John Doerr on the market opportunity for global warming

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.

The format for community blogging

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.

The model for news and blogs

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

Immigration: scapegoat politics is failing

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.

Unpacking the bookshelf: after mass marketing

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.

Unpacking the bookshelf on environment and industrial ecology

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.

Squidoo: pulling Amazon lists out of Amazon

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.

Media elitism in Berkeley

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.