Anti Alpha Male

Level 5 Leadership
We were suprprised, shocked really, to discover the type of leadership required for turning a good company into a great one. Compared to high profile leaders with big personalities who make headlines and become celebrities, the good-to-great leaders seem to have come from Mars.
Self-effacing, quiet, reserved, even shy — these leaders are a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will. They are more like Lincoln and Socrates than Patton or Caesar.
From Good to Great by Jim Collins.

Copyright and hope

The Eldred decision is disappointing, but the game isn’t over.
A Salon article by Siva Vaidhyanathan analyzes the Supreme court ruling, and gives cause for hope.
The Court supported Congress’ right to extend copyright terms, but also re-iterated key principles of copyright law: the right to fair use of copyrighted content; and the right to build on ideas contained in copyright works.
Congress is still free to change its mind if enough of us speak up.
In 1998 when the DMCA and the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension bills were passed, the loudest voices in the political process were the media and entertainment businesses. Most individuals had never heard of the issue. The major media didn’t cover it. Geeks were likely to take the technolibertarian position that government actions weren’t worth bothering about.
It’s different now. The mainstream media is telling the story. More people understand the rights we’re losing when copyright control is extended far beyond the balance defined by the founding fathers. More people who understand the technology are starting to speak up and participate in the political process.
It’s in our hands now.

Austin Blog Update

The alpha-demo-AustinBlog now has sample posts from Adam Rice, Jon Lebkowsky, and Prentiss Riddle in addition to me.
One small bug – the posts show up in the order the trackback pings were sent, rather than the post dates. This shouldn’t be too much of a problem if we are sending pings when the posts are written.
Next steps:
* aggregate the content into weblog software, for improved formatting, comments, etc.
* add GeoUrls to posts 🙂
Stay tuned for updates.

Internet Topic Exchange and Austin Blog Demo

Phillip Pearson just posted the first version of the Internet Topic Exchange, a very cool service that enables the creation of composite blogs out of trackback pings.
A few weeks ago, Chip suggested creating a composite Austin blog to cover Austin politics, following the Peterme conversation on city blogs. We could cover other topics in addition to politics — music, restaurants, etc.
There’s already an AustinBloggers site, which has several authors. But that requires individuals to post directly to that blog. This is a different idea — post to your very own blog, and the AustinBlog will aggregate your Austin-related posts.
I created a demo site, here which has some of my Austin posts from recent months.
All we need to do to post to the blog would be to add this trackback to the posts on our own blogs about Austin. http://topicexchange.com/t/austin_blog/
The resulting content will be available as an RSS feed, which we could pull into a standalone MovableType-based blog (for example, and if I get the RSS plug-in working correctly). This could be formatted more nicely than the native wiki format.
People who don’t use trackback can enter their URL in a web form here or use the MT trackback server (not sure how that works yet.)
I’m travelling this week, so I can’t work on a standalone aggregate blog until next week.
I sent an email to everyone I remember participating in the AustinBlog conversation over the last few weeks. Others are welcome to to the party.

Secret Government

This link was passed on to me by my friend Ben Greenberg.
Last Friday’s episode of This American Life, the public radio documentary show, is about “Secret Government”. It contains three investigative stories on different aspects of US governmental secrecy since Sept. 11. You can listen to it as real audio stream at the This American Life web site.
The three articles cover:
1. Secret deportations of immigrants. Some smart ACLU lawyers contacted foreign embassies requesting names of deportees. Pakistan gave them a list. David Kestenbaum went to Pakistan and interviewed some of the deportees about their experiences.
2. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court. This secret court authorizes wire taps on people who could be foreign spies. In this court the standards of probable cause necessary in criminal investigations do not apply. In the 24 years it has existed, the court has never said no to any wire tap request from the government. This past spring the 7 conservative judges, all appointed by Chief Justice Rhenquist, ruled that Attorney General John Ashcroft and the Justice Department had gone too far. The judges on the court felt strongly enough about Justice Dept abuses to make their ruling public and to allow the ACLU to file a brief during the Justice Department’s appeal of the court’s decision.
3. The story of Jose Padilla, and American citizen designated as an “enemy combatant.” He has been held without charges, stripped of all rights, in a military jail, since last spring. The story suggests that the less evidence the government has against a suspected terrorist, the fewer rights it allows the suspect.

Sharing rich media: too little and too big

iCommune is a program that lets iTunes users share songs over the internet. (via Euan Semple
Which is very nifty — as long as both people have iTunes.
Meanwhile, Marc Canter argues in favor of universal broadband content standards. He argues gamefully about the benefits to:
* On-line media storage systems
* Media management systems
* Media tools, devices and playback systems
* Online communities
But each of these players has more interest in proprietary models than common standards.
It will take some sort of mass decentralized application (like blogging) to drive standards againsts the interest of the existing vendors

Greenhouse gas reduction bill from McCain, Lieberman

Missed this last week, but wanted to pass it along in case you handn’t seen it.
“The New York Times reported on a bill introduced by Senators McCain and Lieberman proposing mandatory reductions in greenhouse gases and a carbon dioxide trading system like the one used successfully for sulfur dioxide, which contributes to acid rain.
caught via Gil Friend

BlogConversations #3 – BookGroupFormingNetworks

A stupendously wonderful application for RidiculouslyEasyGroupFormingNetworks would be an All Consuming companion site that would enable an aggregate blog of book-related posts.
So, one blog that would aggregate the posts on Smart Mobs and Lessig’s Code and whatever other books the BlogMob is reading.
P.S. Some implementation thoughts:
Use a bookmarklet to catch the ISBN number (as in LibraryLookup) and then use the mt.setPostCategories command in the MetaWeblog API to create a post categorized by “BookClub” and by ISBN.
Then syndicate and aggregate by category.

Blogconversation #2

The topic-based model (RidiculouslyEasyGroupForming and the BlogThreading models have different strengths and weaknesses.
They are both good, they aren’t the same.
Topics are great for aggregate blogs that assemble posts about coffee shops, Austin events, or other specific subject.
Threadneedle is better for aggregating a human conversation, whose topic meanders under a named thread.
A topic-focused blog won’t get you a human conversation (that would be ai-complete). A human conversation won’t get you a subject-organized index (not without editing after the fact).
– Adina
p.s. Shelley writes a good summary of her progress and other developments in BlogConversation tools here.