Clay Shirky alleges that the boost Dean got from the internet was illusory; internet campaigning is a substitute for the real thing. That's only true if the legions of new internet activists give up, and don't learn the next steps of political activism.
I've seen the gap between familiar and new in Texas. I participated a little in the project to get internet tools for the Texas Dean campaign. Glen Maxey, a sensei of local politics, runs the campaign, and talks about precincts and delegates. The enthusiastic crew building web tools talk about blogs and RSS, PHP and MySQL.
My main political experience has been digital rights issue activism, not political campaigns. Last year, fighting the SDMCA battle, we used email, blogs and wikis to co-ordinate; shoe-leather to lobby legislators, and old-fashioned connections to invite tech industry lobbyists to help fight off the movie moguls.
In the comments to the Shirky post, Rusty Foster explains how the Dean Campaign dropped the ball in the field campaign in Iowa.
The field ops were not, as far as I know, too busy blogging pictures of their cats to handle the strategy. Their strategy and execution just didn’t work. They didn’t keep in contact with their pledged caucus-goers, and they didn’t teach the people who actually went to the caucuses what to do when they got there. It had nothing to do with the internet — it was a failure of the offline campaign.
Clicks and mortar. We've seen the doomsaying before when the dot-coms crumbled. Then Amazon bought warehouses. The airlines opened Orbitz.
If Dean doesn't find the clicks and mortar balance, somebody will.
Last week I was scanning my RSS reader and stumbled across a Socialtext bug report. The Shifted Librarian wanted to scan the RSS Winterfest weblogs, and ran into a bug in our new RSS feed. I reported the bug. Pete diagnosed the problem in the blog comments.
RSS for information discovery, and weblog for collaboration. It works.
RSS readers are very handy for people to manage attention to incoming information.
Debates about the relative superiority of RSS readers and web browsers are missing the point. Nobody wants the whole web coming to their desktop reader.
You use RSS for sources that change periodically, that you visit again and again. Bug-tracking is a great application -- several people in the RSS-Winterfest IRC mentioned bug-tracking as handy use of RSS.
A few people in the IRC mentioned RSS for alerting. The RSS polling design isn't intended for real-time notification. For that you need IM or Jabber or Tibco. Real-time notification and periodic updates can be used nicely side-by-side -- for example, a system administrator might want routine human and system notifications via RSS, and system-down or danger-zone alerts by IM or pager.
Information updates have different levels of urgency -- "the building is on fire" is more urgent than "the room temperature has increased from 68 to 72 degrees" (unless you're managing a temperature-sensitive lab culture).
A given piece of information is more urgent for some than others. A customer support query is urgent for the service reps on duty, and of background interest to product managers and developers.
We need a range of attention-getting media.
* IM/pager for lapel-grabbing alerts
* email for important, short-notice items
* RSS for alerts for discretionary attention
* Weblogs and wiki providing a "browse mode" fix for recent changes junkies, and a searchable archive for occasional readers
(We also need a Ross Mayfield trademark colorful chart to gain fame for the concept.)
These modes complement each other. They help individuals manage attention, and they help organizations focus attention on urgent matters, while building knowledge in important areas.
Over 1000 participants participated in the RSS Winterfest voice-blog-wiki-IRC multi-model conference last week. Socialtext hosted the "Eventspace" wiki-blog -- we hosted the application, and we also helped to host the online party. It was lots of fun, included insightful conversation, and created useful resources.
Participants in IRC improvised conversation on the themes of the sessions. Bloggers posted session notes and questions and resources. Wiki participants built collaborative pages on RSS Tools, RSS Authentication, and other topics.
Here are some of the practices we used that helped make the conference lively:
* create weblogs with relevant topics
* set up sign-in space for people to describe themselves and learn about each other
* pre-populate the wiki with the conference program and other resources
* real-time gardening -- link interesting pages to the home page, consolidate related resource pages, help harvest quotes and references.
Maybe most important, we helped weave questions, comments, and insights from the IRC and wikiblog into the voice conference. It's a salon facilitation skill, translated to electronic media.
This RoperASW/Tandberg polllast year revealed the crushing tedium of traditional teleconference. Less than half of attendees actually pay attention to conference calls. With audience participation tools, you get an event that is more lively and intelligent.
Dylan Greene writes an insightful yet ultimately unsatisfying piece arguing that RSS is not yet ready for Prime Time.
He's right that RSS has weaknesses. The way most people use it, it wastes bandwidth. Many feeds don't include full-text (need to fix this...). Comments aren't well integrated. And, the coup de grace, an RSS reader isn't yet built into Microsoft Windows.
True, but not that useful, unless you're a Gartner analyst trying to determine whether a technology has reached a state of ultimate, top-right-quadrant maturity.
The interesting questions are:
* is RSS mature enough to do what you want?
* can you benefit from RSS as an individual, a publisher, or an organization.
If you're a mildly tech-savvy individual wanting to keep track of lots of weblogs and news, then RSS is a lifesaver.
If you're a complete novice, or if you advise complete novices, you probably want to avoid RSS -- though bloglines is pretty darn accessible -- I'd recommend it to anyone who is comfortable with a browser.
If you're a blogger or web publisher, and want to reach the increasing number of users who depend on RSS to read web content, then surely publish in RSS.
If you're in an organization where most people are drowning in email (i.e. most of us) and you have influence over technology choices, you might want to consider using RSS to complement business applications, helping individual employees manage their time and attention.
Dylan's points are correct, but they don't tell you whether the rewards of RSS are worth the trouble for you. It takes a bit more effort to use technologies that are somewhat in their life cycle. You need to decide whether it's worth it.
If you're an open source geek or work for a technology company that's not Microsoft, you have opportunities to shape next-generation syndication standards and applications. Those opportunities are here now, and will be gone in a few years.
A recent Zogby poll found that even in red states, which voted for George W. Bush, 32 percent of the public believes that the election was stolen. In blue states, the fraction is 44 percent.via a succinct op-ed by Paul Krugman.
I've been working on evoting issues here in Texas. Voting administration officials are very concerned that "alarmism" about evoting will reduce public confidence in elections.
It is too late. We have a problem. Without a voter-verified paper trail, there's no way to have a reliable audit. If something goes wrong, we'll never know.
The way to handle citizens' justified concern is action, not Xanax and lullabies.
Officials are concerned about cost. Krugman says it well.
What about the expense? Let's put it this way: we're spending at least $150 billion to promote democracy in Iraq. That's about $1,500 for each vote cast in the 2000 election. How can we balk at spending a small fraction of that sum to secure the credibility of democracy at home?
UC Irvine Researcher Walt Scacci is studying open source development, and has come across distinct practices.
It's not clear to me how the open source practices differ from agile processes in general -- a lighter, more conversational, less document-heavy design process.
What are some of the differences you've found, apart from the obvious ones?
For example, in software engineering, there's a widespread view that it's necessary to elicit and capture the requirement specifications of the system to be developed so that once implemented, it's possible to pose questions as to what was implemented, compared with what was specified.
We do not see or observe or find in open-source projects any online documents that software engineers would identify as a software requirements specification. That poses the question: What problem are they solving, if they haven't written down the problem? While it's true that there's no requirements specification, what there is instead is what we've identified as a variety of software informalisms.
What do you mean by "informalism"?
That word is chosen to help compare to the practice advocated in software engineering, in which one creates a formal systems specification or design that might be delivered to the customer. Informalisms are such things as information posted on a Web page, a threaded e-mail discussion or a set of comments in source code in a project repository. It may be a set of how-tos or FAQs on how to get things accomplished. Each is a carrier of fragments of what the requirements for the system are going to be.
Bruce Eckel is trying to cultivate bloggingas a genre for expressing ideas that aren't yet complete thoughts. "I now believe there are three modes of written communication: books, articles, and ideas. The first two I have long experience with, but I lack a medium for ideas. "
Eckel draws an interesting connection between initial simplicity -- getting something out quickly -- and elegant simplicity, which takes a lot of work to prune a complex expression to a simple form. They aren't the same thing at all, but getting material out into the world helps give you the feedback that lets you refine and polish.
What is the balance between simplicity and expedience? "Do the simplest thing that could possibly work" is certainly not saying "do the most elegant thing" because the goal is to get something working, without too much effort, so that you can try it out and see if it solves any portion of the problem. "Trying it out" is what will produce the valuable information that can be fed back into the next iteration, and will also begin to tell you what's most important about the problem.
In the article about the 80/20 rule, Tim Bray explains that simplicity isn't easy.
In Tim's words, "the mental machinery involved in the design process naturally tends towards more rather than less."
The unofficial version of my business card reads "grinch." I spend a lot of time saying no to all kinds of attractive, bright, shiny jingly ideas. "Too complicated." "Not the most important thing right now, maybe later." "What's the simplest way of doing things that works"? Two parts diplomacy, one part curmudgeon. Not a good way to win popularity contests.
Before Christmas, from a biotech company, "This is much easier to use and manage than $competitive product. I can use this with much more of my team"
Yesterday, from a consultant who helps organizations improve collaboration and manage knowledge... "It's like $competitiveproduct, but easier to use and cheaper."
Tim Bray has been working on a series of articles analyzing which factors lead to technology success. The strongest predictor isn't investor support, technical elegance, a compelling idea, standardization. It's the "80/20" rule, systems that yield 80 percent of the benefit for doing twenty percent of the work.
The 80/20 Tribe’s offerings are denounced as “Just a toy!”, while they hurl back accusations of pedantry, big-system disease, and so on.
Big smile. This is what makes me think that our company is really on to something. There are two kinds of skepticism that we run into occasionally.
* "Oh, it's just a wiki"
* Like Lotus Notes, but less.
I hear these occasionally from corporate buyers who are used to big collaboration and KM solutions, and from industry analysts who've been following collaboration software since the dawn of time. These are the feature-checklist folks, who want to know if you product comes with a ballpoint pen and a fish scaler, regardless of whether anybody in their shop needs these things.
The sweet spot is doing the right 20% of the work.
In the link blog, Anil writes "i fear it may take us another few years to live down the impression generated by this story." Anil, who is "us"? When you use the phone, you don't have to "live down" the impression created by teenagers chatting about crushes and parties. People who blog about social software and politics don't have to "live down" teenagers blogging about life -- just like the teens don't need to "live down" the grownups talking about car repair and jobs and insurance.
It's just communication. People say what they want to say. The medium and the tools let us say it. All good.
In one of the episodes of the Soprano's first season, baby mobster Christopher Moltisanti, who's trying to write his life into a screenplay, comments that a movie script is about 120 pages. David Chase takes advantage of the story-telling space in a 13-hour season to pull together a form more like a novel: developing characters, unfolding themes, interlocking plots, arcs, and pointed social commentary.
I've been watching the Sopranos for the first time on DVD this past week; it's as good as its reputation.
I love the emotional range in the characters gesture and expression. Tony Soprano at turns affectionate, sarcastic and brutal, honest and cagy. Carmela shows intertwined love and hatred when her chronically unfaithful husband is about to be slid into an MRI machine after collapsing mysteriously. Boss figurehead Junior Soprano reveals insecurity and envy.
In classic novel mode, the show takes on the hypocrisy of the American aspiring middle class. Carmela Soprano strives to be socially accepted in the upper-middle class world, hosting fundraisers, getting her daughter into the ivy league. Gambling rackets aren't all that different from insider trading and stock speculation, except mob debtors get beaten up. Elegant dining room table chit-chat is politically correct, self-righteous, barbed, and snobbish. The suburban world's questionable sources of wisdom include psychotherapy, mixing insight and narcissism; and religion, shown as vulnerable to psychobabble and corruption.
I love the storytelling, and I don't have enough tv/film vocabulary to describe what I like about it. The interlocking plot structure comes from the conventional vocabulary of tv drama. Some of the the addictive quality derives from soap opera techniques -- plot suspense driven by characters -- the tensions in Tony and Carmela's marriage, the ambitions of Christopher Moltisanti. Some of the intellectually satisfying structural symmetry comes from classic theater -- the gun on the mantel in the first act will be fired by the last act.
There's also something about the pacing that seems distinctive. It doesn't have the racing quality of tv hyperdrama; nor does it have the static, echoe-ey feel of soap operas. And it doesn't have the schematic feel of a theatrical play adapted to screen, either. If you're a tv/film fan, and can put your finger on this quality, please write in.
It's definitely addictive -- reading blog entries about the show, I'm glad to hear that I'm not the only person who watched in three days spaced over a week.
In contrast to Adaptation's parody and ultimate surrender to Hollywood cliches, the Sopranos embraces and transcends genre, and accomplishes art.
Watched Adaptation over the holidays with the brother and sister-in-law in New Jersey. I enjoyed Nicholas Cage's acting tour de force, playing an angst-ridden, intellectual, original screen-writer, and his cheerful, confident, cliche-loving twin brother, with similar mannerisms and different personalities.
I was entertained by the dogged resistance to making a movie without hollywood plot cliches -- sex, drugs, chase scenes, personal revelation -- and eventual surrender to a short, devastating parody of hollywood style.
The film even plays games with emotional trajectory; there's one red herring, the striving of the New Yorker writer and screen-writer to "follow their bliss"; and the emotional moral the movie chooses; to "be confident, despite critics." The film could have easily swapped themes and worked as well; it's a critique of the tacked on "moral of the story" chosen from at random from the cliches of therapeutic culture.
It's either a measure of a small bit of heart in the movie, despite overall cynicism; or personal vulnerability, but I resonated with the intellectual snobbery toward his sincere and middlebrow brother that the main character has to unlearn.
Ultimately, though, as Judith comments, the film-school cleverness isn't as smart as it thinks it is. A film-school student watches oodles of movies, realizes that there are no new stories left, and that the industry uses golden chains to tie film-makers to sentimental and dramatic cliches.
Shakespeare had that problem -- the groundlings all wanted fight scenes; comedies have a happy ending; tragedies end with blood on the stage. Homer presumably had that problem -- there were hundreds of years of story-telling; he had to get the audience to listen to him, and somehow do something new.
Schneier's critique of airport false alarms also explains why the Patriot 2 provisions -- which let the government gather reams of financial data without probable cause -- is likely to backfire.
Schneier writes in Salon Magazine
In the months and years after 9/11, the U.S. government has tried to address the problem by demanding (and largely receiving) more data. Over the New Year's weekend, for example, federal agents collected the names of 260,000 people staying in Las Vegas hotels. This broad vacuuming of data is expensive, and completely misses the point. The problem isn't obtaining data, it's deciding which data is worth analyzing and then interpreting it. So much data is collected that intelligence organizations can't possibly analyze it all. Deciding what to look at can be an impossible task, so substantial amounts of good intelligence go unread and unanalyzed. Data collection is easy; analysis is difficult.
The Patriot 2 provisions let the government trawl for data. If there's no need to show probable cause, it's easier to cast a wide net than to catch the tuna and leave the dolphins alone.
Danah writes that blogging is a privilege, with preference to straight white males. Maybe at the top of the Technorati popularity charts. But take a look at the participants on Austin Bloggers and Austin Stories, the blog and journal portals. Core community members are women, queer, stay-at-home moms, workers in social work, teaching, non-profit, retail, tech-support, students, and job-hunting. This is a community, not a country club.
is that it turns the (book, movie, recording) into a commodity and the experience of (reading, watching, listening) into social conformity.
The punchline is a thumbs-up/thumbs-down rating. The book is good/bad, and you'd like/hate it too.
This leaves out the subjectivity of the observer. My experience of a work of culture is partly evaluation against definable criteria (the book's plot is predictable), and partly the interaction between the book's content and my emotional and intellectual experience. When I read a book, I evaluate these things somewhat separately. Is it a "good book" -- well-researched, well-plotted, etc. And did I learn something new, did I have an emotional and esthetic experience.
Because the experience is subjective, a recommendation can't be general-purpose. There's a genre of folk ballad that can usually make me cry. Not sure whether it's "good music" or "bad music" -- just that it flips some switches and buttons to trigger a strong emotional experience.
Also, the "book review" format emphasizes the dialog between reviewer and reader, rather than the dialog between writer and reader (this point makes more sense for books than other forms). I experience reading not as an act of consumption but as a conversation, separated in time and space from the writing. (That's why it's so darn cool when weblog trackbacks invoke comments from authors; it becomes a live conversation).
So, the essays about books here aren't really book reviews -- they're essays with esthetic evaluation, and personal emotional/intellectual reaction, and response to the author's ideas.
p.s. This isn't as solipsistic as it sounds. The act of recommendation is an intimate act, not a public one. A recommendation is based on empathy; experiencing a work of culture through the filter of another's intellectual and emotional preferences, and assessing whether the other person might enjoy the work. A generic thumbs-up/thumbs-down public recommendation is a much more pallid thing.
Joi Ito and Marko Ahtisaari in a conversation about whether blogs are just, given the inequality in traffic and link stats that Clay Shirky pointed out. The premise is wrong. The charge of injustice only applies if blog traffic is like money or power; more is better; the greater can oppress the lesser.
Adam Rice has it right here: "Power laws? I don't have a problem with them. I write my blog for my own satisfaction and to let my friends know what I'm doing and what I'm thinking about. And to remind me in the future of what I was doing/thinking. While it's nice knowing that other people are reading it (which, I think, a few other people do), that's not why I do it."
Out of all of the goals on the list for 2004, I know how to do all of the items but one.
Made fabulous progress last year in professional and nonprofit activities. I know how to stay fit and eat well, though it's hard to do when working a zillion hours at a start-up. I kept the resolution to stay in touch with friends and keep social commitments, even when really busy. I completed some small but useful programming projects; learned how to build things small steps at a time and debug.
Gosh, I'm even procrastinating getting to the point. I'd love to meet the right guy, and don't know how to do it. So I'd love your advice, dear readers.
There are two methods that people recommend:
Method 1) Have an active life, do things you enjoy, and meet interesting people. Eventually, you'll meet someone who's right for you. Or someone you meet will introduce you.
This method is fun and relatively easy. But sloooow. I met and briefly dated someone through a non-profit connection, who's super-smart, fun and capable; not right for an LTR for me, and we're friends now. That was one guy in a year.
Method 2) Market yourself. First, ask everyone you know to fix you up. This hasn't had any results so far. I guess I can try again...
Next, fill out profiles on the online dating services. Browse profiles and send form letters to plausible-sounding guys. Meet for coffee. The results of this approach have been amusingly disastrous. Outside of "dates", I meet people I like and make new friends all the time. On "dates" with guys selected by profiles, I meet people who are wildly unsuitable -- a guy whose favorite activity is gambling; a guy who wears a concealed handgun at all times; a guy who doesn't wash. Ask me for more amusing stories, if you like.
This isn't fun, and hasn't had any good results so far. So I procrastinate. I put it on my to-do list every single weekend, and lo and behold, do everything else.
Gentle readers:
* Shall I continue to pursue method 1, and trust that the universe will make a connection?
* Or shall I smile sweetly, take a photograph with a tighter sweater, and write more form letters?
Advice welcome.
p.s. If you're a single guy who reads my blog, feel free to drop me a note. Ditto if you know someone I should meet.
p.p.s. So, you ask... why is such a nice girl still single? Dated the same guy for a long time, during my mid-20s/early 30s when most people hook up, and didn't marry him.
David Weinberger says: if you want to get at the real social networks, you're going to have to figure them out from the paths that actual feet have worn into the actual social carpet.'
So right. The best examples we have today are things likeTechnorati and the Blogstreet neighborhood and All Consuming that
Here's another way of looking at things. The Social Network tools are about saying hello. Unless you're 18 months old, hello is only .1% of the conversation. Weblogs, wikis, and other public conversations are about the other 99.9% of the conversation. And the Technorati/Blogstreet/AllConsuming applications help you find relevant conversations to join.
Halley talks about learning about air traffic control from a friend.
To rely on personal contact to spur your learning or curiosity seems a haphazard way to increase your knowledge, but it happens all the time in our lives once we are out of school. These days however, blogs are doing just that -- making a wide range of subjects interesting, engaging, accessible and fascinating simply by the fact that you sense an intimate connection and a personal voice at the other end of the information.
This only seems unusual because we've been introctrinated with the weird idea that learning is something kids acquire in a school building from professional teachers. Humans have learned from peers and mentors, throughout the human lifespan, for as long as primates have been able to transmit ideas about tools, culture, history, and behavior.
In addition to Halley's good point about blogs, I have a weird theory that wikis will help this renaissance in grownup learning. I know several book club wikis already. Wikis are gaining interest among "communities of practice" -- groups of grownups who want to share learning outside academia. Wikis are great for individuals building a vocabulary in a subject, and wonderful for groups building shared understanding.
Blogs help to discover and browse new ideas, through the lens of another passionate human. Wikis help to build personal and shared memory as people learn.
Good scientific evidence shows that people are happier and live longer when they have a strong social network, and even when they have a pet to take care of.
In this context, how much do online social networks count? When someone spends time blogging; participating in mailing list discussions; chatting on IRC; does this strengthen the immune system? Or weaken it? Does it make a difference if the participants meet each other in person every once in a while, or never?
Has anyone done research on this yet?
