For hundreds of millions of people.

PS. just in case Jones Day is worried (per their ideas in the suit that linking to them means the public could be confused), or anyone else is wondering, this website is not connected in any way with Jones Day.

She's Geeky

Hey.. She's Geeky is a few days away, and you can still sign up.

The list of great women attending is here: She's Geeky Attendees and Registration

Really looking forward to interacting with all those awesome girl geeks on Friday and Saturday at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View!

Obama New Yorker Cover Remix

Based upon the Kevin Drum/ Washington Monthly suggestion, I remixed this week's New Yorker Cover based upon Barry Blitt's Illustration. It is much funnier with the thought bubble and McCain. I think it will be easy for people in the current climate to misunderstand the original. But the remix makes it easier to get that it's supposed to be funny.

FCC Hearing at Stanford Today

I can't go, but I hope lots of folks out there who support and open and free internet do. Here's the schedule according to Save The Internet:

It is rare for all five members of the Federal Communications Commission to leave Washington, D.C., and they want to hear from you. There will be a public comment period - come speak up to save the Internet!

WHAT: Public Hearing on the Future of the Internet
WHEN: Thursday, April 17
TIME: 12:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.
WHERE: Dinkelspiel Auditorium, Stanford University
(471 Lagunita Drive, Palo Alto, CA) Map It!
For directions and travel information, visit: http://www.savetheinternet.com/=stanford_travel

FCC Public Hearing Agenda
12:00 p.m. - Welcome/Opening Remarks
12:45 p.m. - Panel 1: Network Management and Consumer Expectations
3:00 p.m. - Panel 2: Consumer Access to Emerging Internet Technologies and Applications
4:30 p.m. - Public Comment
6:30 p.m. - Closing Remarks
7:00 p.m. - Adjournment

Note also that Comcast is proposing a "P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities" according to ArsTechnica, who is skeptical. Don't see any users in that room, but if they don't invite us, I'd guess after Boston, we'd all get pretty mad and force them to include us. Either way, (FCC or voluntary code) I think it's going to be user centric in the end. We're just going to have to fight like hell.

Kevin Marks also makes a great point about Comcast: They are like The Producers who oversold their Broadway show, assuming it would fail, by getting 100 people to buy 10% of the who. Comcast, by overselling their network for internet access is doing the same, and then having secret levels above which they cut people off out of the blue, is pretty bad.

Revolution is Not An AOL Keyword

Eddan Katz wrote this piece: Revolution is not an AOL Keyword, and I acted as his editor, 5 years ago. We posted it to the bIPlog on the first day of the war in Iraq.

We had a real uphill-behind-the-scenes fight about it at the Journalism School, where the blog was then hosted, because some of the other folks on the blog thought it wasn't really under our mission to publish something about the war and culture and the internet. But we convinced them; we knew we would get it published when John Battelle, one of the profs, lent his support for us. And it got slashdotted. And Revolution was made into a tshirt. Which was all a blast after working on it all night messing with the language and placing links ... some of which are broken but I think it matters to keep them intact and original. I think the linking is a kind of expression in this piece.

Eddan and I thought up what Napsterization could be here at this blog, but in the end only I've posted to it. I still wish Eddan would, and maybe someday he will. He's really great.

Anyway.. here is Revolution. I got all misty-eyed when I reread it and moused the links, because it's passionate and it means something, even if some of it is a little out of date. Cause the war ain't over. I can't believe it. I just didn't think things could get this fkedup. But as Robert Fisk says, The only lesson we ever learn is that we never learn. Right on.

Revolution is Not an Aol Keyword*

You will not be able to stay home, dear Netizen.
You will not be able to plug in, log on and opt out.
You will not be able to lose yourself in Final Fantasy,
Or hold your Kazaa download queues,
Because revolution is not an AOL Keyword.

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.
Revolution will not be brought to you on Hi-Def TV
Encrypted with a warning from the FBI.
Revolution will not have a jpeg slideshow of Dubya
Calling the cattle and leading the incursion by
Secretary Rumsfeld, General Ashcroft and Dick Cheney
Riding nuclear warheads on their way to Iraq,
Or North Korea, or Iran.

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.
Revolution will not be powered by Microsoft on
The Next-Generation Secure Computing Base
And will not star Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee
Or Larry Lessig and Martha Stewart. Revolution will not promise penile enlargement.
Revolution will not get rid of spam.
Revolution will not earn you up to $5000 a month

Working from home, because revolution is not
An AOL Keyword, Brother.

There will be no screen grabs of you and
Jeeves the Butler one-click shopping at My Yahoo,
Or outbidding a shady grandma on eBay for
That refurbished iPod 20-gig.
MSNBC.com will not predict election results in Florida
Or fact-check the Drudge Report.
Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.

There will be no webcast of Wil Wheaton boxing
Barney the Dinosaur on the dancefloor at DNA.
There will be no mob- or wiki- blog of Richard Stallman
Strolling through Redmond in a medieval robe and halo
As St. iGNUcious of the Church of Emacs
That he has been saving
For just the proper occasion.

Survivor, The Osbournes, and Joe Millionaire
Will no longer be so damned relevant, and
People will not care if Carrie hooks up again with
Mr. Big on Sex and the City because Information
Wants To Be Free even while Knowledge Is Power.
Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.

There will be no final pictures from inside the
World Trade Center in the instant replay.
There will be no final pictures from inside the
World Trade Center in the instant replay.

There will be no RealVideo of 2600-reading,
Linux-booting white hat hacktivists
And Mickey Mouse in the public domain.

The theme song will not be written by Jack Valenti or
Hilary Rosen, nor sung by Metallica, Dr. Dre,
Christina Aguilera, Matchbox 20, or Blink-182.

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.

Revolution will not be right back after
Pop-up ads about eCommerce, eTailers, or eContent.
You will not have to worry about a
Cookie in your browser, a bug in your email, or a
Worm in your recycling bin.
Revolution will not run faster with Intel inside.
Revolution, dude, is not getting a Dell.
Revolution will increase your Google rank.

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword, is not an AOL Keyword,
Is not an AOL Keyword, is not an AOL Keyword.
Revolution will be no stream or download, dear Netizen;
Revolution must still be live.

*See generally Gil Scott-Heron, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

Posted by Eddan Katz at March 20, 2003 05:45 AM

The NY Times on Girl Geeks: They are Fashion, Not Technology

The
NYTimes Stephanie Rosenblum has an article in today's *Fashion* section on Girls in Tech. Wo. Not in the *Technology* section. In Fashion.

Sorry, Boys, This Is Our Domain talks about how girls are coding up more content online: webpages, web art, blogs and podcasts.

And then they decorate it with an image of a girl at her laptop with a devilish tail. But instead of asking one of the girls they interviewed to make the artwork, they ask Adam Strange to do the art for the article:

So when they interview people like Doc Searls, Loic Le Meur or David Weinberger, all of whom are very smart about tech, those articles are in the tech section or business, but when they talk to girls, who for the record, are far more technical in this article than these three tech experts, girls are put in Fashion. I've never seen coverage with Doc or David or Loic in fashion. Maybe they should be there depending, but they aren't put there by the editors that I know of....

This is not about David or Loic or Doc (all extremely supportive of women in tech, btw), and certainly they don't choose the section the paper puts them in, but rather the way the editors and writers at the NYTimes see them, verses the girl geeks in this article.

My point is that the NYTimes puts men who talk tech and trends or social impact in tech/biz, and women who code web art / pages in fashion.

Can you tell I'm pissed? WTF?

However, the number of women in tech isn't great (Which is why we need more articles in the Tech section about this people!)

The article says that less "...than 15 percent of students who took the AP computer science exam in 2006, and there was a 70 percent decline in the number of incoming undergraduate women choosing to major in computer science from 2000 to 2005, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology."

Chaos, In Pakistan and Silicon Valley

Today are the Pakistani elections. Why do I say chaos? And why also in Silicon Valley? And how are they at all connected?

As Amra Tareen, who is in Pakistan covering the event, says in her report about the elections:

As the day progressed more people started to show [to the polling stations], people were staying back home enjoying their morning off and due to concerns of violence. In the last 24 hours gunmen in Lahore and surrounding areas have killed 8 people and injured 40.

Check out this ballot from Pakistan, which Amra explains:

For example PML-Q (Musharraf's party) has the symbol cycle, PML-N (Nawaz's party) is represented by the symbol Tiger or a Lion and PPP (Benazir's party) is represented by the arrow. People caste their vote by placing a fingerprint and a seal over the symbol.

I've been helping Amra, a friend in the Silicon Valley for 4 years, with her company All Voices. Amra is from Pakistan, though she spent some of her educational years in Australia, including getting an engineering degree, and then went to Harvard for an MBA. She was also a VC in Silicon Valley for 6 years. Now she has founded All Voices with Erik Sundelof and the help of a great team of engineers and other folks.

I'm still working on Dabble, but I just find what is happening at All Voices so compelling, that I wanted to help her do this. She's raised VC money for a news and a conversation site that is meant to foster discussion from people around news events.

And how many Silicon Valley founders go to Pakistan to cover the elections, to kick off their companies?!?!

That's incredibly unusual, and to me, shows tremendous passion and guts about both the company, and her desire to see Americans and Middle Easterners talk about what goes on in their world. Anyone can talk, but she specifically wants to see these two groups getting to know each other on a more personal level, as opposed to say, an AP report.

So what is the chaos in Silicon Valley? Well, it's not on par with the Pakistani Elections, but the alpha All Voices is out, and people are commenting, talking about the election (finding a few bugs too!), making events, posting videos and photos, and it's the first big exposure the team has dealt with.

The site is pretty simple, really. The idea is that events happen in the world, and an event within AllVoices can then be assembled by pulling in news stories, photos and videos by news sources or blogs and say, creative common's licensed Flickr photos.

But you can also make an event, which is really more factual in nature, than opinion, about whatever has happened in their world. Then you might blog or add photos or videos to your own event, or you could add those elements to events made by others or the system. For example, Amra has put video here and here and here of the people in Pakistan talking about the election, onto the event she made noting election coverage. After you make your event, the system will match blog posts, articles, images and video to it, and more folks can come along and share eyewitness stories, comment, ask questions, etc.

All this gets put onto the map and front page which lists recent and active events.

So when others come to the site, they can find your stuff based on where it happens as well as by searching or by finding your list of activities via your profile. Amra's election reporting is, of course, located in Pakistan on the map.

The sites definitely is an alpha, where there are bugs and things. Her engineers have been working on this for about 6 months, and it's really great to see what they've done.

As I said, I've helped with a little consulting on the side. Normally, I wouldn't blog about things I offer consulting for, and normally I'm too busy with Dabble, but I think this site and Amra's work has the potential for so much social good, I'm breaking my own rule.

So take what I say with a grain of salt due to my work and bias. Go visit the site yourself and decide if you think it's worthwhile. But more than anything, I encourage you to get involved in supporting Pakistan as it hold its election. Pay attention, comment, blog, make a stink, but support democracy and the people of Pakistan as they stake a claim for their future!

Fiber Optics in Sherborn Massachusetts

I'm visiting with some friends in Sherborn Massachusetts. They previously had dial up internet access, but sometime in the last two years, everyone (3,000) in this town, as well as more surrounding towns, got fiber optic lines put in by Verizon.

They have 5 mbs of downstream service for $35 a month, and if they pay $7 more per month, they can get 15mbs. It's rocket fast, so fast, as my host says, "it's too fast to take advantage of much besides video and VOIP because no one else has a fast connection to talk that fast with you." But it still rocks.

Everywhere I go in the Bay Area, work, home, friends offices, public places.. I wait for every website, video, voip connection, etc that I use. It's just amazing the contrast here. And every window I look through in my host's house has gorgeous forest and fall colors .. it's at least 100 yards to the next house., and all the houses here have that sort of spread. How do they do it when we can't get this in the denseness of Berkeley, San Francisco, Mountain View?

I'm sure the telcos that took $200 billion from the FCC and then didn't install fiber optic service have some excuse, but it's BS. They just need to install it since we paid for it, and then we can all move on.

James Cicconi of AT&T On Net Netrality

James Cicconi, Senior Executive VP Legislative and External Affairs for AT&T was at Esme Vos' Muniwireless conference yesterday, spewing what I would kindly call the greatest of spin, and unkindly as BS.

Net Neutrality is not about people telling network providers what to charge for tiered service. That's bull. Net Neutrality says that video packets, no matter where they come from, will get through at the same rates. Same with text or photos or VOIP or anything else. The network can't under Net Neutrality distinguish and discriminate because it doesn't like where something came from or the place the packet came from didn't pay the telco's any money to prioritize the packet.

To quote muniwireless (emphasis is mine):

It's Day 2 of the Muniwireless Silicon Valley Conference and they have an executive from AT&T talking about municipal wireless networks.

AT&T has not changed its tune. It is still against cities using public funds to compete with private enterprise and believes that communications should be left up to private firms like AT&T.

James Cicconi, Senior Executive VP Legislative and External Affairs for AT&T claims that there is no duopoly and there is enough competition in the market for telecommunications services, so cities should stay out.

What is AT&T's position on net neutrality?

Net neutrality is a challenge for all companies. You spend billions to deploy your assets and net neutrality means someone telling you what you can do with your assets - what you can charge, tiers of service, etc.

"All bits should be treated equal" is a problem for network engineers because one bit is porn another bit is heart surgery, another is email, yet another is voice, another is spam. That everything should be moved equally end to end is ludicrous. It's a more costly way to do things. It's not efficient, according to AT&T.

AT&T cannot build and maintain assets quickly enough to meet the demand. They are spending $19 billion this year. Some of the demand is driven by video. What happens when people start delivering high definition film? They can't build networks fast enough! What's the answer? Effective traffic management.

The antitrust laws can deal with the problems of net neutrality (side note: unfortunately these are not being enforced today). Why should AT&T want to degrade traffic? They will go to someone else (side note again: in a duopoly, you've got Comcast which has been blocking Bittorent traffic).

I don't know about you but where I live and work, we have two choices: AT&T for dsl or Comcast for cable internet access. They are both Mid-band services, and not great but better than dialup. And we pay exorbitantly for them compared to other countries.

So of course they want to take their AT&T/Comcast duopoly and spin Net Neutrality as being all about people interfering with their pricing models for tiered service when it's really all about prioritizing packets. They want to divert attention from the reality which is that they want to put their videos through first, their media, their VOIP or media/VOIP from people who've paid them off. Instead of letting users have what they want. The telco's want to own the pipes and the content.

It's wrong and we can't let the telcos win on this.

Take Back America

Salim just pinged me from his flight home from London to ask me to blog this.. it's happening now!

Confabb is the only place you can watch this live! Cool!

Take Back America

Confabb is powering the website for "Take Back America" -- a democratic conference where the presidential candidates are laying out their platforms.

I just found out that www.confabb.com is the ONLY place where you can watch live video of the event! Right now, Obama is on and will be followed by Edwards, Clinton and Kucinich. Congrats Jon and the team! Click "live chat" and if you're logged in, you can watch.

Getting Real

Bob Lefsetz explains why the music industry is even worse off than I thought, pushing them deeper into the hole they've been digging for years. They are so far removed from what is real and passionate in the art of music and in how people connect to the artists that this must seem perfectly reasonable to them, from a business point of view.

This summer in the east hamptons there will be a 5 concert series, costing $15,000 per ticket which buys entry into all five shows, with Prince, Billy Joel, James Taylor, Tom Petty and Dave Matthews.

He aptly compares this concert series to Mitzvahpalooza where Long Island defense contractor David H. Brooks spent $10 million dollars in 2005 on his daughter's bat mitzvah, and hired Don Henley, 50 Cent and Aerosmith among others to play two floors of the Rainbow room in NYC for the event.

Bob's right, it's disgusting for the fans, not to mention the idea of the artform, as well as commentary on the state of our society, which has gotten so gluttonous and cynical that even to people who can't afford it, which is most of us, this kind of thing seems reasonable and in no way a slap on the soul of music as an artform.

One Web Day! It's here!

Celebrate how the internet has changed our lives and made it better with people around the world!

Okay, that's a lot of explanation points, but the internet has made my life so different than it was before. And so much better.

First wave was email and research, in 1992, when I needed Supreme Court case law from the Cornell Law School website, or a news article from Dialog, or bulletin boards. Oh freedom from the law library for every little task!

Second wave was IM, more email with many more people and the web. Instant. Communication. Conversation. And all that primitively laid out info on the web. That was never so easy to get before.

Third wave was blogging (which has totally changed my life the most of all these waves) and lead me to research the live web, search algorithms based upon human behavior in many different types of circumstances and make my company. And introduced me to a whole huge circle of friends and colleagues.

Right now I'm staying with a friend in Amsterdam who I first new on the web. She's amazing. And her husband. Both of whom sustain themselves very nicely through their online blogs, which are entire businesses where the storefront, or office space, as it were, resides on these blogs. Partly our friendship bloomed out of respect for each other's work, visible online. And partly because our work on the web led us to meet in person and gave us a rich foundation to start our first conversation. About fashion. And online advertising and how we each hate marketing, are geeks, but wish the right shoe ads could show up in the right places, without violating our privacy.

Well.. it's One Web Day.

Tell your story on your blog, on the One Web Day wiki, or anywhere you like. But let people know how much richer your life is because you can communicate over the collapsed barriers of time and space the internet allows.

I'm going to be in London filming a proclamation from the Lord Mayor on One Web Day.

Throw up your own video at Blip.tv, tag it "onewebday" and it will end up in Dabble here: One Web Day video page.

Or throw your video up at whatever video hosting company you choose, tag it onewebday, and we'll do our best to get it posted to the One Web Day video page right away.

See you later today in London!

TSA: Incompetent and Not Afraid to Cover It Up

Coming through security last Friday night in JFK for my very delayed flight (due to weather), I had the following experince:

I walked through the metal detectors, with all my things besides me, with my boarding pass and driver's license folded together.

The TSA agent standing there asked for my boarding pass, and I gave her the packet. I kept a close eye on my bags because once I sent my bags, coat and shoes through the security thing and my digital camera was taken. Don't know if it was by another passenger or by a security employee, but I'm not taking any chances. A woman asked, "who's bag is this" holding up my bag, and I tell them it's mine. She tells me to get the rest of my things because she's going to inspect my bag. I get for my laptop and shoes, in a separate bin, and follow that agent.

At this point, I don't get my boarding pass or license back from the other agent. Later I am told that the woman who gets the Boarding Passes and Driver's Licenses, as you pass through the metal detector, hands the one she has off, and then takes the next one from the person coming through next.

But, she didn't hand it to me. She likely gave it to someone else, probably the next person in line. I get out, after they inspect my bag for secret blow-up water (you know, our liquid diet hoax by the current administration to get them reelected). I realize I don't have my ID and Boarding Pass. I go back to the TSA desk the the security area exit (I'm a few feet away), and an Agent Derreck says they have nothing of mine, without checking (across the room from where the actual thing happened). I get him to walk over in the security line to check for sure. He does and comes back empty handed. I ask, "How will I get on the plane?" He takes me to Jet Blue special services, where they cut me another Boarding Pass. But I have no DL, so the JetBlue woman asks me for other ID, and it turns out that 2 credit cards, my gym ID with picture, and costco ID with picture, are enough to get me another boarding pass. She double checks my California address verbally with me which I repeat back to her as I stand next to Agent Derreck.

While she was printing, Agent Derreck starts to talk about how TSA over in the security area has an "... ironclad process for bringing people through the metal detector." Basically, they bring one person through, check ID and boarding pass again, and then once they give it back, motion the next person through the metal detector. This is how they regulate people coming through the metal detector. As he says this, a different TSA agent, a woman, walks up the JetBlue service desk and hands a New York State Driver's License to the JetBlue woman, and says, "This person didn't get their ID back." Agent Derreck grabs the license from the JetBlue woman's hand, and says to me, "This kind of looks like you." To which I say, "That woman has tons of blond hair, and mine is brown, plus I live in CA." He hands it back to the JetBlue woman. A couple of minutes later, another TSA agent, also a woman, walks up the the JetBlue service counter with a Driver's License from Kansas, and hands it in, saying again that someone didn't get their ID returned.

After getting my boarding pass reprinted, I say to Agent Derreck want to make a complaint about TSA. He calls Port Authority but only tells me he's called "someone" and they'll be there in a few minutes to take it.

Port Authority Officer M. Wapole (#1746) arrives, takes a report, gives me the report number, a phone number and the name of the officer and date and time. I ask for a copy of the report and he says I'm not allowed to have one. I am surprised. He says it's private property. I ask how I make the complaint against TSA and he says he's not TSA. So I go back to Agent Derreck of TSA.

Agent Derreck says he won't take a complaint. He says I can make one at www.tsa.gov (so much for people without computers). I ask for his name and the agent's name at the metal detector, and he covers his shirt. But I can see that it says "Agent Derreck" before his hand is fast enough to cover his name tag, in brass. He says, "I won't give you my name or hers." And walks off, with his hand over his right breast.

According to the hand written note from Port Authority, the Port Authority report was taken by Officer Walpole and the time was September 15, 2006 at 8:35pm. Case #17304.

So much for accountability. The police and the TSA just cover each other's incompetence.

Meanwhile, I'm stuck without a driver's license, but more importantly, I think TSA *GAVE* it to some other passenger. After several hours at JFK, I checked back with the JetBlue service center, and they had not been given my license.

Wow.

And the kicker. When I arrived back in CA, I realize that I still have a small tube of toothpaste in my laptop bag (I carry a tube plus a brush to work) and forgot about it. It went with me through two screenings by the TSA in Oakland and Seattle, and two more, Oakland and JFK.

Who are these people kidding. Security Theater it is.

Thought Fashion: Are You In or Out?

It's true. I peeked.

Yes, I downloaded the AOL files. And I peeked. Why? Because I wanted to write this blog post and I wanted to see for myself what sort of gestures people were making as they searched for porn or socks or how to bury their pet birds or wives they'd just killed. I also needed to see the form the data was in. And I'm a voyeur just like everyone else in and around this story, and I wanted to rubberneck my way into other's private intellectual spaces.

But it's not right. The part where I and every news outlet, blogger, reader and looky-loo has been engaging in, judging people by their searches, making assumptions and behaving as if we ourselves have never made any searches or expressed any thoughts that would not look funny to someone else.

It's also not right because the data is personally identifying. Reporters have been tracking down people based upon their searches. It's not that hard, if you yourself are a good searcher.

What was it Bob Blakely said? About how "dragging all human behavior into the public is literally totalitarian." He is the chief security and privacy scientist for IBM's Tivoli Systems. "If you erode privacy, you erode liberty, because people don't tolerate things going on in front of them that they don't approve of." I was struck by how succinctly he answered the question that is always asked of people who object to the government or some other large and powerful entity as compared with you: What do you have to hide? If you're not doing anything wrong?

Every article on AOL's mess up that says something like AOL's Disturbing Glimpse Into Users' Lives is buying into this whether they know it or not. Thank you CNet for reaffirming our intolerance.

Let's get clear on the definition of "aggregated" data. For us geeks, we use this term often, as we reassure those whose data we work with that aggregation means we are removing anything personally identifying, and placing it with other user's data, so that it's just a pile of anonymized data that could never be distinguished by the person. An example might be the aggregation of all the searches on "dog," where who did them is removed but we know that 38 people searched on that term during a particular hour and day.

But users don't think that way. They hear the word, aggregated, and they think the data handlers are aggregating everything the system may know about just them, specifically and personally, and lumping it all together. Talk about miscommunication. And it terrifies the non-geeks.

What we really should be saying is that the data is "anonymized" and therefore you are safe. AOL's data was not safe because it was not anonymized, and for users, it was their definition of aggregated.

The AOL data which lumped each user's searches together with a user ID over three months, making profiling and finding them easy, meant that AOL provided enough data in some cases to indicate a lot about who the data related to very specifically. Leading to judgments by the rest of us. About the people who do or think things on the edges of society.

And why is this wrong? Because it hurts people. It makes them feel defensive about their own thoughts and ideas.

So, well, if you aren't doing anything wrong, what *do* you have to hide? Well, everyone has something they do or think about that would be an edge thought or that in one context would be in the middle, but in another, must be defended as it resides on the edge. And that would be disapproved by someone. Something the rest of society might not tolerate.

Intolerance leads to the totalitarian. We, the human race, have been intolerant since the beginning of time. What we are intolerant of is a moving target depending on the fashion of the day. In the 30's in some places it was fashionable to be intolerant of Jews and gays. In the 40's it was Germans and the Japanese, and in the 50's communists and socialists. In the 60's it was civil rights proponents and hippies and in the 70's liberals. In the 80's we were back to communists, and in the 90's it was Hispanics (remember all the state propositions outlawing them from medical care?). And what is it today? Islam? Are thoughts you think today and the cultural references associated with them that are in the middle going to fall to the edges in the next decade?

We have used the fear of all these intolerable people and their thoughts as excuses to hunt for more proof of their intolerableness by surveilling everyone in society and searching through all the detritus of our lives. With digital data more available, we think we can find the proof we need in these edge thoughts. And then we will persecute the people having them. And what better way to do it now that the internet, ISPs and heavily used search systems can provide one or another level of very personal, thought data. Search terms, or a database of intentions as John Battelle has talked about so much, are one slice of your data that tell a lot about you. And if we can get it in a neat little file, machine readable and searchable and quantifiable, then well, why not?

If you believe that sacrificing freedom to keep freedom is the way to go, then you probably don't see any problem with demonizing people who have thoughts you don't like. Especially if those thoughts are in the form of passing gestures such as search terms plugged into a browser.

But until we decide (or default) into a Minority Report society (and change our constitution), we are not yet convicting people for thinking things. Everyone has had the thought that they'd like to kill someone once or twice in their lives. But people, the vast vast majority, don't do it. The idea that we demonize someone for searching on this, which is a gesture I would put into the fleeting thought category for almost everyone, is taking an edge thought, which we all have from time to time, and putting it firmly under the scrutiny of the middle. I believe we really only want to find people who make serious plans to hurt others, or actually carry it out. That is what our law it based on, and the premise of our society. But to track everyone, their searches, their every digital gesture, and expose it in one or another ways is going to be troublesome. And it begs a question I've asked before: is your digital identity your personal intellectual property? Is your Google identity yours or someone else's? And by extension, is your clickstream a personal expression (carefully chosen and shaped by you)? In other words, can you copyright your clickstream and exert ownership?

There are at least two choices. One of them is to do what we are doing now: have ISPs and search services collect this data, and when asked by the government, have it turned over. But that means the data is still in many ways secret. Of course the companies don't want the data getting out because it is proprietary. And neither does the government, because they don't want anyone to know quite how much is out there about you, in case you are trying to cover your tracks or you want to defend yourself. But having all the data, the government has the upper hand. And secrets are powerful. How do you show, if you are being accused of something based upon your searches, that everyone else searches on those same things too? That it's actually a social norm? If you can only ask for your own searches to defend a case against you, and not everyone else's, in order to compare yourself to it, you won't be able to argue social norms which judges rely heavily on when making decisions.

But there is another choice. And that brings up the Attention Trust premise (I'm a Board Member) which is that people own a copy of their own data, no matter where they do things: Amazon.com purchases, Google searches, or AOL clickstreams, or anywhere else you might land in a browser on your computer. As a co-owner of your data, you can take it anywhere and do what you wish. There could be many business models built upon this data controlled and shared by users. Google takes all the data they collect and plugs it into AdSense. If lots of users took their own data and made it available voluntarily, a new and more 'open source' style AdSense could be created.

But much more importantly, something like Steve Gillmor's Gesture Bank, where users opt-in their clickstream information, in an anonymous form, exists to open up this kind of data. The Bank will make the aggregation of anonymized data available to anyone for any purpose. While this may lead to businesses working from this pool of searches and clicks, it also means that a growing pool of data is there to show the edge thoughts and potentially unpopular ideas people may exhibit. The pool can be used to defend against totalitarian efforts to single out in secret those who are out of fashion politically. Which may turn out to be you. Or someone who uses your computer.

That I think is far more important than an open source AdSense, though a business built upon this data would likely justify and make a better case for us to have a Gesture Bank of ideas and thoughts that support political freedom.

Seth Goldstein and Steve Gillmor already offer Root. net users the opportunity to put their data into the Gesture Bank if they wish, though any person can contribute to this anonymous pool of user data. And for that matter, attention streams can be sent to multiple services.

And, at the October 4 Attention Conference, Steve and Seth will announce Attention Soft. Stay tuned.

Totally like whatever, you know?

See the excellent poem below by Taylor Mali. Or listen to it at Soapbox, part 2, at the very end of 24 minutes of excellent political discourse, clips from the last several president's inaugurations, and literary eloquence. Mali gives an outstanding reading. Very entertaining and fun.

20 years ago, one of my friend's mothers, an actress who disassembled the emotion behind every word, and then reconstructed it in new and real ways that always seemed so much richer than what had existed before, hated it when we said "like." I remember she wouldn't allow us to say it. Got upset every time. Said we weren't committing to our words. And what was the point of speaking if we couldn't commit to our words? Once in a magazine, I remember an interview with her, where the opening paragraph describing her said she had the courage to live the contradictions of her life. I remembered all those years of her berating us over and over for "like" and "whatever" and "you know?" when I saw the article, and again hearing Taylor do his reading in Soapbox. I agreed with her, but I felt too tentative then to have the courage she had. It was hard for me to give up the words that let me off the hook a little. But she and Taylor are both right. If you're going to do anything worthwhile. You have to commit in your words to yourself.

Totally like whatever, you know?
By Taylor Mali
www.taylormali.com

In case you hadn't noticed,
it has somehow become uncool
to sound like you know what you're talking about?
Or believe strongly in what you're saying?
Invisible question marks and parenthetical (you know?)'s
have been attaching themselves to the ends of our sentences?
Even when those sentences aren't, like, questions? You know?

Declarative sentences - so-called
because they used to, like, DECLARE things to be true
as opposed to other things which were, like, not -
have been infected by a totally hip
and tragically cool interrogative tone? You know?
Like, don't think I'm uncool just because I've noticed this;
this is just like the word on the street, you know?
It's like what I've heard?
I have nothing personally invested in my own opinions, okay?
I'm just inviting you to join me in my uncertainty?

What has happened to our conviction?
Where are the limbs out on which we once walked?
Have they been, like, chopped down
with the rest of the rain forest?
Or do we have, like, nothing to say?
Has society become so, like, totally . . .
I mean absolutely . . . You know?
That we've just gotten to the point where it's just, like . . .
whatever!

And so actually our disarticulation . . . ness
is just a clever sort of . . . thing
to disguise the fact that we've become
the most aggressively inarticulate generation
to come along since . . .
you know, a long, long time ago!

I entreat you, I implore you, I exhort you,
I challenge you: To speak with conviction.
To say what you believe in a manner that bespeaks
the determination with which you believe it.
Because contrary to the wisdom of the bumper sticker,
it is not enough these days to simply QUESTION AUTHORITY.
You have to speak with it, too.

Core Values at Bloggercon

Mike Arrington is doing the next Core Values session at Bloggercon IV. I want to wish him well, and note the information from the Core Values session at Bloggercon III that I led, because I think that session was extraordinarily productive.

In fact afterward, many people kindly said that they felt it was most useful and interesting, because they left with something tangible (the list) and they really liked that rather than me telling them what the values are I see online, or that I feel are important myself, I just asked questions, and let them come to the conclusions about the values they share and the controls they felt should exist to support those values. They appreciated the light touch guiding them to find and develop their own conclusions.

Here the list the group of 80 made during the session, of what they feel are core values for the blogosphere:

Things we value:
Democracy
Non-exclusivity
Attribution
Transparency – disclosure
Innovation
Personalization
Accessibility
Honesty
Creativity
Knowing who people are
Editorial Independence
Connectedness
Anonymity

Things we devalue:
Power law economics
Lack of Attribution
Anonymity
Wuffie-hoarding
Links for money

Good luck Mike! I'm sure you'll take us to the next level. I hope the last sessions list is useful as a starting point.

Anti-Copyright and Anti-Fair Use: The Broadcast and Audio Flags

Broadcast and Audio Flags are provisions in Senate Bill 2686, up on Thursday. They are bad for users, bad for balanced copyright, bad for fair use, bad for innovation, and bad for new companies (including Dabble).

This is about incumbent media companies fearing the internet, much like the RIAA in 2001, and trying to get the government to protect them against digital media, instead of working with it to create new business models.

Call your Senator (there are some numbers below provided below in an except from an EFF email.

I just called Senator Boxer's office (212 number is below, or SF: 415-403-0100) to register my opposition, and I noted that Boxer's office takes phone comment anonymously. Interesting.

From EFF:

* Action Alert - Tell Your Senator To Take Out the Flags

The Communications, Consumers Choice, and Broadband
Deployment Act of 2006 is a monster name for a monster bill
-- in its latest form, it contains 159 pages of densely
plotted telecommunications reform. But while politicians
struggle with its major clauses, the RIAA and MPAA have
piggybacked their own agenda: the broadcast and audio flags,
which restrict innovation and legitimate use of recorded
digital radio and TV content. Your call today could force
the flags to find a home of their own.

The Committee markup of this bill is on Thursday, and your
Senator is on the Commerce Committee. One last push from
you could get Congress to remove the entertainment industry
mandates from the bill.

IF YOU HAVE FIVE MINUTES

Please call your Senator (numbers below). Here's a sample
script:

STAFFER:
Hello, Senator Lastname's office.

YOU:
Hi, I'm a constituent, and I'd like to let the Senator know
that I don't think the broadcast and audio flag provisions
belong in S. 2686, the Communications, Consumers Choice and
Broadband Deployment Act. These are anti-consumer
provisions, which would give the FCC far-reaching powers,
and give the entertainment industry a dangerous veto over
new technologies. I hope the Senator will insist on
excluding these provisions on Thursday.

STAFFER:
Okay, I'll let the Senator know. Thanks.

Chairman Ted Stevens (AK), (202) 224-3004
John McCain (AZ), (202) 224-2235
Conrad Burns (MT), Main: 202-224-2644
Trent Lott (MS), (202) 224-6253
Kay Bailey Hutchison (TX), (202) 224-5922
Gordon H. Smith (OR), (202) 224 3753
John Ensign (NV), (202) 224-6244
George Allen (VA), (202) 224-4024
John E. Sununu (NH), (202) 224-2841
Jim DeMint (SC), (202) 224-6121
David Vitter (LA),(202) 224-4623
Co-Chairman Daniel K. Inouye (HI), (202) 224-3934
John D. Rockefeller (WV), (202) 224-6472
John F. Kerry (MA), (202) 224-2742
Barbara Boxer (CA), (202) 224-3553
Bill Nelson (FL), (202) 224-5274
Maria Cantwell (WA), (202) 224-3441
Frank R. Lautenberg (NJ), (202) 224-3224
E. Benjamin Nelson (NE), (202) 224-6551
Mark Pryor (AR), (202) 224-2353

The New Someone Is The Old Someone Else - Characterizing Company Cultures

For the past two years, I've been joking that:

the new yahoo is the old google
the new google is the old microsoft
the new microsoft is the old IBM
the new IBM is the old novell

part of the joke is about reputation and standing
in the cycle of being loved, then successful, then vilified
and/or bloated, then obsolete.

i kind of wonder if this still stands this way, two years later.
things have shifted a lot over this period.

frankly the new yahoo is just out innovating google for now..
but that could change.. and google is being very backward with
social things.. trying to just "engineer" everything as if there
was nothing subjective in the world, only objectivity (and the
attendant stats that back those objective understandings up.

i definitely hear a lot more 'evil' stuff about google than
before, remarks about the incredible bureaucracy at yahoo,
which might put them further down the chain now, and
how IBM, with their patents going out open source, is getting out
front again as an innovator.

what changes a company from one category to another?
these aren't even defined, and are totally in the realm of folklore..
as these ideas are more about cynicism and schadenfreude
and simplistic impressions than anything all that real.

and yet, every time i tell the joke (more in the past than recently)
people laugh a lot. so there must be something there.

We Didn't Build the Internet to Turn It Back Into Cable Tv

You know, the kind of cable TV where big entertainment companies pay off cable companies to get their channels on your set top box?

Congress didn't accept it, so net neutrality lost.

So we are keeping the system that started a year ago. It's the one that will make the internet like Cable TV.

It's critical to innovation, our companies (mine is Dabble.com) and to freedom of speech that we have a neutral net, where anything can move across it, where there is no fee to get some piece of information through to someone who wants to see it.

This isn't about tiered pricing. This is about who's packets paid the telco's fees.

This is about Hollywood keeping us from speaking, because if I'm watching my friend's video, I'm not watching Disney. Hollywood stands to benefit the most, after the telco's who charge the fees.

And Disney can afford to pay off the telcos to pass through their info, but my friends can't.

Haven't we been here before?

Digital Maoism vs. Voice

Isn't that much like the issues we've looked at over the past few years:

Wikipedia vs. Britannica
Bloggers vs. Journalists
Remix culture vs. TV
Flickr vs. Getty Images
Wiki's vs. Blogs

All the talk this past week about Jaron Lainer's essay, The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism is another one of those 'or' things that keeps coming up around the internet. (Or Internet with a capital 'I', if the NY Times is your style guide.) As an aside, Sam Klein of Wikipedia at the on Monday, asked everyone to please (smile) stop calling it "the wikipedia." It's just "wikipedia." Ok, back to Wikipedia. So Wikipedia is not a replacement for Encyclopedia Britiannica. Instead, you use one for some things (I use wikipedia for finding links because Google's search results for many kinds of items are too polluted and unhelpful) and a reference like Britannica (well, not Britannica, but I have lots of other traditional old style references) for things that those top down, traditional reference sources cover better.

We use reporting from professional journalists for reporting, access to places individuals can't get into, and some kinds of news, and blog posts for voice, commentary, and some kinds of news and reporting. We use remix video for humor, smaller stories and short form video, and TV for long form, high production video. We use Flickr for the stream of photo images that comes from our friends and for some kinds of reporting, and we use Getty for.. well.. they are hard to use. So we don't buy a lot from them. Wikis are used for the collection of information around a topic or event, blogs are used for voice and commentary. Collective tools are used for collective action, and voice tools are used for voice.

The thing is there are choices, based on purpose, goal, need, process and style. And the choices are based on nuances that the arguments above cannot reasonable reduce to an 'either or' situation. A single thing is not meant to work in all instances. And the beauty of the internet combined with information technology is that together they give us lots of choices. Both for production and consumption.

I think the rest of the folks who responded to Lanier's essay did a great job of discussing the subtler ideas and arguments, so I'll let those stand as they were terrific. There is no need to restate the idea that some of Lanier's criticisms do not necessarily apply to Wikipedia, or that some others do apply, in specific contexts, but that wikipedia is supposed to function the way that it does.

I just wanted to point out that online, as everywhere else in life, we make choices, and the idea is to choose the best thing for the circumstances, not to expect that all things will work in all circumstances. The internet is no exception.

Net Neutrality

First, watch the video. And then the other video. And this other video. Yah. It's worth it.

Then, check out David Isenberg's most terrific eTel talk about your freedom to connect.

And check out Save the Internet. They have tons of great information.

Then read below. Here's how I see this:

Another way of looking at this issue of net neutrality is... remember the old Highway system. Where El Camino Real on the peninsula in the Bay Area used to be a toll road, where you would not get mugged and the road was nice and fast, but it was expensive. And the Alameda (parallel to ECR) was the slow road, which wasn't taken care of, where you would likely be ambushed and was free?

Well, that's what the telcos would like us to see when they talk about two tiers. And think about what that kind of road system does to the economy of information? It's not very democratic is it? This isn't just a small or large bag of potato chips. Or dial up and broadband. It's about whether we support basic services for all people to get information. Cause if you are on dialup, you are missing much that is useful and interesting about the internet.

Secondly, the part that's different about the types of information that would be available in the slow cheap road verses the fast expensive road (dialup verses high-speed bandwidth) is that the packets would be treated differently.

The perverse part of the telco's proposal is that packets of certain types (VOIP and video, for example) that paid an additional toll, would get to you faster than those that didn't pay.

So it's not just the user who has to pay for the speed of their service, it's that the other side, the content maker, would also have to pay for you to get fast packets on a fast road. Disney and Viacom will pay their side of the tolls, but can PBS? Can little joe video blogger pay? Or will he get the same deal as the

What that means is is that the Hollywood and bit content producers would have the edge over the average person who wants to get a message out. So if you have a fast connection but joe blogger didn't pay, well, sorry, those packets won't get to you quickly. Instead, even though the user paid for faster service, they would not get all packets at the same speed. The content maker who didn't pay would have their packets come through slowly. And of course, the slow speed service buyer, who asked for a video from the content maker who didn't pay the toll would never see that video, it would be so slow.

Tonight: "Email -- Should the Sender Pay?": EFF Fundraiser, Debate Between Esther Dyson and Danny O'Brien

Details below about this event at EFF.

At eTech, Esther and Annalee Newitz were talking about Goodmail, innovation in spam control for email and the controversy with EFF and others around this topic. I asked them both about stats. What I wanted to know was how much (number and percentages) email is spam, how much is non-profit email, how much is educational, and how much is political speech?

My feeling was that with those kinds of stats, and an agreement that we would let the IRS decide who should get free email if we instituted a pay for send system, we could give this a try. The issue with the IRS is this: they give tax exempt status to entities who are non-profits, some political organizations and others, and if an organization has that piece of paper from the IRS, we should exempt them from fees. The additional step for political organizations might be that we also use state and federal Fair Political Practice Commissions that also have organizations categorized. But with these kinds of certifications and exemptions from fees, we could try, innovate, experiment with different email systems that might help us solve some of the spam issues we currently have online.

One thing, when I was having this discussion with Esther and Annalee, I realized that I don't really get spam. This, even though my email address is on the front of my blog. I'm sure the spam is coming in like crazy, but because the ISP that hosts my hoster is clearing away some, and then my hoster clears more at the server level, after which the remaining batch has to go through the specific email system I have set up with my settings and training about what is spam on his servers and then I have more clearing going on at the email client level on my computer, I see about one spam email every week or so. It's rare, especially considering I get 1000 email a day. So I hadn't thought for a while about what a problem this is at the email level. In fact, I see far more spam blog, or splog, spam, via comments, trackbacks and in posts and through live web search, than I do in email. So my sense of the problem was really underwhelming for email and overwhelming for live web stuff.

Anyway, come to the debate tonight, to hear the arguments for and against!

Roxie Cinema
3117 16th St (Yahoo! Maps, Google Maps)
San Francisco, California

* "Email -- Should the Sender Pay?": EFF Fundraiser, Debate
Between Esther Dyson and Danny O'Brien

In light of AOL's adopting a "certified" email system, EFF
is hosting a debate on the future of email. With
distinguished entrepreneur Mitch Kapor moderating, EFF
Activist Coordinator Danny O'Brien and renowned tech expert
Esther Dyson will discuss the potential consequences if
people have to pay to send email. Would the Internet
deteriorate as a platform for free speech? Would spam or
phishing decline?

WHEN:
Thursday, April 20th, 2006
7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

WHAT:

"Email - Should the Sender Pay?"

WHO:

Danny O'Brien

Danny O'Brien is the Activist Coordinator for the EFF. His job is to help our membership in making their voice heard: in government and regulatory circles, in the marketplace, and with the wider public. Danny has documented and fought for digital rights in the UK for over a decade, where he also assisted in building tools of open democracy like Fax Your MP. He co-edits the award-winning NTK newsletter, has written and presented science and travel shows for the BBC, and has performed a solo show about the Net in the London's West End.

Esther Dyson

Esther Dyson is editor at large at CNET Networks, where she is responsible for its monthly newsletter, Release 1.0, and its PC Forum, the high-tech market's leading annual executive conference. As editor at large, she also contributes insight and content to CNET Networks' other properties. She sold her business, EDventure Holdings, to CNET Networks in early 2004. Previously, she had co-owned
EDventure and written/edited Release 1.0 since 1983. Recently, Esther authored a New York Times editorial called "You've Got Goodmail," defending a sender-pays model for the future of email.

Mitch Kapor

Mitchell Kapor is the President and Chair of the Open Source Applications Foundation, a non-profit organization he founded in 2001 to promote the development and acceptance of high-quality application software developed and distributed using open source methods and licenses. He is widely known
as the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the "killer application" which made the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980's. In 1990, Kapor co-founded EFF.

WHERE:
Roxie Film Center
3117 16th Street, San Francisco
(between Valencia and Guerrero)
Tel: (415) 863-1087

See the link below for a map:
http://www.roxie.com/directions.cfm

Local Muni are the 22 and 53 (both at 16th & Valencia), 33
(18th & Valencia), 14 (16th & Mission), 49 (16th & Mission).
BART stops one block east at 16th & Mission.

Public Parking is available on Hoff Street, off of 16th
between Valencia and Mission at very reasonable rates.

This fundraiser is open to the general public. The suggested
donation is $20.
No one will be turned away for lack of funds.

Please RSVP to events@eff.org

Adaptive Path is the generous sponsor of this fundraising event. Founded in 2001, Adaptive Path is a leading user experience consulting, research, and training firm that has provided services to a range of clients, including Fortune 100 corporations, pure-Web startups, and established nonprofit organizations. The company is headquartered in San Francisco. To learn more about Adaptive Path, visit the company website at:

To learn more about the DearAOL campaign against AOL's planned system:

For Esther Dyson's editorial, "You've Got Goodmail".

Dave McClure's Top Ten Reasons Why Web 2.0 is Like Disco

The Top 10 Reasons Why Web 2.0 is Like Disco:

#1: Feels great, but don't want any pictures caught doing it.
#2: Nobody quite sure what it is, but everyone wants to try.
#3: First learned how to do it at [foo | bar | summer] camp.
#4: Lots of parties, alcohol, and women with big hair.
#5: Can fool most people if you can just do [ajax | the hustle].
#6: More about having fun than doing something useful.
#7: Open source, free love, & fashion from the 70's.
#8: People are remixing it all the time.
#9: More popular it gets, more people trash it, more popular it gets.

and last but not least:

#10: Done best when you don't give a damn what anyone else thinks.

New Canadian Copyright Law Book is Under CC Licensing, Royalties Go to CC

Professor Michael Geist writes about In the Public Interest: The Future of Canadian Copyright Law (all chapters available for download):

Of possible interest - with the Canadian government nearing hearings on proposed copyright reform, 19 Canadian copyright professors today launched a new book examining the bill and copyright law in Canada from a public interest perspective. I served as editor with the contributing professors representing ten universities from across Canada. In a first for major legal title in Canada, the book is being published under a Creative Commons license with all royalties going back to CC.

The book is divided into three parts. Part one includes three essays that provide context for Canadian copyright law. Part two features 11 essays on the current legislative proposal with several pieces on TPMs, education and copyright, and ISP issues. Part three looks ahead with pieces on copyright term, user rights, fair dealing, extended licensing, and crown copyright.

Nice!

Micah Sifry Invites You to Participate in Supporting Andrew Rasiej

Updated: the call is now at 12:30 pm EST instead of 1pm EST.

...with this conference call for bloggers about Andrew Rasiej, who is running for Public Advocate in NYC:

From: info@rasiej.com
Subject: Barlow, Dyson, Hodder, Michalski, Newmark, Searls, Sifry, Trippi, Vos and Weinberger invite you to meet Andrew Rasiej
Date: August 24, 2005 2:37:37 PM EDT

Dear friend:

When someone who understands the democratizing forces of technologies like social networking, blogging, and p2p decides to enter the world of politics to shake things up, we should take heed and add our voices.

That's why we're writing you about Andrew Rasiej, candidate for New York City Public Advocate, and inviting you to join a national bloggers conference call next Tuesday August 30 from noon to 1:00pm EST to meet him and find out more.

At first glance, you're probably thinking, "Why should I pay attention to this race? It's not even the most powerful office in New York."

But Andrew is running to prove that the power of networked politics is real and can fundamentally alter not just campaigns, but also how citizens and elected officials engage in civic life and the results they achieve. It just so happens that the office of Public Advocate, which is the number-two elected position in the city, is perfect for this.

The Public Advocate has the power to introduce legislation, conduct investigations, and chairs an important--though neglected--commission on open public information. But the office is really only limited by its holder's imagination and ability to organize people and focus attention where it needs to be focused.

Andrew is also a candidate of new ideas, and here are his three most important proposals:

1. To make America's largest city a Wi-Fi hotzone, and to help close the digital divide by creating a low-cost, high-speed wireless mesh network for everyone in the city.
2. To use the ideas behind open-source and peer-to-peer networks to reinvent the Public Advocate's office, and turn it from being one person's modest soapbox into a sounding board, connecting hub and amplifying megaphone for all the people in the city.
3. To use technology to make city government more open, transparent and accountable.

Andrew's getting attention for his innovative and common-sense approach, as these articles by Thomas Friedman,
David Kirkpatrick,
and Stowe Boyd show. Joe Trippi says, "Andrew worked with me on the Dean campaign and I can honestly say that this is a brilliant man who can have a positive, real effect on New York City."

Moreover, Andrew's not just a idea guy; he has a track record of getting things done. From starting the rock club Irving Plaza to founding MOUSE.org, an education nonprofit that has trained thousands of NYC students to be their schools' own technologists, to advising top Democrats like Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt and Howard Dean, to starting the Personal Democracy Forum—he is a doer, not just a talker.

You may not agree with everything he has to say, but we urge you to give him a listen—and we're sure he'll give you a listen, too. The conventional wisdom says he's a long-shot, but political change has to start somewhere.

To take part in the conference call, please RSVP to info@rasiej.com (hit reply) and you will be sent the call-in information. Feel free to share this invite widely.

Sincerely,

John Perry Barlow
Esther Dyson
Mary Hodder
Jerry Michalski
Craig Newmark
Doc Searls
Dave Sifry
Joe Trippi
Esme Vos
David Weinberger

p.s. While Andrew is running in the Democratic primary, what he represents ought to inspire Republicans, independents and creative thinkers of all stripes. As Phil Windley, the former CIO of the state of Utah and a Republican, recently wrote, "If we are not willing to support (vote and donate) to people who understand technology and what powers innovation, then we'll get the nation we deserve."

Advocates for Rasiej

Andrew Rasiej, First NYC Candidate with a Video Blog

Rock and roll. This is so cool. Andrew does a video blog. (He's running for Public Advocate in NYC in case you don't know.) Jay Dedman and Ryanne Hodson did a super job creating the vlog.

And look at the video:

He's very cute there with that little slightly embarrassed smile, should get lots of votes! He's on his way to a wifi hearing, where he testifies that wifi in NYC is key to keeping NYC 1st in the world.

YES! I want universal wifi. It's like a water. Which should be a municipal utility.

Also, the low res quality of the video gives it that "60's -- we're gonna change the world!" feel.. like we're watching JFK or something!

I love this. Every candidate should have a "man on the street" vlog.

Previous videos include: Being a Business Owner in NYC and Meeting Andrew (where you can learn that his name rhymes with Shea (Stadium), that he works out, sends his own email, and works late a lot, was born in NJ, lived in NYC, studied art and architecture, and wants to know your complaints so that he can use new technology to connect you and others to each other, and the right folks to fix it.

Nice work, Andrew, Jay and Ryanne!

Update: See Andrew get interviewed by Amanda Congdon at the Rocketboom vlog, about NYC wifi.

The Chat as Art, The Chat as Theater

Yesterday, I attended PDF, Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej.

Personal Democracy Forum: Power to the People with Chat

The backchannel was fantastic. During the last panel, it was particularly good. However, there was a panel just before lunch that had the audience laughing so hard, between what the speakers were saying, and the chat behind them.. that one speaker suggested they should just give up speaking so we could just all do the chat. That was when the chat moved to a new level, an art mob of flowing moving commenters listening and speaking through the chat. Not all of it was great.. but there were moments where it was serendiptously so on the mark. The whole audience was engaged, pounding on ASRC.. talking back to the panelists. And the panelists had no choice but to listen and respond and integrate it into their talk. About 40 people were on it, out of 200 in the audience.

At the last panel of the day, there were about 300 in the audience, with about 60 people on the chat. It again ripped into high gear, so much so that the panelists were twisted around trying to read it, while the audience was roaring over the discussion onscreen verses onstage. People were totally engaged in what the speakers were saying, questioning and riffing on it. Jay Rosen later noted that it was a big neck strain to turn to read it .. and Arianna Huffington finally got a laptop from someone in the audience so she could face us and maybe respond to it onscreen, though she didn't appear to type anything. However, she too noted that it had a life of it's own, and maybe their panel should just keep silent in the face of it. But they kept going, as the audience kept on. Weaving a discussion on many levels, fast and furious.

It was a new level of theater, one I haven't seen before this intensely. Good show!

In fact, if you do panels, which in larger setting are required, the chat is a must onscreen behind. And if you are lucky, you'll get this good an interaction.

Last panel of the day (note, Jeff Jarvis had to leave part way through for a media interview):

The Heterogeneity Issue, Part I: Pop!Tech

Update: the person mentioned below who is affiliated with Poptech is not an 'organizer' but instead is one of a 'loosely affiliated working group' that many people are apart of that do different things for Poptech.

This is a subject I haven't blogged about too much, though I've discussed with people in person. Diversity, homogeneity and heterogeneity are difficult issues, because it's easy to be misconstrued. I don't want favors for people due to their demographics or some sense that they are supposed to be included in order to create heterogeneity. I want people to be included because of their work, perspective or ideas. I'm not interested in quotas.

I choose conferences that see and talk about new and diverse ideas and perspectives. I also go to see people, but the first choice is around the conference material itself. I realize the world is much more interesting and broad than just my white female Bay Area perspective; it's a dead end without other ideas. I cannot survive doing work without knowing people and work beyond my own little world. However, not everyone needs to share this. They are free and welcome to make groupings of work and people from a singular perspective, and present these in conferences or anywhere else.

So when I choose a conference to go to, what I want are discussions, work, perspectives and ideas framed to reflect what they really represent.

After listening to Pop!Tech's sessions last fall, I blogged about how the conference was just in need of reframing. Okay, this was cheeky. But I don't believe in forcing a conference like that to change or telling them they are bad for not including people who are not white men. Rather, I want them to be honest about what they represent. They had mostly white males presenting last year, with one woman and one black man, and so, Pop!Tech 2004, in addressing "The Next Renaissance" was really addressing the next renaissance from the perspective of white men, about white men's experiences with the concept of it.

For 2005, the Pop!Tech theme is Grand Challenges..

PopTech will explore some of the greatest challenges confronting humanity, and the role that new ideas, and new technologies, will play in responding to each in the future.

Sounds really great. I'd love to listen to people exploring great challenges.

But here too, it's not all humanity that Pop!Tech is addressing or giving perspective from.. it's from the perspective of mostly white men. Nothing wrong with that. Currently on their site, they have 12 speakers, with 2 that are women (one appears to be Indian), two Indian men. So they have 16% women, and 25% non-white. That's fine. Just frame the conference as addressing "grand challenges" from the perspective of *mostly* white men.

After I wrote the Pop!Tech post last fall, I was talking with one of the people who helps with it in a loosely affiliated working group (note, this sentence was updated). He told me he'd read my post, and didn't understand why women complained about not having women speakers at conferences. He thought that women should just make their own conferences if they wanted to speak. I said in response, you mean, separate but equal? I think he got it, that this was a silly way to see things.

The point is, if you purport to represent the world, and cover the world, in your conference or discussion, then do it by including people who are beyond your demographic, and work that goes beyond your demographic (and there is lots of amazing work out there by folks who happen to have other perspectives), for projects and ideas covering other worlds than yours. This isn't about forcing a change, it's about being honest about what you're perspective is.

Right now, Pop!Tech doesn't appear to have changed much over last year, though they have slightly higher participation from non-white males right now. However, when they post the full 30 speakers they intend to showcase, they will need to have many more people with different perspectives if they expect us to believe they cover the whole world. Though, to show they have women, they've put one of the two woman at the top of the speaker's list. See the image below, but note the list is vertically placed on the Pop!Tech page:

My Virtual Candidate: Andrew Rasiej

I'm not a New York City resident, so I don't vote there. But I do care about NY, and visit regularly. My interest in the way it's run is, from my vantage point outside NY, somewhat virtual. However, NY's problems are very real, and so anyone who looks for new and interesting ways to solve them gets my attention.

I like Andrew Rasiej a lot. He's running for NYC Public Advocate. The Public Advocate is sort of a vice-mayor, though he is independent of the mayor and can oppose him. Before this, Andrew founded MOUSE (Making Opportunities for Upgrading Schools and Education), "a non-profit organization focused on integrating technology into teaching and learning in urban public schools."

Andrew is a really smart, thoughtful guy, who I think really cares about making things better than they are now. You can check out more here at Adam Penenberg's TechnoAdvocate Q&A.

And he is running based on three things I really like:

1. Getting people more connected through public wifi, open technology, transparency and engagement in New York City government.
2. "Our supporters are smarter than us" is his slogan, and what I see him doing is getting people to use group problem solving to work on NYC. This includes but isn't just about online systems that are easy and in place already to share the collective smartness of the populace. Example: getting people to tag Flickr photos of potholes, text messaging each other with quick information about something that needs immediate attention, and using online systems to inform and organize.
3. Andrew is accepting contributions of no more than $100 and if you donate before May 11, there is 4 to 1 matching (so your $100 turns into $500!! Wow!!)

Show that a candidate worth supporting can do this with small contributions in with an online infrastructure by donating and participating.

And get on the bus!

The Value of a Link

Thank goodness someone is thinking about this. I mean.. what is the value of a link? The Federal Election Commission thinks a link, if it directs the readership of a blog to a campaign website, might be worth the amount that gets donated to that campaign due to the link.

I can see why this issue comes up.. in analog terms. People who make in-kind contributions have to be listed by the campaigns as donors. Unless they don't coordinate their activities with the campaign. Though they still might have to declare their activities with the FEC. However, to bloggers, a link is free and often not just a referal but rather a pointer to a source or to background information.

Valuing campaign contributions as it were, from digital sources who link this way may also not get the true value of the link. The FEC is proposing to apply rules of analog campaign activity to the internet. So bloggers, linkers... are they press... are they contributors of in-kind linking or words... or are they expressing opinion? What is their status and is it based on what they do, or say, or based on self-identification? I'd say it's as varied as blogs are: blogs are a tool, remember? It's like asking what is the status of this piece of paper? Is it a letter, a newspaper, a shopping list, a diary? The status depends on how it's used but there are many possibilities and otherwise it's just a flexible tool for communication.

Of course, there are multiple meanings for links. A link can be an endorsement, a referral, a pointer to background information, a literary expression and a joke, all at the same time. And more. Some readers may view the link in singular ways.. but some will see all the meanings and the point is... regulating that is going to be, practically speaking, very difficult. Because linking is a form of speech. And blogging is a kind of expression. And the status of the blog sending the link also has something to do with the value, and therefore, every link, depending on the text, the linker, the linkee, and the types of linking occurring, shifts the value of a link.

Nonetheless, the FEC is hot on the trail of the value of a link according to Declan McCullagh at c|Net:

This is a big deal, if someone has already contributed the legal maximum, or if they're at the disclosure threshold and additional expenditures have to be disclosed under federal law.

Certainly a lot of bloggers are very much out front. Do we give bloggers the press exemption? If we don't give bloggers the press exemption, we have the question of, do we extend this to online-only journals like CNET?

I think this is a bad road to go down.. but if the FEC is going to do it, they need to call in some folks who understand and live in the blogosphere, rather than coming at the problem from the outside looking in, to figure out what it really means when bloggers write, link or otherwise interact with campaigns.

My favorite quote is this: "..because there's no standard for being a blogger, anyone can claim to be one...." Oh for the love of self identification and transparency. You can only really claim to be one if you actually write one. How about instead: "..because there's no standard for being a blogger, anyone can write one...". It just feels a lot more representative of what actually happens.. because it's based on doing, not claiming.

Live Blogging My Session on Local Politics at Votes, Bits and Bytes

With Dave Winer, Nicco Mele.

I asked about campaign's turning into governance.. and building online communities that make this transition.. what does it mean and how do you do it, practically speaking?

Jordan Pollock: being able to see responses to the blog.. filtering up .. having an effect on the campaign.. verses Kerry.. where is was more top down So, can you maintain the bottom up assembly of voices?

John Barth, public radio exchange.. res. of montclair NJ.. terrible local newspaper, NY times doesn't do NJ well, local gov doesn't
-- barristanet.com and there is a yahoo group..
they are trying to make it easy for everyone in town to make it easy to put up info about the local government...
-- citizen sunshine!!

challenges: if you run interchange on a local level.. trying to get a real dialog .. you get self directed niches of community.. very frustrating to maintain a discussion that is constructive.. how do you get to real conversation?
-- how to deal? holding a session to talk about how the moderators are doing..

Ben Ron, Act Blue -- transition from campaign to governance.. if it's the campaign's responsibility to make the transition.. but on blogs.. they aren't run on campaign so they keep going.. seems more natural to have the party do the transition..

Bruce McHenry - have a long standing cabinet that would make the transition like the british government..

Homes Wilson - Downhill Battle .. software and network .. and anyone at home to make their own TV channel.. to publish it.. BitTorrent.. their website is about IP advocacy and other stuff. want to make TV a democratic media..

ME: is there an inverse relationship between the production values of the content of the amount we know the people.. and our willingness to watch shows with low production values because we know the people..

podcasting.. microphone, computer.. talking.. authentic

production values and governance.. people go to blogs for reputation and authenticity.. and

bob lyons, WGBH radio..

regulation? on podcasting.. no limit on spectrum

Dave W... can have as many radio stations as you want as you can have domain names and subdomains..

greedytv.org
BBC: building public values.. look at this doc!
BBC: ICAN.. civic portal.. a single integrated source of

Ben: big campaigns.. big tv.. big broadcast.. verses conversation.. bush in a coffee shop talking,, or fireside chats..

Nicco: can the candidate take the energy to the governance stage..

DaveW: channeling Cluetrain.. demand supplies itself..

Holmes -- the packaging is just something that gets between you and the listener...

DaveW.. Putnam.. was right but for the wrong reason.. we're bowling along but we can do it together.. Dave thinks we can have the best of the 20th century and the 19th century.. mass distribution of micro content.. mastered mass distribution of our own content..

John Barth: once a politician gets into office.. blogging.. some may ask.. if they are blogging why aren't they governing..

Bob Cox, National Debate: mentioning Ed Cone at BIII, at a local level.. someone blogs locally.. and makes constituency and talks about town.. they start to be an influencer.. people listen to them.. and running for office can start to be the platform.. but they were known as a blogger..

Bruce McHenry - the critical mass of branding needed.. because the cost of building the brand is so high.. that we need to get known people.. but the critical mass of branding..

Betsy Camblin? MIT - blogs give intimacy.. have a sense of who they are.. unedited.. no different that the mimic-ed intimacy that we get from celebrity..

Are press releases like blog posts? In the marketing sense? to CNN etc?

DaveW: campaigns become their own source of info with blogs...

??? from Erin, camera person: What happened with the shift? from Dean to Kerry? the platforms didn't line up.. the styles.. etc?

Britt Blaser: the campaign needs to be a host.. and the Kerry Campaign didn't welcome it.. the gestalt.. wasn't there.. our society likes new things in technology.. but not in politics.. you had to be a good orator 50 years ago.. but not now... you must be a good blogger .. in future campaigns..

Bruce: although Clinton could talk for 8 minutes even though the teleprompter went down.. Bush couldn't do that now..

William Davies: people used to be shocked by porn online.. and now they are used to it.. people will be shocked by things online in politics but they will get used to it..

Betsy.. brought underprivileged communities into conversation about how to change politics with technology.. and they aren't interested in blogs and online communities.. they don't want it

Holmes: Dan nailed it yesterday.. when he said that tech is cheap, but educational system isn't up to it..

Betsy: that's a cop out.. it's that the tech is not interesting to them..

Liza Sabater: Technology use needs to come out of those communities.. it needs to be of the community to make it work.. and just because a blogger who is of that community.. doesn't mean they speak for the community..

Joanne Orevek?: some answers will com from the school system.. but

Ian Landsman: mentioned Poukippsie

Britt Blaser: look on Technorati for Poukippsie..

Meetups.. people will come back for online discussions about things that matter to them..

Nicco: can we make the things that are happening in Montclair happen elsewhere..

Interesting things going on: Westportnow.com... guy who did that came to Bloggercon II..

Holmes: something bugging me.. about the divide issues.. we may be thinking about this too algorhimically.. where the tool that does this.. does that.. can we figure out ways to accelerate penetration into local areas.. there could be other tools beyond blogs.. that get more

Upmystreet.com.. put in zipcode and find discussion that is very local... things like crime, house prices, what's happening locally.. stuff gets done but it's local and mundane..

Geomapping..

Murmur.ca.. leave a note when you see a sign.. and do it with a cell phone..

Joe is finishing our session with an Accordian rendition of The Gambler...

Micah Sifry on NPR/Future Tense: Distributed Politics Online

Seconds ago.. on KALW 91.7 from SF! I missed the intro.. but it was a great interview about his new project, The Personal Democracy Forum and the idea of open source politics. The interviewer seemed taken with the idea that open source could be applied to something else besides software development. And Micah explained about the idea that distributed networks / communication and personal participation come together to shift politics in a compelling new way, and he's trying to harness some of that activitiy for the PDF. In other words: it's the community, stupid.

You can listen here online if you like.

Go Micah!

Giving People Information to Get Them to See

Orig Posted on the Lakoff blog:

Democrats have a false theory of the electorate.. and of how people vote: give people the facts and they will reach the right conclusion.. and they see framing as spin... and resist it.. -- from the Class 5 notes

This particular statement made in class last Tuesday reminded me of what I often heard journalism students and the occasional visiting professional journalist giving a lecture at the JSchool at UCBerkeley say, though they were speaking from the journalistic model, not the voting model. It would always make me stop then too. It's the idea that given the right information, people will choose wisely (code word for the 'right' way, which is the way the speaker thinks is right). In a way, the theory is understandable in that given better information, people will make better decisions. But economists know this doesn't happen. Given lower pricing, many people do not buy the generic brand over the branded brand even though the same manufacturer may have made it. And given the right information, or the facts, people do not necessarily choose a particular course of action, for one reason or another.

It might be due to their perception that the facts as delivered by either liberals or journalists is incorrect, to be disregarded because the facts don't fit the person's framework of life, are not trustworthy for some other reason, or are less trustworthy than some other conflicting fact. But it may also be because people don't like being condescended to, don't like being told what is right or good or correct. I believe this is one of the issues top down media currently faces today: the masses, who were supposed to be reading newspapers and getting the right info so they could make the right decisions and be 'well-informed', realized some time ago that newspapers in their old form were in one way or another out of touch with their lives and what they needed from their information deliverers. It might have been the paper-paper delivery, the generalist nature of the coverage, or the occasional journalist whose lack of humility or disregard for the truth or the intelligence of those they were reporting for just didn't sit well with the great unwashed. But when media has screwed up, anger toward top-down media has showed up in some surprising ways, and at least for me, and the few that I've spoken with, the anger and distrust comes in part from the sense of condescension we've felt. Liberal views of knowing what's best have also provoked this same sort of anger in the public. That's not to say that I or those I've talked with about this are libertarians.. though there is some flavor of it there, balanced by other sensibilities that government has a responsibility to control certain things for all of us, whether we like it or not (keeping industrial pollution regulated, making everyone stop at stop signs, providing education -- though you probably realize that I see us doing a better job on the stop signs and falling down with our responsibility to kids and the environment).

So does better information matter? Absolutely, as does education, so that people understand many ways of looking at fact, theory and argument. But I don't believe that given better information, people will the see 'the light', especially the one particular light the information giver wants to make people to see. Yes, some will see it, but the most responsible thing to do is to give people honest information no matter what position it supports and let them make up their own minds. It's why I love blogging and other newer forms of online information passing. It may not always be right.. it maybe require us to be continuously asking about whether the information appears true, whether we trust the purveyor, or should put our trust in the search for information that is more truthful. But expecting others to get some particular notion afterward is condescending, and will never get the liberals, or top down journalists, a considered place at the table of most folks. Because the bristling nature of that condescension just makes people feel funny and that leads to distrust. But sharing information across many information sources, blogs and top-down media online, and wikis and via word of mouth, gives us the opportunity to lose the condescension so that we do our own fact checking and are apart of the process of getting the best information for the sake of getting the best information no matter what its provenance.

It's Over For the Moment

Technorati has finished the Election Watch site for now. It's not really complete by any means, but we worked 17 days straight on it, didn't finish everything we wanted to, but over the four days of the Democratic Convention, got about 4 million hits, and it was great that everybody worked so hard to make things stable and usable. Some of the guys spent nights in the office to make the deadlines, though most people would stay to the middle of the night, then go home and return early for the next round. Regardless, people gave it everything they had; Technorati folks are an extraordinarily talented and hardworking bunch.

It's nice too that the Republican Convention is a few weeks off, so that we can get back to solving some more of our stability and UI problems so that we can give the kind of service we have to for our users.

In addition, in the middle of that, I had to be away at BlogOn, the conference I helped organize last week at UC Berkeley. Though I spent a significant amount of my time there with three others getting Technorati work done. I hate splitting my time between two very intense projects... and I really felt like over the few days that it mattered.. I did them each in a half-asked manner. They were each 20 hour-a-day events, and I wasn't really giving either of them what they needed. I don't ever want to do that again. It was intensely unsatisfying.

But I'm pleased that despite my lack of singular focus, and doing less than all I could have done, both came off reasonably well. And the best part is now, after 17 days of round-the-clock work, I have three days to work out, recover, get a pedicure, read blogs, go to a couple of parties and movies, hang out with people I love.. and make delicious gourmet treats and drink nice wine.

danah boyd on The New Blogocracy

She covers the convention, the Times dismissal of bloggers as "web diarists" and the comparisons to journalism ...

As a practice, journalism espouses an air of objectivity, purporting to cover all sides of a debate, equally and with emotional distance. While few believe that journalists are unbiased, it is considered a respectable aim of the profession and readers expect them to be as objective as possible. Bloggers, on the other hand, have no such cultural code and their readers rarely hold them accountable for objectivity. In fact, what makes blogging confusing for many is that the practices encompassed by that term are quite diverse.

Technorati is Going to The Democratic Convention with CNN

CNN just announced that Technorati will joining them at the Democratic National Convention next week (I'll have a CNN press release to link to soon). Dave Sifry and I will be on-site in CNN’s convention broadcast center, where Dave will provide regular on-air commentary on what bloggers are saying about politics and the convention (thousands of them, not just A-listers or convention credentialed bloggers). We are also going live with a politics site. Our new site will make it easier for people to see what political bloggers are saying about the convention and CNN.com will link to this site, and we’ll be updating the CNN site with the latest.

I'm incredibly honored to work with the rest of the folks at Technorati, because they are so good at what they do, even though what we are trying to present about blogs is so hard to do in terms of making blog information make sense to people. But I hope we can live up to your expectations, as bloggers, readers, the Thomas Paine's of the 21st century, as we talk to each to each other, and Technorati attempts to show the incredible conversations that compliment journalism, and adds to the discourse.

I hope we can do you justice and communicate well what blogging is about to people who don't know about this, and why your conversations matter. That they are passionate attempts to connect to people, and be heard, instead of the old consumer/customer model where we just hold our mouths open to passively receive content from mass broadcast media. That now, we are all participants and we want a voice and a place in the discourse at all levels, about whatever any individual blogger cares about, unfiltered, honest, and real. Cross your fingers that we can pull off showing people not on the internet why you matter. We hope we can make you proud.

Also, if you see some interesting post about what's happening at the convention, please email me at mary at hodder.org, with the subject line CONVENTION COVERAGE, because we need good quotes to show how powerful people's ideas are.

Thanks.

For some additional news on the Convention bloggers, see Adam Penenberg's Blogging Against Convention.

Thank Goodness For Denise Howell

Whom, I so much want to meet. Last night, I had to miss the Innovation Summit's Fireside Chat with Michael Powell (okay, I heard there were 600 people there - so it must have been a hell of a fire...) due to an emergency. Anyway, her post on what happened is good stuff if you couldn't go, or could and want to continue the discussion in the blogosphere with Michael Powell, who has a new blog (2 posts so far!)

China Digital Conference Day II: Larry Lessig Keynote.

Xiao Qiang (our host and organizer of the conference): The conference is about China, but not static country, but a dynamic, changing, interconnected country. With that, introduced Larry Lessig (the following are notes from his talk).

Larry Lessig: China's Digital Future (title). 15 years ago he bought his first ticket to China, and was graduating from Law School and wanted to celebrate. His plane was to land on June 3rd, 1989. But they were diverted to the Phillipines, and eventually he made his way to Beijing. It was an astonishing way to recognize Beijing compared to the picutures on the news the previous two months. On a train from Beijing to Shanghi, on a train sitting with a professor who spoke English, and chatted about what all this meant. Lessig was proud of his heritage, traditions, but wanted insight about China. And so wanted the core ideal. But that is also a blindness. The issue of the internet upon thinking about it, may be a blindness, a core, an insight to realize.

Daguerrotype led to Kodak, which led to an expanding market. Question in the courts over whether one needed permission to take and then publish the photo. The answer was no. You were free to capture and share images, and then at that point the explosion of growth in photography took off. But if the courts decided to not make it free, things would have been different. It would have been:

D(aguerre)
M(achine)
C(ontrol)
A(ct)

So is there an insight here for China? (Onscreen:) Insight: China.

...."to steal a book is an elegant offense" -- William P. Alford. Recognizing the complexity of intellectual property. But there is blindness in China too. Cybercafes where monitoring comes up. Surveillance. Access to the internet and control of it shut it down. Cybercafes in the US are the opposite. Very strong freedom for cafes to be free of surveillance in cafes in CA. But there is blindness in the US, too. Blindness about Intellectual Property. The question is the freedom in the context of IP. The stakes of course are different. And don't mean to equate the context and weight in both situations. But do want to look at the parallel. To find what we can teach each other, find the insights. An opportunity to recognize the blindness in each other's cultures, and respectfully tell each other. In the same way that the men on the train to Shanghi thought each needed to know certain things before they could understand each other's cutlures.

Radical change. Dimensions: term, scope, force, reach.

Term: 14 years, x2, but now it's 70 years after death, and for Irving Berlin, his most famous work gets 140 years. Before, the renewal was not done half the time, so the average length of a term was >33 years. But now, the maximum is the average.

Scope: only copyright granted if you registered, but now, everything is automatically copyrighted. Which means that in the beginning of the US, only about 1% was copyrighted, so that 99% was in the public domain. So after 1976, everything gets the benefit of copyright, and the formalities have been eliminated, so that was 25% regulated before 76, is now 100% regulated. Before the Internet, courts and humans regulated. Now: the rule is regulated by technology under-which access is granted. Code. Law. Code is law.

Example, Middlemarch is a public domain book, but the Adobe EBook reader does not reflect this. You can only copy 10 pages every 10 days, print 10 pages every ten days, and read aloud. It's machine readable controls that are enforced by the system.

http://aibopet.com. This site gave info on how to hack your Aibo to "teach your Aibo jazz." Not a crime to dance in the US. Not a crime to teach your dog to dance. But when this Aibo site gave instructures, they were C&D'd by Sony for sharing the hack so that you could have your dog dance. The law protecting the code, protecting access to the code, says the maker has final say, not the owner of the Aibo.

Reach: Used to be that fair use meant that you had free use for certain ordinary uses. But now all those uses can be regulated by machines.

Dimenions: term, scope, force, reach.

Never has the law granted this much power to the few to control "creativity." Very different than when Walt Disney could be creative without asking his lawyers first. The internet squares this ability to create that Disney knew.

Gave a couple of examples including the Grey Album and the Read My Lips video of Tony Blair and George Bush which the audience totally cracked up over. Obviously they'd never seen it. A lot of clapping and giggling.

So when people ask him why he does copyright law, it's because this regulation of copyright law, when tied to digital technology ,says something about how culture and democracy could develop. And yet all the examples are illegal art. And yet none could be sustained. And each sought permission to use the materials. And in each case, the lawyers responded that "it's not funny." But the system of permission forces creators to be disaddents or comply. But if they comply, they can say much less.

So here's the core. The blindness. We see this system regulating potential. Changing the freedom to speak. To speak differently. Not broadcast democracy, or a kind of Soviet system, but as a bottom up system. Not a NYTimes democracy, but a blog democracy. A p2p democracy. The ideals of free culture. That is lost. Because the law has said that without seeking permission first, the answer is no.

Jesse Jordan, at RPI, decided he would make something to allow people to search files on the RPI network. So he tinkered with the technology to enable people to search better and produced a 1 million file network, 2/3 of which had nothing to do with music. But he got C&D'd by the RIAA, and because copyright infringement is $150k per infringement, he had $15,000,000 of exposure. So the RIAA took his $12k in student savings for making a search engine. And in talking with his lawyer-uncle who said he would help, but it would probably cost $250k. So the choice is to send the $12k or spend $250k.

In 1987, the J. M. Barrie estate had "the Little White Bird" enter the public domain. In 1928, Barrie also produced "the Boy that Would Not Grow Up" which will enter the public domain in 2023. This was the basis of Peter Pan. In 2002 Emily Somma wrote "After the Rain" about how people should want to grow up. But she was informed that she would have to wait until ALL the Peter Pan stuff is in the public domain before she can publish her work.

Another example: a film maker wants to publish his documentary with a Meet the Press clip but NBC told him it "does not make the President look good" so he was denied the clip, though the interview was about matters of national importance. So he is not using it.

And there are the Diebold memos and the C&Ds using the DMCA to force the take down of the memos at Swarthmore (and elsewhere including Berkeley).

Copyright is increasingly a feature that stifles. But this is a conference about China and the internet. Where there is a different kind of control. But we can say the same from a different perspective. There is the Yahoo France case, where the French court told Yahoo to take Nazi content down for France. In the US, there was outrage that France was regulating the internet and violating the first amendment. And yet a couple of years before, there was the iCraveTV case in the US where TV was available on the itnernet. In Canada, there was a law that allowed the rebroadcast of TV, so it was made available, but the US court said that Canada had to block US users, and the court asked how well the blocking would have and the answer was 98%. That wasn't good enough, so the US court shut down the Canadian site. So the nature of the case was different, and the content was differet, but the blindness was the same. The core blindness is the same.

The stuff is different, but teh ideal is the same: freedom. Not anarchy. Not a world where standards are not obeyed. But think about the freedom and the prosperity it produced. Not a world without intellectual property. But a world where there are limits over the control. And if we can hear others, and they can hear us, then there is a potential to understand the Kodak moment. Where the moment where freedom that comes from recognizing that blindness is in in both places.

QandA: LL: this is a message for right wing conservatives about control. People have to begin to recognize this is a political issue. When he proposed a reduction in copyright, the MPAA said that it was too much of a burden on poor copyright owners to ask them, 50 years after the origin of the work, to pay $1 to reregister.

Orvill Schell: reflect on china, how important is it for a society to have a first amendment, something to lay out free speech, before it can have it?

LEssig: train, need foundational docs. prof: docs are words, need a culture that recognizes these values first. I think it's an insanely complicated thing to figure this out. Docs have never been used here to lay out culture. Though amendments, 13th, 14th and 15th were the first constitutional laws to attempt make a change in the culture and were totaly unsuccesfull for the frist 100 years. But then when it became a social and culture movement, the change started happening. So docs might be a useful step. But it requires more than just documents to really change.

Q; didn't explain Creative Commons, and we are working on CC in China, and how this will work?
A: CC started 2 years ago, so that creators could mark content, with a some rights reserved model, with human readable, lawyer readable, and machine readable expression, that for ex, Yahoo can now read, for say, photos. Got a million CC licenses out in the first year, but now Yahoo says it's 3 million, in a year and a half. To port the legal code into different systems, and there are more than 50 countries to date, Japan, Brazil, etc., and another 25 coming, it requires making one for each system. But these the code and CC licenses rest on copyright law in each country. Working on this in China.

Q from Jang: always talk about copyright in China, but want to hear about the challenges of piracy, for video, software, my observation is that the most important thing is to cut a balance. In China it's already outlawed. But it's a "lower circus of globalization" where migrant workers who can't find jobs and then they engage in this illegal activity.

A: In the spirit of recognizing the common blindenss. We in the US were born a pirate nation. We didn't protect foreign copyrights until 1889. This was a mistake. Every nation needs to respect foreign IP. But there is a difference between "piracy" and "piracy" which is one, reselling, verses two, creatively reusing as in the examples above.

A lawyer, who said to LL, do you realize that there is a kid with 400k songs on his computer? And LL said, do you really think that that kid would actually buy that or listen to that much music? So what is reasonable? Are you really losing those sales?

You can criticize piracy, and you should, but it's also about ideas of free trade, especially with respect to developing nations. There is something about making a balance here between them.

Air America on the Internet

Trying to listen to Al Franken's new show on Air America. Live now if you live in three states or can listen through the internet. Real keeps cutting in and out with it. Or their server does. How 'bout another format guys? So far I've heard commercials for the show itself, AmEx, and the show again. But no show.

Just wait til Howard Stern does this. They need to better anticipate the loads and untapped desire for content....

Yeah, it just came back on. They're spoofing Ann Coulter (Bebe Neuwirth is playing her) locked in the green room ("Fire that Puerto Rican... he's in breach of contract over the crou d'etes!)

Dang it, the sound is gone again.

Back... "Farther to the Left Than The John Birch Society..." lots of commericals, and it's gone again. Well, maybe another day.

Got it back at the end, where they went back to "Ann" who was screaming mad. "I can't believe how incompetent you are!" Al: "Well, I can'd disagree with you there, Ann." Ann: "I'm a lawyer, Al, and I can tell you this: this is actionable! Let me outta here." Then Al said let's just do the interview now, and he asked her what was wrong with liberals, which she started to answer, then started screaming again. Pretty good. Damned Liberals!

However, unless they keep Bebe coming (she's sassy), this will get boring. I think three hours is too much Al. How bout a very tight hour of comedy?

Rip Mix Burn The Election

The Sloganator appeared a few weeks ago when Bush Cheney '04 decided to put a slogan/poster maker online. Oh thank you we said! Of course, we immediately made posters and then they took it down. No sense of humor at all. Until they threatened to give us popups! I think they know exactly what they are doing with that offer. Links via Freedom To Tinker.

Can't wait to see those remixed political ads.

Press - Blog Feedback Loop, or The Napsterization of The Non-Fiction Media

Last night at dinner after the end of eTech, Robert Scoble (of Scobleizer, and a Microsoft employee) told me about his interaction this week with Reuters. Apparently, Reuters did an article about Joe Trippi's O'Reilly's Digital Democracy Teach-In talk Monday (which was very different in effect for those who heard Trippi than the way it was framed by Reuters). I also heard that the back channel IRC talk from the audience listening to Trippi were very critical of him. Robert reacted to that article with this:

... TechDirt compared the coverage from bloggers to that of Reuters. They underlined the "spin" that Reuters gave the story. I agree with TechDirt. The spin doesn't match the speech. Journalists need to report what was said at speeches and put it all in context. This was like listening to a two-hour speech and then ignoring almost all of it so you can write the story you want to write in the first place. Why go to the conference then?

Robert said that Eric Auchard from Reuters came up to him yesterday during eTech to explain why he (Auchard) had written the story the way he did. Robert was surprised, and notes it:

Turns out it was Eric Auchard from Reuters. Now, look back at my blog on Monday. I took a swing at Reuters for how they reported Joe Trippi's keynote here at the O'Reilly conferences. The guy who wrote that story was now speaking with me. We had a nice conversation. He said that he had read and considered what I had to write and appreciated that. Then he explained his point of view. While discussing news judgment and other factors I found myself thinking just how unlikely this exchange would have happened five years ago.

Because of the relationships I've built in the industry he was talking to me as a peer. Think about that. Reuters was explaining how it worked to me. And whether or not I was right or wrong really doesn't matter. The fact that a common citizen like me could be heard by a journalist who is at the top of his profession (you don't get a job at Reuters by being a hack or unprofessional) is simply amazing to me.

Now, is Eric changed by weblogging? Absolutely! But I'm changed by Eric too. First of all, I was able to get Eric's point of view and, to tell you the truth, it is a compelling point (that his job is to report the news and that he picked out the most interesting things for his readers). Second of all, I now have a relationship with Eric. Who do you think I'm likely to call if I have a technology story that I think Reuters would be interested in?

I think this is rather amazing. I missed the Monday sessions. But I'm happy that to see that the whole day is available here. And I really am very interested in this discussion between a blogger and reporter discussing the why and how of stories in the traditional press. It's a very interesting phoenamon.

Check out Jay Rosen's The Tripping Point for more perspective on the Trippi talk at eTech and the Dean Campaign.

And for a different take on the traditional vs. non-traditional, here's Dan Okrent's semi-blog (he's the New York Times' public editor or ombudsman) and Steve Outing's interview with Len Apcar at NYTDigital.

More on Echo Chambers

Previously I talked about this, in reference to an LATimes article the other day. Dave Weinberger and I had a nice chat about that and he made a very good point, which is that echo chambers happen both online and off, that they are actually a very good thing in that they are actually like minded communities figuring out what issues are important to them, what logic works for advancing the cause, and who can do what to make it happen. I agree, and it's why I said below that there is some good and some bad in this kind of thing. It's similar to building your own newspaper, to the extent that you don't know what's going on in the world that the rest of the people you know are talking about. The result of this is being left out of the proverbial watercooler conversation. In the same way, being too insular in an echo chamber (aka community) will result in the bad effects, but using community building is also a positive thing.

I don't think we can dismiss the value of them, because they are insular too. And I don't think we can blame what happened with Dean on the echo chamber effect. The way the campaign used the internet was exciting and interesting, and it will be a value add to campaigns and political activity in future. It is a tremendous asset. But Dean, I think failed for other reasons, maybe because while he appeals as an outsider, he's also an outsider perhaps when it comes to voting verses blogging or donating, people went for the guy who can work Washington, a political heavy, who may be perceived as having a better chance at beating Bush. Don't know, but in any event, I don't think the internet was so much the cause of the failure here, but other factors that may have been obscured by how exciting it was for those folks to organize and communicate in this new way.

The Internet Echo Chamber is Similar to Echo Chambers Elsewhere

Doc was quoted in Joseph Menn's/LA Times story, Dean Backers Debate Internet 'Echo Chamber' today. My favorite comes at the very end, about Dean and the use of the internet in the political/campaign process:

He's the Wright brothers' first airplane. You wouldn't want to put passengers on it. But that doesn't mean it isn't important.

Many blog folks are quoted including Dave Winer, John Perry Barlow, Clay Shirky, David Weinberger, Michael Cornfield and Larry Lessig. Dave Weinberger responds:

The echo chamber meme distracts us from the true echo chamber: The constellation of media, especially in the US.

An interesting thing, this echo chamber effect, and how digital media and the internet can take it in directions that are perpendicular to the kind that happen in the analog world. With the internet, we can't usually see the people we are conversing with (though there are blog photos, on the internet, no one knows your a dog...). This means it's harder in some ways to see a lack of diversity when conversing, because the commonality is just in the similar interests or characteristics and that those with opposing views are located somewhere else on the internet. The physical queues that would alert us to the lack of diversity are missing and so we turn to online queues which may either be non-existent, or just very different, and can't represent the physical and emotional states we embody. These digital queues may show us other things that might or might not lead us to diverse discussions, (exceptions for rants and other obvious excitements, but if one is just talking in a forum or blog, it's harder to gain that emotional presence that we pick up on in person and we might misinterpret another’s words in associating an emotional component).

I had a conversation with Eddan Katz yesterday about these echo chambers we find ourselves in, talking about the copyfight echo chamber, the Dean echo chamber, journalism and media’s, Washington DC’s, New York’s, SF’s, academia’s, lawyer’s, liberal’s, conservative’s, etc. All these echo chambers, whether in person/analog or online, lead to reinforcing their member’s views, while at the same time like members explore the logic and understanding of their shared interest or commonality. Some good and some bad there, but the value of the internet for us is the way we can, given interest and concern, find conversations easily that we don’t normally listen to, views we might not otherwise see because they don’t have physical proximity or the right of entry, to see what people who think differently are thinking about. The opportunity is there if we want to find it, but then, even the internet is an echo chamber, because our commonality is that we are people with access and an understanding of how to converse and how to find others conversing. This is a huge problem, though also a huge opportunity to find diversity without proximity.

Also, I am in a class with Joe Menn, who is an interesting, smart guy. Questions in the first class to students included what we had written, and I mentioned my blogs. I asked him whether he (or Katie Hafner) read blogs, would read them if he knew he himself or a particular article was being discussed. No, he said, no time, and not interested. Sort of intimated that bloggers are in the cranks and crazies category. Though he didn't say this outright. Didn't seem to like blogs at all, highly suspicious of them and their writers. Nice article though.

The Internet Echo Chamber is Similar to Echo Chambers Elsewhere

Doc was quoted in Joseph Menn's/LA Times story, Dean Backers Debate Internet 'Echo Chamber' today. My favorite comes at the very end, about Dean and the use of the internet in the political/campaign process:

He's the Wright brothers' first airplane. You wouldn't want to put passengers on it. But that doesn't mean it isn't important.

Many blog folks are quoted including Dave Winer, John Perry Barlow, Clay Shirky, David Weinberger, Michael Cornfield and Larry Lessig. Dave Weinberger responds:

The echo chamber meme distracts us from the true echo chamber: The constellation of media, especially in the US.

An interesting thing, this echo chamber effect, and how digital media and the internet can take it in directions that are perpendicular to the kind that happen in the analog world. With the internet, we can't usually see the people we are conversing with (though there are blog photos, on the internet, no one knows your a dog...). This means it's harder in some ways to see a lack of diversity when conversing, because the commonality is just in the similar interests or characteristics and that those with opposing views are located somewhere else on the internet. The physical queues that would alert us to the lack of diversity are missing and so we turn to online queues which may either be non-existent, or just very different, and can't represent the physical and emotional states we embody. These digital queues may show us other things that might or might not lead us to diverse discussions, (exceptions for rants and other obvious excitements, but if one is just talking in a forum or blog, it's harder to gain that emotional presence that we pick up on in person and we might misinterpret another’s words in associating an emotional component).

I had a conversation with Eddan Katz yesterday about these echo chambers we find ourselves in, talking about the copyfight echo chamber, the Dean echo chamber, journalism and media’s, Washington DC’s, New York’s, SF’s, academia’s, lawyer’s, liberal’s, conservative’s, etc. All these echo chambers, whether in person/analog or online, lead to reinforcing their member’s views, while at the same time like members explore the logic and understanding of their shared interest or commonality. Some good and some bad there, but the value of the internet for us is the way we can, given interest and concern, find conversations easily that we don’t normally listen to, views we might not otherwise see because they don’t have physical proximity or the right of entry, to see what people who think differently are thinking about. The opportunity is there if we want to find it, but then, even the internet is an echo chamber, because our commonality is that we are people with access and an understanding of how to converse and how to find others conversing. This is a huge problem, though also a huge opportunity to find diversity without proximity.

Also, I am in a class with Joe Menn, who is an interesting, smart guy. Questions in the first class to students included what we had written, and I mentioned my blogs. I asked him whether he (or Katie Hafner) read blogs, would read them if he knew he himself or a particular article was being discussed. No, he said, no time, and not interested. Sort of intimated that bloggers are in the cranks and crazies category. Though he didn't say this outright. Didn't seem to like blogs at all, highly suspicious of them and their writers. Nice article though.

Political Action Gets Distributed

Move On has announced the winner for their "Bush in 30 Seconds" contest, where 1500 entries were submitted, 14 finalists chosen and then judges and anyone else interested voted. The winner was apparently the favorite of both the judges and the individuals who voted.

Hermann Maiba (U of IL/Chicago) in Shifting the Lens (pdf, 2001) talks about how "Like the swapping of MP3 files over the Internet, information about movement struggles and tactical innovations diffuse globally among likeminded activists. This phenomenon can be best described as a Napsterization of political activism."

I think Move-on's contest is the most salient comparison yet to napster, where there is distributed collaboration, peer-to-peer sharing of information, and the disintermediation of traditional political power.

Update: apparently, Move On is trying to raise $1.6 million from their supporters to run the spot during the Superbowl.

Howard Kurtz Blogs Dean

Kurtz is a Washington Post Reporter. With a new blog. Dean is using the internet to connect to his supporters and connect them to each other, as well as blogging his campaign. Kurtz is blogging about the Dean use of the internet and other strategy aspects of the campaign, among other campaign issues.

Two different uses of the same technologies to do two very different things, with similar results: the disruptions of the old media guard, and the old political guard.

Jay Rosen talks about the Frank Rich article (from yesterday, Napster Runs for President in '04), where Rosen takes apart Rich's analysis of the napsterization of politics, and those who cover those politics.

Update: the link for Dean's campaign was changed from this, to this. Also Jay Rosen updated his piece and I'm quoted in it.

Howard Kurtz Blogs Dean

Kurtz is a Washington Post Reporter. With a new blog. Dean is using the internet to connect to his supporters and connect them to each other, as well as blogging his campaign. Kurtz is blogging about the Dean use of the internet and other strategy aspects of the campaign, among other campaign issues.

Two different uses of the same technologies to do two very different things, with similar results: the disruptions of the old media guard, and the old political guard.

Jay Rosen talks about the Frank Rich article (from yesterday, Napster Runs for President in '04), where Rosen takes apart Rich's analysis of the napsterization of politics, and those who cover those politics.

Update: the link for Dean's campaign was changed from this, to this. Also Jay Rosen updated his piece and I'm quoted in it.

Howard Kurtz Blogs Dean

Kurtz is a Washington Post Reporter. With a new blog. Dean is using the internet to connect to his supporters and connect them to each other, as well as blogging his campaign. Kurtz is blogging about the Dean use of the internet and other strategy aspects of the campaign, among other campaign issues.

Two different uses of the same technologies to do two very different things, with similar results: the disruptions of the old media guard, and the old political guard.

Jay Rosen talks about the Frank Rich article (from yesterday, Napster Runs for President in '04), where Rosen takes apart Rich's analysis of the napsterization of politics, and those who cover those politics.

Update: the link for Dean's campaign was changed from this, to this. Also Jay Rosen updated his piece and I'm quoted in it.

Napster Runs For President in 'O4

...http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/21/arts/21RICH.html?ex=1387342800&en=035abc452122c4ec&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND">by Frank Rich.

...Dean online followers collaborate on organizing and perfecting the campaign, their ideas trickling up from the bottom rather than being superimposed from national headquarters. (Or at least their campaign ideas trickle up; policy is still concentrated at the top.) It's almost as if Dr. Dean is "a system running for president," in Mr. Johnson's view, as opposed to a person.

...

Should Dr. Dean actually end up running against President Bush next year, an utterly asymmetrical battle will be joined. The Bush-Cheney machine is a centralized hierarchy reflecting its pre-digital C.E.O. ethos (and the political training of Karl Rove); it is accustomed to broadcasting to voters from on high rather than drawing most of its grass-roots power from what bubbles up from insurgents below.

For all sorts of real-world reasons, stretching from Baghdad to Wall Street, Mr. Bush could squish Dr. Dean like a bug next November. But just as anything can happen in politics, anything can happen on the Internet. The music industry thought tough talk, hard-knuckle litigation and lobbying Congress could stop the forces unleashed by Shawn Fanning, the teenager behind Napster. Today the record business is in meltdown, and more Americans use file-sharing software than voted for Mr. Bush in the last presidential election. The luckiest thing that could happen to the Dean campaign is that its opponents remain oblivious to recent digital history and keep focusing on analog analogies to McGovern and Goldwater instead.

Napster Runs For President in 'O4

...http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/21/arts/21RICH.html?ex=1387342800&en=035abc452122c4ec&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND">by Frank Rich.

...Dean online followers collaborate on organizing and perfecting the campaign, their ideas trickling up from the bottom rather than being superimposed from national headquarters. (Or at least their campaign ideas trickle up; policy is still concentrated at the top.) It's almost as if Dr. Dean is "a system running for president," in Mr. Johnson's view, as opposed to a person.

...

Should Dr. Dean actually end up running against President Bush next year, an utterly asymmetrical battle will be joined. The Bush-Cheney machine is a centralized hierarchy reflecting its pre-digital C.E.O. ethos (and the political training of Karl Rove); it is accustomed to broadcasting to voters from on high rather than drawing most of its grass-roots power from what bubbles up from insurgents below.

For all sorts of real-world reasons, stretching from Baghdad to Wall Street, Mr. Bush could squish Dr. Dean like a bug next November. But just as anything can happen in politics, anything can happen on the Internet. The music industry thought tough talk, hard-knuckle litigation and lobbying Congress could stop the forces unleashed by Shawn Fanning, the teenager behind Napster. Today the record business is in meltdown, and more Americans use file-sharing software than voted for Mr. Bush in the last presidential election. The luckiest thing that could happen to the Dean campaign is that its opponents remain oblivious to recent digital history and keep focusing on analog analogies to McGovern and Goldwater instead.

Napster Runs For President in 'O4

...http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/21/arts/21RICH.html?ex=1387342800&en=035abc452122c4ec&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND">by Frank Rich.

...Dean online followers collaborate on organizing and perfecting the campaign, their ideas trickling up from the bottom rather than being superimposed from national headquarters. (Or at least their campaign ideas trickle up; policy is still concentrated at the top.) It's almost as if Dr. Dean is "a system running for president," in Mr. Johnson's view, as opposed to a person.

...

Should Dr. Dean actually end up running against President Bush next year, an utterly asymmetrical battle will be joined. The Bush-Cheney machine is a centralized hierarchy reflecting its pre-digital C.E.O. ethos (and the political training of Karl Rove); it is accustomed to broadcasting to voters from on high rather than drawing most of its grass-roots power from what bubbles up from insurgents below.

For all sorts of real-world reasons, stretching from Baghdad to Wall Street, Mr. Bush could squish Dr. Dean like a bug next November. But just as anything can happen in politics, anything can happen on the Internet. The music industry thought tough talk, hard-knuckle litigation and lobbying Congress could stop the forces unleashed by Shawn Fanning, the teenager behind Napster. Today the record business is in meltdown, and more Americans use file-sharing software than voted for Mr. Bush in the last presidential election. The luckiest thing that could happen to the Dean campaign is that its opponents remain oblivious to recent digital history and keep focusing on analog analogies to McGovern and Goldwater instead.

Political Shifts Because of Technology

Speaking of technologies that disrupt old systems (well, that's pretty much all we speak about here, or the disruptive media output), Jay Rosen, who writes the outstanding Pressthink blog about changes in journalism and media, is the editor of a new blog called The Blogging of the President. There are several folks on the blog including Chris Lydon, who does those long but very interesting interviews with people like George Lakoff and Dave Sifry where both the interview audio record as well as Lydon's article are available together and play off each other, like an ocean, and a painting of a ocean. Both have their value, and what is reflected back is both the art, and the life of the person. David Billings, Matt Stoller, Stirling Newberry, Oliver Willis, Rick Heller and Joshua Koenig are also contributors, though I am not as familiar with them. But Rosen and Lydon's work is first rate and so to extrapolate....

Check out the blog, which focuses on both the ways new media are changing politics overall, as well as the changes in specific campaigns.

Political Shifts Because of Technology

Speaking of technologies that disrupt old systems (well, that's pretty much all we speak about here, or the disruptive media output), Jay Rosen, who writes the outstanding Pressthink blog about changes in journalism and media, is the editor of a new blog called The Blogging of the President. There are several folks on the blog including Chris Lydon, who does those long but very interesting interviews with people like George Lakoff and Dave Sifry where both the interview audio record as well as Lydon's article are available together and play off each other, like an ocean, and a painting of a ocean. Both have their value, and what is reflected back is both the art, and the life of the person. David Billings, Matt Stoller, Stirling Newberry, Oliver Willis, Rick Heller and Joshua Koenig are also contributors, though I am not as familiar with them. But Rosen and Lydon's work is first rate and so to extrapolate....

Check out the blog, which focuses on both the ways new media are changing politics overall, as well as the changes in specific campaigns.

Political Shifts Because of Technology

Speaking of technologies that disrupt old systems (well, that's pretty much all we speak about here, or the disruptive media output), Jay Rosen, who writes the outstanding Pressthink blog about changes in journalism and media, is the editor of a new blog called The Blogging of the President. There are several folks on the blog including Chris Lydon, who does those long but very interesting interviews with people like George Lakoff and Dave Sifry where both the interview audio record as well as Lydon's article are available together and play off each other, like an ocean, and a painting of a ocean. Both have their value, and what is reflected back is both the art, and the life of the person. David Billings, Matt Stoller, Stirling Newberry, Oliver Willis, Rick Heller and Joshua Koenig are also contributors, though I am not as familiar with them. But Rosen and Lydon's work is first rate and so to extrapolate....

Check out the blog, which focuses on both the ways new media are changing politics overall, as well as the changes in specific campaigns.

New Media Campaign And New Media

Jay Rosen on Dean:

With Dean, the campaign is somewhere... out there. It is not at headquarters any more, but it talks to headquarters. This is a de-stabilizing premise, and a reporting nightmare. But Samantha Shapiro in the Times magazine this week had a notion.

...What attracts so many believing people to Howard Dean is that discovery-- wow, we can shape this ourselves. What attracts a lot of thinking people to the unfolding Dean phenomenon is that politics can be thought about again. New patterns are there to be figured out.

Somehow the American nation remembers civic traditions eclipsed by the strange system we have for electing presidents. This system has been building strength since 1952, when television was new and the state primaries began to take nominating power out of the hands of party chiefs.

Haypenny Does a Campaign Blog.

But Doc Searls does the roundup on the Dean Campaign, and the parallel media universe they have created, in his post that started off talking about the NYMag cover story suggesting he consulted for them (he didn't) where he rifs through the writers who get the Dean Campaign's new media use and their development of an online community, verses those that don't.

Earlier this week, Searls talked about Loïc saying that Blogging will have the same effects to journalism as Napster & P2P to the music industry.

Traditional media sources are no longer the primary source of information. Internet news sources, especially non-mainstream sources like "blogs", are challenging the traditional rules of journalism. How is the media landscape evolving? What are the implications of this revolution for traditional media suppliers, producers and viewers? How should the mainstream media respond if it is to remain competitive in the future?

And check it out: the first congressional rss feed.

New Media Campaign And New Media

Jay Rosen on Dean:

With Dean, the campaign is somewhere... out there. It is not at headquarters any more, but it talks to headquarters. This is a de-stabilizing premise, and a reporting nightmare. But Samantha Shapiro in the Times magazine this week had a notion.

...What attracts so many believing people to Howard Dean is that discovery-- wow, we can shape this ourselves. What attracts a lot of thinking people to the unfolding Dean phenomenon is that politics can be thought about again. New patterns are there to be figured out.

Somehow the American nation remembers civic traditions eclipsed by the strange system we have for electing presidents. This system has been building strength since 1952, when television was new and the state primaries began to take nominating power out of the hands of party chiefs.

Haypenny Does a Campaign Blog.

But Doc Searls does the roundup on the Dean Campaign, and the parallel media universe they have created, in his post that started off talking about the NYMag cover story suggesting he consulted for them (he didn't) where he rifs through the writers who get the Dean Campaign's new media use and their development of an online community, verses those that don't.

Earlier this week, Searls talked about Loïc saying that Blogging will have the same effects to journalism as Napster & P2P to the music industry.

Traditional media sources are no longer the primary source of information. Internet news sources, especially non-mainstream sources like "blogs", are challenging the traditional rules of journalism. How is the media landscape evolving? What are the implications of this revolution for traditional media suppliers, producers and viewers? How should the mainstream media respond if it is to remain competitive in the future?

And check it out: the first congressional rss feed.

New Media Campaign And New Media

Jay Rosen on Dean:

With Dean, the campaign is somewhere... out there. It is not at headquarters any more, but it talks to headquarters. This is a de-stabilizing premise, and a reporting nightmare. But Samantha Shapiro in the Times magazine this week had a notion.

...What attracts so many believing people to Howard Dean is that discovery-- wow, we can shape this ourselves. What attracts a lot of thinking people to the unfolding Dean phenomenon is that politics can be thought about again. New patterns are there to be figured out.

Somehow the American nation remembers civic traditions eclipsed by the strange system we have for electing presidents. This system has been building strength since 1952, when television was new and the state primaries began to take nominating power out of the hands of party chiefs.

Haypenny Does a Campaign Blog.

But Doc Searls does the roundup on the Dean Campaign, and the parallel media universe they have created, in his post that started off talking about the NYMag cover story suggesting he consulted for them (he didn't) where he rifs through the writers who get the Dean Campaign's new media use and their development of an online community, verses those that don't.

Earlier this week, Searls talked about Loïc saying that Blogging will have the same effects to journalism as Napster & P2P to the music industry.

Traditional media sources are no longer the primary source of information. Internet news sources, especially non-mainstream sources like "blogs", are challenging the traditional rules of journalism. How is the media landscape evolving? What are the implications of this revolution for traditional media suppliers, producers and viewers? How should the mainstream media respond if it is to remain competitive in the future?

And check it out: the first congressional rss feed.

Senator Coleman on Filesharing and Suing Your Customers

Via BoingBoing:

Sen. Norm Coleman is beginning to germinate a clue. He's figured out that turning one in six Americans into a felon for engaging in file-sharing is corrosive to the body politic, but his answer is to call for reduced penalties for file-sharing, not a new copyright deal -- like the one that created the recording indusustry in 1908 in order to legalize piano rolls, the first big Napsterization of music. Still, in this MPR interview (mp3), he does admit to having downloaded some Bob Dylan MP3s.

Senator Coleman on Filesharing and Suing Your Customers

Via BoingBoing:

Sen. Norm Coleman is beginning to germinate a clue. He's figured out that turning one in six Americans into a felon for engaging in file-sharing is corrosive to the body politic, but his answer is to call for reduced penalties for file-sharing, not a new copyright deal -- like the one that created the recording indusustry in 1908 in order to legalize piano rolls, the first big Napsterization of music. Still, in this MPR interview (mp3), he does admit to having downloaded some Bob Dylan MP3s.

Senator Coleman on Filesharing and Suing Your Customers

Via BoingBoing:

Sen. Norm Coleman is beginning to germinate a clue. He's figured out that turning one in six Americans into a felon for engaging in file-sharing is corrosive to the body politic, but his answer is to call for reduced penalties for file-sharing, not a new copyright deal -- like the one that created the recording indusustry in 1908 in order to legalize piano rolls, the first big Napsterization of music. Still, in this MPR interview (mp3), he does admit to having downloaded some Bob Dylan MP3s.

Incumbent's Protection

Hollywood and Whine: Why are Democrats helping the entertainment industry stamp out new technologies that fuel economic growth? by Brendan I. Koerner at Washington Monthly.

Same old, same old:

It's a political tale as old as Capitol Hill: A lumbering industry selects a certain corporate-friendly party to be its Beltway patsy. In exchange for the requisite campaign donations and other perks, members of said party use their clout to push through the industry's legislative agenda--an agenda that would rip off consumers and harm the overall economy but enrich the corporate string-pullers immensely. Pundits and public-interest types grumble over the bald-faced cronyism, but as long as the money keeps flowing, the beneficiaries don't seem to care a whit.

Sounds like the buddy-buddy relationship between Republicans and the energy industry, right? The characters cited in the above scenario, however, are the Democrats and Hollywood, one of Washington's coziest couples. For years, Hollywood has poured money into the Democrats' campaign coffers and been rewarded with indispensable assistance on the industry's crusade of the moment--squelching new technologies that allow the dissemination of digital content in ways Hollywood can't control. One bill being hatched by Democrats would allow media companies to hack into networks like KaZaA, a file-sharing service which has replaced Napster as the most popular MP3 clearinghouse on college campuses. Another would outlaw high-tech devices that don't come equipped with government-approved hardware to make it impossible to copy digital media. And yet another would strip consumers of the right to play their legally purchased CDs on multiple devices. The Democrats' Pavlovian alignment with the grossest impulses of the entertainment industry was even written into the Democratic platform back in 2000, when the party urged "all steps necessary" against the leakage of copyrighted materials--a plank pushed on them by Hollywood.

Conclusion, the Dems can afford to lose some entertainment support in favor of new tech support, because it is the future, and the way to innovating news jobs and culture.

Incumbent's Protection

Hollywood and Whine: Why are Democrats helping the entertainment industry stamp out new technologies that fuel economic growth? by Brendan I. Koerner at Washington Monthly.

Same old, same old:

It's a political tale as old as Capitol Hill: A lumbering industry selects a certain corporate-friendly party to be its Beltway patsy. In exchange for the requisite campaign donations and other perks, members of said party use their clout to push through the industry's legislative agenda--an agenda that would rip off consumers and harm the overall economy but enrich the corporate string-pullers immensely. Pundits and public-interest types grumble over the bald-faced cronyism, but as long as the money keeps flowing, the beneficiaries don't seem to care a whit.

Sounds like the buddy-buddy relationship between Republicans and the energy industry, right? The characters cited in the above scenario, however, are the Democrats and Hollywood, one of Washington's coziest couples. For years, Hollywood has poured money into the Democrats' campaign coffers and been rewarded with indispensable assistance on the industry's crusade of the moment--squelching new technologies that allow the dissemination of digital content in ways Hollywood can't control. One bill being hatched by Democrats would allow media companies to hack into networks like KaZaA, a file-sharing service which has replaced Napster as the most popular MP3 clearinghouse on college campuses. Another would outlaw high-tech devices that don't come equipped with government-approved hardware to make it impossible to copy digital media. And yet another would strip consumers of the right to play their legally purchased CDs on multiple devices. The Democrats' Pavlovian alignment with the grossest impulses of the entertainment industry was even written into the Democratic platform back in 2000, when the party urged "all steps necessary" against the leakage of copyrighted materials--a plank pushed on them by Hollywood.

Conclusion, the Dems can afford to lose some entertainment support in favor of new tech support, because it is the future, and the way to innovating news jobs and culture.

Incumbent's Protection

Hollywood and Whine: Why are Democrats helping the entertainment industry stamp out new technologies that fuel economic growth? by Brendan I. Koerner at Washington Monthly.

Same old, same old:

It's a political tale as old as Capitol Hill: A lumbering industry selects a certain corporate-friendly party to be its Beltway patsy. In exchange for the requisite campaign donations and other perks, members of said party use their clout to push through the industry's legislative agenda--an agenda that would rip off consumers and harm the overall economy but enrich the corporate string-pullers immensely. Pundits and public-interest types grumble over the bald-faced cronyism, but as long as the money keeps flowing, the beneficiaries don't seem to care a whit.

Sounds like the buddy-buddy relationship between Republicans and the energy industry, right? The characters cited in the above scenario, however, are the Democrats and Hollywood, one of Washington's coziest couples. For years, Hollywood has poured money into the Democrats' campaign coffers and been rewarded with indispensable assistance on the industry's crusade of the moment--squelching new technologies that allow the dissemination of digital content in ways Hollywood can't control. One bill being hatched by Democrats would allow media companies to hack into networks like KaZaA, a file-sharing service which has replaced Napster as the most popular MP3 clearinghouse on college campuses. Another would outlaw high-tech devices that don't come equipped with government-approved hardware to make it impossible to copy digital media. And yet another would strip consumers of the right to play their legally purchased CDs on multiple devices. The Democrats' Pavlovian alignment with the grossest impulses of the entertainment industry was even written into the Democratic platform back in 2000, when the party urged "all steps necessary" against the leakage of copyrighted materials--a plank pushed on them by Hollywood.

Conclusion, the Dems can afford to lose some entertainment support in favor of new tech support, because it is the future, and the way to innovating news jobs and culture.

Bill Moyers on Big Media

Distribution, according to Ernest Miller, is more important to copyright and the First Amendment, than the right of reproduction. Bill Moyers talked with John Nichols and Robert McChesney about the current state of media in the United States and how it affects democracy, earlier tonight. The FCC is planning to overhaul the ownership concentration rules, and with less distribution, think less freedom of expression, because what is out there will be more closely controlled by a very small number of people.

Bill Moyers on Big Media

Distribution, according to Ernest Miller, is more important to copyright and the First Amendment, than the right of reproduction. Bill Moyers talked with John Nichols and Robert McChesney about the current state of media in the United States and how it affects democracy, earlier tonight. The FCC is planning to overhaul the ownership concentration rules, and with less distribution, think less freedom of expression, because what is out there will be more closely controlled by a very small number of people.

Bill Moyers on Big Media

Distribution, according to Ernest Miller, is more important to copyright and the First Amendment, than the right of reproduction. Bill Moyers talked with John Nichols and Robert McChesney about the current state of media in the United States and how it affects democracy, earlier tonight. The FCC is planning to overhaul the ownership concentration rules, and with less distribution, think less freedom of expression, because what is out there will be more closely controlled by a very small number of people.