Sustainablog writes that Walmart's getting into organic food. One excellent thing about this is that Walmart scale can help take soil conservation mainstream. Factory farms producing better soil are much better than factory farms mining soil. Another excellent thing is scaling up agricultural practices that don't depend on petroleum-derived fertilizers.
Walmart's entry into the market is a big threat to smaller organic farmers, but it also creates an opportunity. Buy local, brand local. The eco-conscious buyers who were buying organic for the environmental benefits will also be thinking about the unsustainability of long-distance food transport. Small players who can brand local will be able to get higher prices from customers buying sustainability.
Essembly is a fun toy for people who like to debate about politics and meet likeminded folks, but it doesn't yet do much useful to help you get informed or take action.
The starting point is kinda fun. The system poses some political question. You answer on a scale of one to four, and then the system lets you explain your answer. Some of the questions are put together by the editors of the site, and others by participants.
The explanations are what really make it work as a game. When I filled out their initial quiz, one of the questions was:
Preserving the environment is usually more important than protecting jobs and business.
Grrr!!! What a horrible question! This false dichotomy is toxic to real progress. How about, protecting the environment through clean energy can be a major creator of jobs and businesses. Moreover, reduction in fossil fuel carbon may be the only way to make sure that we have a viable economy that supports the current population.
Once I realized that I could comment, and people could debate each other in their answers, I was less mad and more entertained.
Debate is an important part of political learning, as Scott Henson teaches citing Christopher Lasch, who argues that journalism's goal of objectively informing people is a fallacy, since people really understand things through argument. The advocacy framing provided by blogs like Glenn Greenwald's actually makes news easier to understand, even if you don't agree with the blogger all the time (Greenwald is perilously right, but that's a digression).
The site gives people strong identity, with pictures and background information, which will hopefully help the site stay civil.
The problem is the site doesn't provide good ways to get beyond the opinions that readers bring to the table. I'm not going to go to Essembly as often as I'll go to a blog site that brings and contextualizes news in the context of the readers' opinions, with references to go deepen when I care to.
The site makes it easy to make groups and "friend" people in the social networking site manner. But it doesn't yet provide tools for people who want to do anything more.
What I really want from an activist site is a set of tools that helps not just to affiliate, but to organize. A tool to arrange a group visit to a legislator. A tool to build a mailing list,with distributed administration. A tool to build shared talking points, and to write letters to editors and decision-makers. A tool to donate for a shared purpose.
Essembly is a fun start, but in game terms, it leaves people at level 1.
I understand Squidoo a bit better now that the fact that it's Seth Godin's company has sunk in. In the social software equation, the individual motivation is self-promotion, and Godin is hoping that others will be as entertaining in their quest for fame and fortune as he is.
I spent some weekend time researching green energy opportunities to invest the money from the sale of my house.
Glad to see uber-VC John Doerr talking about the threats and opportunities
A warming planet, through climate change, is another threat. Doerr, who was joined onstage by his partner John Denniston, displayed slides, including pictures of the entire Bay Area sitting under water -- to show what would happen if global warming melts away Greenland's ice sheet. The ice sheet's melting is well under way, and its demise would lead to a 20-foot rise in ocean levels, he said.
I hope we take action before New York and London go where New Orleans went.
Jay Rosen ponders the right format to integrate blogs into newspapers. What's the right combination of "top-down" and "bottom-up" content?
Daily Kos and the scoop sites have a good model. Anyone can post a piece. The front page consists of a combination of stories written by core writers, and stories promoted from the ranks of highly-recommended reader contributions. Recommended stories are given a prominent sidebar position.
I would add aggregation to that model. Like the Austin Bloggers model, individual bloggers would be able to submit posts to the aggregator. There could be relevancy moderation, as there is with Austin Bloggers. Then, add on top of that the recommendation and promotion features from the DailyKos model. So independent community bloggers could have their content featured also.
So, in a model with money flowing through it, who would get paid? Maybe anyone who gets a front page story, whether they're on the staff, or whether the story was promoted by editors or by reader recommendation.
There was an unconference yesterday in Philadelphia where the traditional journalists and bloggers were on the same side, trying to figure out how to get journalism paid for. The journalists in the room were staring up at an elephant -- the papers in Philly are up for sale, and they don't know if they'll be "allowed" to innovate. Liveblogged by Jeff Jarvis.
That smells like a business opportunity. Mike Phillips of Scripps describes it on commenting on Jay Rosen's site
There are days when I’m tempted to gather a few friends, move into a nice town with a newspaper run by one of the slower-moving publishers, start up something that’s digital and citizen-driven and make a nice living picking the big guy’s pocket.
What about the idea of buying out a paper? Buying out the San Jose Mercury News or the Inquirer? That sounds tough because you start with a high cost base, mostly going for trucks and printing presses.
I'd start cheap, like H20town. When there was a large enough ad base, then I'd start printing a subselection of the online stories and buy some used equipment really cheaply. Which is sad for the old printing press culture, but removes a lot of pressure to start.
Immigrants are the latest in a long series of minority scapegoats to bear the brunt of Republican party "divide and rule" electioneering. Thankfully, it's failing. A vast crowd in LA, and big crowds in Denver, Phoenix and Milwaukee gathered to protest a new bill that proposes making illegal immigration a felony and building a wall on the Mexican border.
In the last election, Republicans made headway in hispanic communities; that seems less likely this time around. Hopefully the bad bill won't go anywhere, and Republicans will be harmed by outraging Hispanic Americans more than they are helped by energizing the white bigot vote.
The scapegoat gambit is an old tactic for the Republican party. Willie Horton and welfare queens worked 20 years ago, but apparently demonization of black folk doesn't go over anymore. In the last cycle, the Republicans picked on gays, but tolerance is on the rise, so immigrants came up in the next draw of the scapegoat card.
Are changes to immigration policy needed? Its troubling to see workers with low wages and no protection. But making immigrants felons and building a wall isn't the solution. Running against the "brown hordes" is a transparent appeal to the bigot vote, and I'm glad to see it not working.
When the internet was becoming commercial, I researched and wrote a multi-client study for the paper industry on the future of paper. In order to understand the consumer economy that drove the advertising support for newspapers and magazines, I researched the history of mass advertising, mass marketing and consumer culture to understand the old system that seemed on the verge of splintering.
Since then, the market for physical goods hasn't changed as much as the dotcom era promised. But the market for text, music, video and software is changing rapidly. The web20ish cascade of user-generated content is as dramatic and more fun than one might have imagined, despite the bad laws that incumbent industries are trying to use to hold back time.
The scary collapse of the newspaper ad market is happening as predicted, along with a very scary decline of democracy.
I didn't think that electronic displays would be cheap enough for books until around now. That market still hasn't gone anywhere. The relationship between pixels and paper has gotten very strange, with books being used by bloggers, mostly as excuses for book tours.
And worrying that global warming might be too far along to reverse. Long before Jared Diamond's Collapse, I read A Green History of the World: Environment and the Collapse of Civilizations. It talks about how human-catalyzed soil degradation led to the progressive decline of the Sumerian, Assyrian and Babylonian civilizations.
On the topic of portals reincarnated with ajax "I never wanted portals to be more dynamic, or even open to third-party-authored widgets - I wanted them to go away altogether."
One of the cool Amazon feature is the list -- users post their 10 favorite Taiwanese films, 17 favorite waffle-making gadgets, and so on.
It's handy and fun. It draws on primal foraging instincts. And it's closely tied to Amazon, and only losely tied to the listmaker. Amazon has user profiles, but they are tightly constrained.
Squidoo enables users to make lists, and offers to help its members increase their fame and fortune by linking their personal site to the Google-friendly link haven. It's an odd combination of fun amateur topics such as the coolest laptop bags and sandwich recipes, and moderately creepy get-rich-quick ads for foreign exchange trading and mystery shopping.
The lists are much prettier than a bare delicious link collection, but they take a little more effort to create. Time will tell if it has the magical combination of benefit to the individual and increasing benefit to the group.
The most interesting question on last week's panel at the Berkeley Hillside club on old and new media was raised by John Markoff of the New York Times. Why, he asked, at a time of great democratization of media, are we seeing increasing concentrations of wealth and power? Why isn't media democratization translating into political and economic democratization?
A few thoughts toward answers:
* Knowledge doesn't become power directly. People who are getting information from Glenn Greenwald's blog about the slow parliamentary strangling of the NSA warrantless wiretapping investigation still needs coordinated action in order to persuade legislators.
* Blogs are widespread and cheap. But tools for more direct organizing -- email tools, databases, volunteer management tools -- are harder for volunteers to come by and harder to use.
* Online organizing needs to be coordinated with in-person organizing and persuasion in order to have enough effect.
Aside from that interesting question, I agree with Scott Rosenberg that the panel would have benefited from breaking out of the tired old "old media vs. new media" frame.
I ran across while preparing for a panel on "tagging 2.0" at sxsw. They sell a faceted classification product used for information retrieval. They did Facetious, a cool del.icio.us mashup which applies facets to delicious tags.
In order to describe their hack as part of my talk on collaborative tagging, I wanted to know how it works. Does the software create the facets? Does the software suggest facets, which are then selected and edited by human administrators? Or do humans create the facets for Siderean to fill in?
I ordered collateral from the website -- needed to fill out a form for each piece of collateral, and talk to a salesman first. The collateral didn't answer my question -- it was all benefit/result marketing, with nothing about the software itself. So I emailed the salesguy. He said he could only answer the question if Socialtext was seriously interested in partnering with Siderean.
So I didn't include Siderean in the presentation. Does anyone have a clue how the software works?
At SXSW, I facilitated a session on "RSS: not just for blogs anymore", with Chris Frye of Feedburner, Scott Johnson of Ookles (formerly of Feedster), and Robyn Dupree of Bloglines.
The panelists gave many examples of the non-blog uses of RSS. The most prevalent is audio/video, which currently represents 20% of feedburner-measured content. "Structured blogging" applications like calendars and restaurant reviews are nifty and seeing experimentation, but not big takeup yet. RSS on mobile devices is used by a small number of users, but those users are very heavy users.
The most fun part of the session was the "fireside demo" format modeled after Wiki Wednesday. This being SXSW, there were plenty of people in the audience with interesting RSS applications. People lined up at the mic to give examples of RSS uses and hacks, including:
* Stuffopolis, a utility for keeping track of lending personal stuff
* Toolshed, a toolset for online music promotion
* 30Boxes (calendar) and Dodgeball plugins for Wordpress by Andy Skelton
Here's the delicious list
I went to a "one web day" organizing event yesterday. I have a bit of ambivalence about the theme, and want to explore the emotion.
The internet is a wondrous creation of humanity. The ability to connect across space and remember across time is stunning to contemplate. It is well worth celebrating.
The model of a "day" dedicated to celebrating, raising awareness, and protecting -- along the lines of "earth day"-- feels like original and unreconstructed hippie-dom. The level of sincerity and optimism is a bit embarrassing, given the waves of cultural disillusion that followed the euphoria. (mind you, the original earth day, be-ins and what not are all before my time).
Unlike the original Earth Day, One Web Day is assertively anti-anti-commercial. The goal is to embrace the commercial providers, big and small, who help bring the internet to people.
The most well-greased way to make a holiday mainstream in US consumer culture is to drive it with consumerism. Mother's day was invented to sell flowers and cards. Christmas is used to sell most of everything. It is easy to imagine web day promotions on internet access, Flickr memberships, and other addictive subscriptions.
And yet the most powerful marketers -- the telco and content oligopolies -- are dedicating vast resources and efforts to make the internet a less connected place, with less of the open access, easy of information distribution, and ease of sharing that make the internet what it is.
When I think about One Web Day, it is hard to think about celebrating the internet without thinking about the amount that is at risk. Much of the remix culture rennaissaince is illegal, or under legal threat, because of bad law. While US telcos try to get laws passed to make municipal broadband illegal, European cities, one after the other, are starting fiber-to-the-home initiatives that will get residents first-class broadband while US connectivity falls behind.
And yet, people won't engaged in protecting something they don't think to value. Part of the value of One Web Day is sharing the idea and the feeling that the internet is worthy of appreciation. Wanting to protect it comes as a follow-on.
I guess the way to make it work is to get the themes of protection and sharing into enough hands, and take advantage of the commercial momentum to spread the word.
the old version of mt-blacklist.cgi has run out of room, and the only choice is an upagrade or migration. I'm going to SXSW, so the migration's not happening til at least next weekend. It will fit with the unpacking theme. Sorry about all the spam.
at a San Francisco dinner shindig, with a group of startup people, money people, and others in the subculture. The genetic effevescence was about remix culture, clean energy, 3d hacking, and the digital native generation.
I don't know whether it is just me but every silver lining has a pretty heavy cloud. Clean energy is grand, especially if it can help compensate for the very large amounts of fossil fuel energy it takes to make our food. Remix culture is cool, except for the fact that it is largely illegal, and remixers could get priced out of the market in a non-net-neutral economy. Kids in the US will grow up with tech as a native language; and 50% of kids will be obese; and many will have fewer opportunities than their parents. People in the room felt free to snark about "your call may be monitored by the NSA", but Senate Intel just voted not to investigate illegal spying. The polar bears are dying in the heat.
The short-term looks fun and interesting; the longer term looks murky.
Upcoming has good attributes of both guy culture and Silicon Valley culture.
In girl culture, there are infinite nuances to invitations, non-invitations, and anti-invitations. Girls invite to pre-parties, afterparties, and other intimate moments that complement official get-togethers. When a traditional girl wants you to come, she looks you in the eye an invites *you*. When a traditional girl wants to know you're only sort of welcome, she tells you that there's an event going on. When a traditional girl wants to snub you, she tells the person standing next to you that they are invited to her event. Bonus girl points for making sure you hear, while whisking the other person away.
Guy invitations are delightfully simple, by contrast. A guy describes an event, and assumes that's an invitation. Hey, there's a tailgate party. Or hey, we're going riding.
Upcoming does the delightfully simple, guy-like version. The event is declared, with a time and a place. The attendee declaresly, openly and impersonally, if they are "watching" the event, or, "attending" the event. Here it is, come if you want to, no big deal if you don't.
Upcoming also has aspects of bay area culture. People have a facility at declaring parties. There's Mobile Monday, and Tag Tuesday, and Wiki Wednesday, and "bar camp". People pick themes or places and flock, often enough that you need some automation to keep track of it all. And the communities are big and dispersed enough that a public bulletin board is helpful; in smaller communities, it's easier and more obvious to let the subcommunity who needs to know more directly.
The one thing I wish it did was slurp events into a personal calendar. Today's task was copying and pasting sxsw sessions and parties.
Edgieo is a conceptually nifty decentralized listing service -- like craigslist, but it aggregates listings you put on your blog. The bit this misses is how and why an individual would put a listing on his/her own blog rather than craigs list or ebay, when those services already have a large audience and easy listing tools.
In order to get adopted, a standard needs to be:
Did some conversational noodling about why group calendar software is so bad. The trouble is, it doesn't support the social processes that people use to schedule events.
First of all, the negotiation required to schedule a meeting. Today, this is done with the brute force method of giving the meeting-ee access to your whole calendar. All free time looks equivalently free. And, exposing one's whole calendar is "too much information" unless one manages nuances of calendar entry types. It would be nicer to be able to do an automated version of the "pick the best option" drill -- you publish some candidate times and the meeting-ee chooses from among them.
Second and worse, the affordances needed to quasi-schedule and unschedule a meeting. How do you set up a request for a casual lunch sometime that a few busy people happen to be free? How do you politely defer a meeting? Scheduling software is a clumsy, second-best replacement for the refined and obsolete skills of personal secretary or traditional wife.
So, in my first full day in California, I returned the rental car and got a rental commuter bike. My house is 2 flat miles from work on a lightly-trafficked bike route. Cycling is the sanest form of commuting when it isn't pouring rain.
Palo Alto has a passive-aggressive downtown street parking system. You can park for 2-3 hours at a time with no charge in a several-block zone marked with colored signs. Then, you need to move your car to avoid a $25 fine. So a workday in downtown Palo Alto involves getting up and moving your car every few hours.
They don't make it impossible to park by making sure there are fewer parking spots than people who want to park, like they do in Cambridge. They don't have pirhana towing, like they do in the Boston area, where predatory towtrucks circle timed parking areas and abduct your car to a distant lot where it must be ransomed for an exhorbitant fine. They just make it really annoying.
So far the transportation scheme is working. I've done the hour-long drive to San Francisco and Berkeley twice for fun things, and otherwise had a short and healthy daily commute.