Heath Row's Media Diet

Beyond Petroleum

2010-06-16T09:29:00.001-07:00

Travis Millard: Authors@Google

2010-05-26T16:14:00.000-07:00

I helped organize this talk by Los Angeles-area comics artist Travis Millard at work in Santa Monica. It took place in February 2010 and just hit YouTube recently.

Dennis Woodruff at the Post Office

2010-05-12T15:57:00.000-07:00

Dennis Woodruff is a Hollywood icon of sorts. For the last few decades, he's been making homemade movies about himself and the Hollywood experience -- as well as his search for Hollywood experience. At first they were available on VHS -- I have a thrift store copy of Double Feature -- and now they're on DVD-R.

He sells them out of his art cars, and he'll sell them to you if he meets you on the street. A friend reports that he spends much of his time chatting up pretty girls and overdressed men in Hollywood cafes. Apparently, he also goes to the post office.

Here's what my wife learned about Woodruff while she stood in line ahead of him:

1. He'd like to meet Eddie Murphy.
2. He thinks black men might know Eddie Murphy and isn't too shy to ask them if that's the case. ("Ask for an introduction," he says.)
3. He's impatient. (He said, "If this line doesn't move any faster, I'm going to blow up this place."
4. He writes his URL on his bills when he pays them through the mail.
5. He considers talking to people in public being an entertainer.
6. He doesn't like to waste money on Express Mail and doesn't think you should either.

Ladies and gentlemen, Dennis Woodruff.

Sardonic Motto Card #1

2010-01-21T22:18:00.002-08:00

The Greatest Salesman in the World

2010-01-02T21:05:00.002-08:00

The first book I read in 2010 was a slim volume, the 111-page 1968 parable written by Og Mandino. I first -- and last -- read the book about eight years ago, near the end of January 2002, on the recommendation of a friend who sold faucets and fixtures for Kohler. I often pick up books on the suggestions of friends. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. With Mandino's classic motivational tale The Greatest Salesman in the World, even though I've read it twice, it's a mixed bag.

As a book, pure and simple, it's a quick read. I read it in one sitting yesterday evening before going to bed. It's a clear and clean story about a successful merchant more than 2,000 years ago -- and the lessons he learned that helped him become a success. The major themes are pretty basic Positive Mental Attitude stuff, with a Christian corollary (and Christmas tie-in!) thrown in for good measure. The main thing (though a minor thing) that rubs me the wrong way is the text's focus on business and sales as the vehicle for success. Readers should feel free to replace "salesman" with whatever they're striving to be the best of: father, husband, son, brother, worker, friend.

Mandino, who went on to author other similar books and become a sought-after motivational speaker, overcame a struggle with alcoholism by diving into some of the best PMA writers of the early 20th century: Napoleon Hill, W. Clement Stone, and Emmet Fox. In fact, this book so impressed Stone that he hired Mandino as editor of Success Unlimited magazine. Success Unlimited continues today in the form of Success magazine. You can learn more about Mandino's ideas thanks to Dave Blanchard's work.

Also of potential interest is the book's relationship to other business parables such as Animals Inc., Miller's Bolt, The Radical Edge, Sandbox Wisdom, and Who Moved My Cheese? I'm not the biggest fan of the subgenre, but if you're going to read one, go to the source.

Taking a Break

2008-11-01T10:41:00.000-07:00

It's been a month since my last post, and I've decided that I'm going to take a blogging hiatus of indeterminate length. Rather than blogging, I'll be focusing my energies in participating in several print-based micromedia, including zines, amateur press associations, mail art, and related projects. I might post occasionally, but in general, there will be other places you can find me. If you're really curious what those are, let me know, and I'll point you in the right direction.

Recent Arrivals

2008-09-30T19:27:00.001-07:00

It's been a good week-plus for zines and such. Here are some of the highlights:

Comicopia #108 (August 2008): The 18th anniversary issue of this international comics APA. ($6 133M) Savage Enterprises Publishing, 10 rue de la Valline, NDIP, Quebec, Canada J7V 9S5.

Musea #165 (August/September/October 2008): Writing on shared culture, the "art Olympics," and YouTube videos. (8S) Tom Hendricks, 4000 Hawthorne #5, Dallas, TX 75219.

Opuntia 66A (September 2008): Geology, pronghorns, and a literature scan. ($3 16S) Dale Speirs, Box 6830, Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2P 2E7.

Rap Sheet #138 (September 2008): The official newsletter of the Small Press Syndicate. ($3 52S) Dale Martin, P.O. Box 442612, Lawrence, KS 66044.

Worry Stone #1: The first issue of Jerianne's new zine about the concerns of adulthood. (28XS) P.O. Box 330156, Murfreesboro, TN 37133.

Zen Baby #19: Christopher Robin's freewheeling zine of correspondence, poetry, news, reviews, and collage art. ($2 56M) P.O. Box 1611, Santa Cruz, CA 95061-1611.

Zine World #26: Perhaps the zine review zine of today. I contribute an article on censorship in California and Russia, as well as assorted zine reviews. ($4 62M) P.O. Box 330156, Murfreesboro, TN 37133.

ZYX #48 (December 2008): Progressive poetry, reviews, and collage art, including poems by A. D. Winans. (10M) Arnold Skemer, 58-09 205th St., Bayside, NY 11364.

Vote for My ChangeThis Manifesto Proposal

2008-09-15T16:49:00.000-07:00

I submitted an idea for a ChangeThis manifesto, and it's currently one of the proposals you can vote for. Vote for my proposal, if you think it's a good idea, and help me get selected... I'd love to do this ebook and think it's a useful topic: How to best leverage the many business book summary services out there.

While you're there, check out the other proposals, as well. It's an interesting project -- and an interesting process!

You Don't Get There from Here #8

2008-09-15T16:32:00.000-07:00

Carrie McNinch, P.O. Box 49403, Los Angeles, CA 90049; Web; Email
($2 36XS)

Daily, three-panel diary comic strips. Sent as trade for a Bundle of Wonder. Excellent.

ZYX #48

2008-09-15T16:29:00.000-07:00

Arnold Skemer, 58-09 205th St., Bayside, NY 11364
(Free 10M)

Innovative poetry, and reviews of same. One of the best poetry zines I get.

Poet's Espresso: September 2008

2008-09-15T16:26:00.000-07:00

1426 Telegraph Ave. #4, Stockton, CA 95204; Web; Email
($1, 28S)

Poetry from multiple poets in at least two languages, as well as local events listings.

A View #135

2008-09-15T16:23:00.000-07:00

Michael Goetz, 1340 Brandywine Dr., Rockford, IL 61108
($1 16XS)

Simply drawn single-panel gag strips with an emphasis on puns.

Several Items from SSO Press

2008-09-06T19:07:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, I received a wonderful envelope from the folks who share P.O. Box 2645 in Olympia, Wash. Among the items included were:

Well, I Don't See Why Not CD-R: "A compilation of unsigned/barely signed Northwest artists" released in July 2008. Musical groups include Twig Palace, Yes Please, the Hail Seizures, Ariel Birks, Blindfolder, and other bands. 17 songs available via Bicycle Records.

Basic Paper Airplane #2 (August 2008): Cut-and-paste perzine by Joshua Amberson, SSO Press, P.O. Box 2645, Olympia, WA 98507. (Trade 20S)

Jesus Christ Super Zine #1: Hand- and typewritten perzine by Ariel Birks, SSO Press, P.O. Box 2645, Olympia, WA 98507 (Trade 40S)

These are begging to be read and listened to, and full reviews will follow in the near future.

Xerography Debt #24

2008-09-03T19:55:00.001-07:00

Davida Gypsy Breier, P.O. Box 11064, Baltimore, MD 21212
($2 16M)

The first issue of a new approach to Xerography Debt, this issue largely contains a lettercol-driven discussion of the intersection between zine culture and the Web. Breier and her team are moving the review aspect of XD to a new blog and will devote the pages of the print -- and PDF -- version to other matters. Contributors to the discussion include yours truly, James Dawson, Jeff Somers, Christopher Robin, and others. Somers also contributes items on post office etiquette, how to mail a zine "properly," and the longevity of online zine reviews. Sinasi Gunes's piece "Zines and Contemporary Art in Turkey" is a brief survey of zine culture in that country, and there are a couple of pages of calls for submissions. I might be most intrigued by the calls for submissions. Even if zine culture is being supplanted in some ways by the Web, there's still a place for the papernet, and this is a healthy expression of the Eternal Network. Oddly, this is the first issue of XD I've ever read, and I feel like I've been missing out -- but joined the party at an interesting point in time. To the future!

Sensing the Future

2008-08-29T07:18:00.000-07:00

The future tastes like ice-cold artesian well water, like copper, like blood on your tongue, like the tang of a nine-volt battery.

The future smells like ozone, like burning rubber, like plastic water bottles, like snow.

The future sounds like white noise, like train whistles in the distance, like doorbells, like the staticky space that shifts and sits between radio stations.

The future looks like daybreak, like sunset, like early-afternoon sunlight, like cellophane, like lightbulbs.

The future feels like polyester, like velour, like Tupperware, like bubblewrap and packing foam, like cold steel.

Opuntia #65.5

2008-08-26T17:58:00.000-07:00

Dale Spiers, Box 6830, Calgary, AB, Canada T2P 2E7
($3 16S)

This edition of Opuntia is a perzine and contains correspondence from and with readers (Spiers responds within brackets in the text of the letters), an item on this year's World Wide Party -- I've not heard of this previously and will suitably recognize the next June 21! -- and offers journal entries covering roughly four months. This is the way I'll learn more about Spiers, for sure.

Wakeup Call

2008-08-25T18:11:00.000-07:00

A review I wrote of Kevin Prufer's poetry collection, National Anthem, was published in the July-August 2008 edition of Small Press Review. Here's the review draft I sent editor Len Fulton:

National Anthem
By Kevin Prufer
2008; 82pp; Pa; Four Way Books, P.O. Box 535, Village Station, New
York, NY 10014. $15.95

"There is nothing so lonely as an empire detached from its people," writes Prufer in his poem "What We Did with the Empire." If anything, that line could well serve as the thesis statement for this collection of more than 40 poems by the English professor at the University of Central Missouri and editor of Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing. In two sections, the slim book collects poems that consider the failings and foibles of politics and government, urban life and consumerism -- belated wakeup calls for citizens of a police state that's constantly at war with other nations (and itself). The tenor and tone is largely one of careful but unavoidable and perhaps understandable neutrality and distance -- reminding me slightly of the prose of Ben Marcus and the comic books of Peter Milligan -- and Prufer's imagery is strong but subtle: birds and boats, coins and coffins, snow and soot. This is a poetry of decay and decline, and there's little hope in the book outside of the occasional lines like, "and the office towers bending down to us as if they'd cup us in their hands and warm us, / as if they'd lift us from the streets before we froze." ("We Wanted to Find America") Too little, too late, for now, and for that, I am thankful.

If you'd like me to consider any small-press poetry or prose books for review in SPR, please email me.

Products I Love XXVI

2008-08-15T12:40:00.000-07:00

One tool I can't live without is a real lifesaver, and it serves a dual purpose. Keynamics makes a nifty little device that's super simple -- and super useful.

The Aviator Laptop Stand is intended to be used on planes, so you can rest your laptop on a seat tray and not have to hunch forward to work. But I've found it to be the best laptop stand for everyday desk use bar none.

It keeps your laptop off the surface of your desk, which increases airflow around the computer and aids in cooling. It also tilts the laptop forward gently for a more ergonomic approach to the keyboard.

And at $20, it's super inexpensive. Just three pieces of plastic you can snap together. I've used other laptop stands -- metal, padded, all much more expensive -- and this one's the best.

My First Poetry Reading

2008-08-05T12:45:00.001-07:00

I read several of my poems at a Google talent show in New York several months ago. They video taped it. Here's what it was like:

Brooklyn! #61

2008-08-04T18:08:00.000-07:00

Fred Argoff, Penthouse L, 1170 Ocean Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11230
($3 24S)

Another theme issue of this long-running Brooklyn-based zine, this edition focuses on industrial neighborhoods. Areas explored and depicted include Industry City, the Gowanus Canal, the English Kills, and Greenpoint.

Bundles of Wonder

2008-07-29T17:53:00.001-07:00

I send packets of zines, minicomics, fliers, and ephemera to people in the zine scene -- the Eternal Network. If you'd like to be included, send no more than 25 copies of your zine, minicomic, flier, CD, or other item to me.

Unlike some of my projects, this isn't about documentation, but distribution. I just send stuff out; I don't keep records of what, much less to whom.

To receive my address in order to send material for inclusion, email me, and I'll smuggle you the essentials. If you'd like to receive a Bundle of Wonder, do the same, and when you get the address, send $5 for priority -- not random -- handling.

If you receive a packet (randomly or otherwise), I hope you enjoy it.

The White Buffalo Gazette #Ferry Across the Ocean of Existence

2008-07-24T19:03:00.002-07:00

Mike Hill, 387 Jayson Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15228
($3 28S)

Thanks to John Porcellino, I learn about the most recent incarnation of the obscuro comix zine. Editor Mike Hill has collected work by Chad Woody, Steve Willis, Matt Feazell, Maximum Traffic, Clark Dissmeyer, Jim Siergey, Jeff Zenick, and Ed Bolman. This is a need to get for small-press comics readers. Send Mike your money!

A View #134

2008-07-24T18:47:00.001-07:00

Michael Goetz, 1340 Brandywine Dr., Rockford, IL 61108
($1 16XS)

This is Michael's more adult comic. This edition includes single panels on breast feeding, condoms, stand-up comedy, Disney, ice cream, sex, religion, drinking, politics, and other topics. Simply drawn, and funny.

Moving Money

2008-07-24T17:30:00.000-07:00

I know Where's George is sooo 1998, but 10 years later, it's captured my imagination like nobody's business.

The idea is simple: Each dollar bill has a unique identifier on it, and were you to enter them into a database, and track instances of a dollar bill's possession, you could monitor its travel throughout the world.

For the last few weeks, I've been religiously stamping my dollars -- $1 bills only; it's George for a reason, Media Dieticians -- with a stamp purchased from Holmes Stamp & Sign and releasing them back into the wild.

All my dollars have been virgins -- no previous entries, these -- but my sense of money and how money moves has been heightened.

Where does your money go? It's not that difficult to tell.

Awesome Career Development Fire Sale

2008-07-22T10:29:00.002-07:00

This is an unbelievable offer and opportunity that I just have to share.

After 16 years in Chapel Hill, Jeff Davidson of the Breathing Space Institute is moving to Raleigh, and until the end of the month, he's offering an incredible package deal -- all in the name of cleaning out stuff he doesn't want to ~~mail~~deal with. Check it out:

$78 worth of Books

The Complete Guide to Public Speaking (Wiley, 324 pages) $16.95
Marketing Yourself and Your Career (Adams Media, 238 pages) $12.95
Complete Idiot's Guide to Getting Things Done (Alpha/Penguin, 324 pages) $18.95
Complete Idiot's Guide to Managing Stress (Alpha/Pearson, 372 pages, $18.95)
The 60-Second Procrastinator (Adams Media, 142 pages) $9.95

$198 worth of CDs and Audio Books

The 60-Second Procrastinator (Oasis Audio, 140 minutes) $19.95
Surviving Information Overload (NIBM, 72 minutes) $14.95
Relaxing at High Speed (ACHE, 32 minutes) $9.95
Blow Your Own Horn (Simon & Schuster, 60 minutes) $10.95
Time, Stress, Simplicity (Skillpath PersonalQuest, 300 minutes) $59.95
Getting Articles Published (PR Leads, 57 minutes) $19.95
Selling Your Book's 'Sub Rights' (PR Leads, 59 minutes) $19.95
Foreign Rights Sales (PR Leads, 60 minutes) $19.95
Creating a Brilliant Book Outline (BSI, 53 minutes, $15.95)
Giving Better Presentations (Dreamcoach, 55 minutes, $16.95)

Plus CD and Article Bonuses

To order, go to this special Web site and enter the description "career advancement" and the amount... $99.

These items are from major publishers -- at list price -- so it's quite a package deal. I don't often post stuff like this, but holy cow.

From the Reading Pile XXXV

2008-07-16T20:21:00.000-07:00

Some reviews submitted recently to Zine World:

Blurt! #5: Lew's all over the place in this well-designed, verbose perzine. Past and present. Memory and diary. New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Texas. He shares stories about his childhood, school-age friendships, discovering punk rock, the dangers of tribute bands, student journalism, relationships on the wax and wane, making zines, couch surfing, being in a band, and other aspects of the punk-rock life. There's not a lot that's new here, but Lew's got a friendly perspective, and his use of adverbs without the "ly" at the end can be fun. The "Livin' on an Island" section makes me want to check out City Island in New York. A great zine for waiting rooms and bus stations. Lew Houston, 135 Wapwallopen Road, Nescopeck, PA 18535, email [$2 108XS 1:21]

Dwelling Portably (May 2008): Regardless of your living situation -- rural or urban -- reading this zine will inspire you to go back to the land -- and will give you the tools and ideas you need to do so inexpensively. Material in this issue covers Chinese-style wheelbarrows, peak forces on backpacks, grain storage, infected food and clean water, vehicle repair, and temporary housing. Wonderfully homespun, Dwelling Portably mixes personal experience and reader contributions. A must read. P.O. Box 190-D, Philomath, OR 97370 [ $1 16S :19]

Farming Uncle #109 (Spring 2008): Editor Louis Toro started an experimental "farmette" and homestead in Greenfield Park, NY, 41 years ago. His zine is a hodgepodge of agricultural clip art, personal and pen pal ads, get-rich-quick working from home schemes, all-caps moralizing, rural living how tos, nonviolent politics, and Native American activism. It's a cluttered cabinet, but it's fascinating -- and makes for an interesting parallel read to Dwelling Portably. My new favorite zine. Louis Toro, Box 427, Bronx, NY 10458 [$3 24S :23]

Local Comics #55: It's been awhile since I've seen one of Michael's comics, and it's great to see he's still stirring the pot. Over the years, his artwork, though simple, has gotten a little tighter. But his sense of humor -- boner jokes, visual gags, puns -- hasn't changed much at all. His use of partial puns, in which he puns off of a syllable or a part of a word versus the entire term, has increased somewhat. That just goes to show that you can find amusement anywhere -- and that puns might be finite. Basic, clever, funny. Michael Goetz, 1340 Brandywine Dr., Rockford, IL 61108 [Two stamps/trade 16XS :02]

Musea #160 (January-February 2008): If this issue is any indication, Tom Hendricks publishes a Christmas-themed short story at the end of the year. Even though the holiday story might be better read at holiday time -- it's July as I write this -- I did enjoy the piece. It's a story about injury, memory, music, and love -- and while it's somewhat predictable, it's gentle and caring. The issue even includes photographs and sheet music to add to the experience. Happy belated holidays, Tom! Tom Hendricks, 4000 Hawthorne #5, Dallas, TX 75219, email, Web [Free 13S :06]

Opuntia #64A-64B (October-November 2007): Given that these issues of Dale Speirs's zines have a whole number, they contain what's termed "sercon," or serious and constructive criticism. Other issues might be reviewzines, APAs, or perzines. These two editions, then, contain an actively footnoted two-part essay on the origin of life, in which Speirs addresses the various theories behind the origin of life and provides a good starter survey of the literature. Speirs also addresses his other interests, including science fiction, postal history, geoscience, and other topics. The Seen in the Literature items are useful synopses of scholarly articles. Worth checking out. Dale Speirs, Box 6830, Calgary, AB Canada T2P 2E7 [$3 16S :23]

The Out Orb Tribute to Carl Sagan: Combining his interests in the work of Carl Sagan, the TV Show Space: 1999, and Esperanto, long-time comics maker Tolbert created this mini sharing a story about Sagan going to Moonbase Alpha to oversee the construction of SETI antennas. I don't always "get" Yul's comics, but I sure am consistently impressed. His controlled use of hash-mark shading is interesting, and his stylized characters, while somewhat stiff, do resonate. Worth it for the drawings of spacecraft, the moonbase, and antennas alone. The Princess Di joke at the end is a pleasant touch. Yul Tolbert, P.O. Box 02222, Detroit, MI 48202, email, Web [Free 16XS :03]

Popular Reality Special Report Vol. 786 #2: Fans of old-school mail art and zinemakers such as Bob Black and Al Ackerman will get a kick out of this intriguing read. Along with cover model Mykel Board, readers are offered pieces on the military and mind control, a faux brochure on human-gorilla in-vitro fertilization, suicide, child abuse, and Cher. Equal parts parody and polittical commentary, it's not always easy to identify what's a joke and what's art. Highlights include the Christopher Robin poem, Suzy Crowbar's textual poaching, and the detourned Yuran Ass comic on the last page. Confusing and fascinating -- a wonderful combination. Poe-Pular Reality, P.O. Box 66426, Albany, NY 12206 [$3 24S :15]

Publick Occurrances #10: This excellently handmade comic -- a limited edition of 500 with what appear to be woodcut covers -- collects drawings done of students from the class of 1925 at the Manual Training High School in Peoria, Ill. Artist Danny Martin's ink work may itself be inspired by woodcuts and lends a sinister air to his recreations of the student portraits. About 50 students and faculty members are featured in this edition. Danny Martin, 746 E. 5th St. #23, Tucson, AZ 85719 [$2 or trade 20XS :01]

Show Me the Money! #26 (Fall, Winter, Spring 2007-2008): Even though I'd like to see more citations and footnotes for a lot of the facts, I was quite impressed by this well-researched zine. Hunnicutt strives to show the realities of our economic and political system and leans pretty far to the left while doing so. Highlights of this edition include his contention that America isn't a democracy but a kleptocratic plutocracy (the Anti-Renter movement of the 19th century bears further research), the comparison of 1929 and 2008, a look at friendly societies and other mutual aid groupss (this might be the best article in the issue), and the two poems near the back. The zine could use more variation in its content (kinds of articles) and design but offers tons of food for thought -- if not tools for activism. Tony Hunnicutt, P.O. Box 48161, Minneapolis, MN 55448 [Free 44S :31]

Tenacious: Art and Writings from Women in Prison #13 (Fall 2007): This zine collects writing and artwork by women in prison, so there are some common threads running throughout the stories. Pieces touch on gender relations between prisoners and guards, health concerns with HIV and Hepatitis C, separation from loved ones, illogical elements of the legal and prison systems, the will to improve one's life or situation in and out of prison, and children. Rachel Vickers's "Ode to Sole Mates" might be the most creative item, told from the perspective of a pair of tennis shoes. A mixed bag, but promising for people interested in women's and prison issues. V. Law, Black Star Publishing, P.O. Box 20388, New York, NY 10009, email [$2 32S :12]

Urban Spook #1: Originally issued in 2006, this is a self-published comic book that's accompanied by a CD featuring six tracks of music and narration, also by Monk. Titled "The Cash-for-Pussy Primer," the piece -- best read while listening to the CD -- details the experiences of a gourmet cheese seller who goes to Span to see an old female friend. The two solicit a prostitute, which leads to some introspection. The artwork is somewhat rough and hurried, but the overall combination more than makes up for the limitations of any of the individual parts. An excellent DIY multimedia project. If you're aware of others like this, please write the reviewer c/o Zine World. Augusto Monk, 305A Brockley Road, London, England SE4 2QZ, email, Web [$10 12S+CD :17]

Worn Fashion Journal #4: Not quite Harper's Bazaar with its portrayal of impractical spectacular runway fashion and not quite Readymade with its DIY thriftiness, Worn is a relatively new semiannual magazine that blends the inventiveness of punk rock and the aesthetics of high fashion. The zine itself is well designed and published on a heavier stock of paper to better present its full-color contents. Highlights include an appreciation of The Image Makers: Sixty Years of Hollywood Glamour, and introduction to log cabin quilt making, Sonya Topolnisky's article on simultaneous color,a piece on the aesthetics of psychobilly, a reminiscence by an auction house intern, and an outline of the chemistry behind dry cleaning. This isn't a world I'm familiar with, but I appreciate the entry point. Well done. Serah-Marie McMahon, 4903 De Grand Pre, Montreal, QC H2T 2H9 Canada, email, Web [$7.50 48M :17]

Secrets of the Subway Society

2008-07-15T15:08:00.001-07:00

I've prepared a tri-fold pamphlet exposing some of the secrets of the Subway Masons, an elite group of underground hitchhikers who have penetrated almost every level of politics and society. If you'd like a copy of this pamphlet, let me know. I'll tell you the address to which you can send a first-class stamp or a SASE; upon receipt of either, I'll mail you the pamphlet.

People interested in helping distribute the pamphlet should contact me, as well. I'll email you a Word document you can print, photocopy, and distribute yourself.

Get Your Dance On

2008-07-09T08:11:00.001-07:00

This video makes me happy -- and love human beings. We are pretty amazing creatures. Silly, but wonderful.

Global Labels

2008-06-26T08:26:00.000-07:00

I've been curious lately about the origins of the products and items I use every day. For example, the clothing I wear. I don't know whether I'll keep track every day, but this morning, I did a quick global inventory of the clothes I'm wearing. And the results were intriguing:

Boxers -- made in Cambodia using fabric from China (Fruit of the Loom)
T-shirt -- made in Haiti (Hanes)
Khakis -- made in Jordan (Gap)
Shirt -- made in China (Uniqlo)
Jacket -- made in the United States (Hart, Schaffner & Marx)
Shoes -- made in China (Vans)

Where are the clothes you wear from? It's an interesting question.

Loping Toward a Psychogeography

2008-06-18T20:22:00.001-07:00

I've never been to Manchester, but were I there this weekend, I'd check out the Manchester Mental Mapping Workshop run by Davide Fasic of the Nottingham Psychogeographical Unit. It's part of the Territories Reimagined: International Perspectives festival, and it takes place from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., Saturday, June 21, at Urbis, Cathedral Gardens, Manchester M4 3BG.

Come and draw your mental map of Manchester. Maybe you won't remember where things are, but know how to get there. You've got a mental picture of the place, your personal map of the city. Nothing compared to the O&S: no grids, no proportions, no miles to the inch. Mental maps are a fluid collection of areas, paths and landmarks; gaps and blurs abound. Buildings and streets are shrouded in emotions, the city changes according to the observer and the sum of all observations is its aura.

Shades of Will Self's recent book, the event also reminded me of a project I learned about at NYU ITP's spring show: World Mappings.

What do the places you love and remember look like inside your head? When I dream of the town in which I was born, sometimes there are entire neighborhoods that don't actually exist.

Andy Warhol's Time Capsules

2008-06-10T11:55:00.001-07:00

The staff of the Andy Warhol Museum is currently in the process of opening and cataloguing each of Warhol's more than 600 time capsules. I wasn't aware that Warhol kept time capsules, but it appears that it was a standard practice of his.

"Now I just drop everything into the same-size brown cardboard boxes that have a color patch on the side for the month of the year. I really hate nostalgia, though, so deep down I hope they all get lost and I never have to look at them again." -- The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

This is a short list of some of the items they've found recently:

121 torn pieces of US 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, and 100 dollar bill edges
Fan letter and nude photograph of Lance Loud, age 16ish
Gift box sent to Warhol from a fan containing a doll and several handmade doll outfits
Note of well wishes from Allen Ginsberg on a list of chanting mantras from the New School
Necklace of Gumby figures crafted by Billy Boy
A collection of stationery, menus, napkins, and brochures stolen from hotels around the world
Photographic negatives of Campbell's soup cans and Coke bottles used as source material for artworks
A selection from several hundred get well cards sent to Warhol following the 1968 shooting
A postcard from Valerie Solanas criticizing Warhol for misspelling her name
Two doggie sweaters for Andy's dachshunds, Amos and Archie
A bag containing approximately 20 spools of wig tape
One of Warhol's silver and black wigs
Invoices from Stephen Sprouse's clothing store totaling $70,000.00
A selection of kinky newspapers and magazines

And here's a sample capsule.

Grassroots Use of Technology

2008-06-10T11:50:00.000-07:00

This looks like an interesting conference:

When: Saturday, June 28th - All Day (8:30am to 6pm)
Where: University of Massachusetts Lowell - Wannalancit Building, 600 Suffolk Street, Lowell, MA

Highlights of the day:

* Keynote Speaker, Nick Jehlen of Action Mil draw lessons from his recent work on the Winter Soldier campaign organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War.
* Non-profit Internet Starter Kit: Take Your Website to the Next Level with These Free Online Tools
* Online Mentoring: Innovative Uses of Technology in Creating and Managing Mentor-Mentee Relationships
* You Can't Get What You Want Until You Know What You Need: Choosing the Right Software
* Making the Most Out of the Organizers' Database
* The Untapped Power of Social Networks for Grassroots Action
* Getting the Clicks: e-Campaigning in Communities with Few Computers
* Managing Your Website with Today's Tools
* Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Roadmap
* HAVA Great Idea? (HAVA stands for Help America Vote Act)
* Facebook to Phone Trees: Multi-Generational Outreach Strategies
* Organizing the Organic Internet
* Helping Your Computer System Grow Up
* Keeping it Simple: technology tools that won't make you want to rip your hair out.
* Collaborative eLearning
* The Point: A Web-Tool for Collective Action
* Managing & Recruiting Tech volunteers
* Strategies for shaping the media/tech future: Policy, funding & organizing
* Open Media Boston: Building a News Portal with Drupal

Lowell is a beautiful, historic city that still remembers its working-class roots The intersection of rivers and canals make it a wonderful place to be on an early summer day. So join us for some engaging connections and some rock-solid knowledge sharing.

If any Media Dieticians go, consider submitting a report! (Or blogging it yourself.)

Two Music Stores in Wisconsin

2008-05-31T19:21:00.000-07:00

Reeds in My Saxophone Case

2008-05-31T18:58:00.000-07:00

While in California recently, I bought a new box of alto saxophone reeds because I wanted new reeds to play my sax. So this afternoon, I cleaned out my saxophone case. I kept all of the reeds still in boxes but threw away used and loose reeds in order to make sure I wasn't reusing old reeds. It's been awhile since I've played my sax. Here are the reeds that were in my case:

La Voz Med.
La Voz M Hard
La Voz M Soft
Marca 3
Marca 3 1/2
Olivieri 3
Rico Royal 3
Rico Royal 5
Roy J. Maier 3
Vandoren 3

If you play a reed instrument, what kind of reeds do you use?

Products I Love XXV

2008-05-30T09:53:00.000-07:00

At work, I just got a FreeAgent Go external hard drive from Seagate. It's the sexiest hard drive I've ever seen. Cost effective at $85 for 160GB -- it goes up to 250GB for $130 -- the drive is a sumptious chocolate brown and about as big as a wallet.

Memory is cheap. And it'll get cheaper.

On Europa

2008-05-05T00:46:00.000-07:00

Last night, I went to a punk-rock show at Europa, a venue in Greenpoint that walks the line between European dance club and music club. The catalyst was a Rocks Off show featuring the Bouncing Souls. I hadn't gone to a punk show for awhile, and I hadn't gone to Europa, so this was the trigger I needed to step out.

Only thing was, I bought the ticket months ago. And when the show rolled around, it wasn't that convenient -- I was leaving the next day for a trip -- and while I bought only one ticket thinking C. wouldn't be into it, I would've preferred going with friends. So I lingered until I realized that one of the opening acts, Tim Barry, was the Tim Barry who fronted Avail.

So I hauled my sorry arse out of my productivity-ridden, rainy-day apartment and into the streets to catch the set by Barry, as well as the tail end of the set by Gaslight Anthem. I bought the new Gaslight Anthem 7-inch, as well as Barry's LP, and I was pleased to see a booth for Microcosm Publishing, from which I bought several zines.

Truth be told, I left soon after the Bouncing Souls started, but I'm sure they played a solid show. Barry makes me miss Joe Kendrick, so hello, man. Not sure I need Jersey core, but that Tim Barry's all right.

On the Physics of the Impossible

2008-05-05T00:30:00.000-07:00

Friday night, C. and I took in a talk by the theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. It was held at the Community Church of New York under the auspices of the Open Center, and it was basically a book signing you paid to go to. Tickets cost $20. The book cost extra.

Kaku, cofounder of string field theory, has a new book out that looks at the scientific underpinnings of concepts like invisibility, teleportation, ray guns, telepathy and mind reading, starships, robots, and time travel.

The talk was heavy on the jokes and use of video -- Kaku hosted a BBC TV show scheduled to hit the states next year -- and light on the science, but there were still some interesting bits. Not only did Kaku hold up some solid examples stemming from actual scientific research, but he walked through various levels of impossibility and types of civilizations that might or might not be more or less likely to embrace potential possibiities.

Part of me wants to think that Kaku has moved from representing a pop scientist to being a new age geek, which possesses a different degree of credulity. But another part of me wants to see the talks behind the talk to better understand the science behind the speculation.

This is popsci, not scifi, and that's an important difference.

On People Movers

2008-05-05T00:23:00.001-07:00

I flew into SFO today. Tom and I rode the people mover to the rental car center after I claimed my suitcase.

Watch this while listening to the song by Servotron. It'll be a kick!

(If the video's not ready now, it will be soon.)

On Beatiful Losers

2008-05-04T23:53:00.000-07:00

Last week, thanks to the generosity of Shane Gill and Pitch Control PR, C. and I took in a screening of Beautiful Losers, a wonderful doc about the art scene surrounding the Alleged Gallery in New York.

No, that's not it. Beautiful Losers is a film about a group of artists, some of whom had some connection with Alleged, a gallery I never had the pleasure of visiting, but which was quite important, even inspiring a book. No, that's not quite right, the movie is about a group of artists who participated in a traveling exhibition show (with accompanying catalog) that captured the ideas and ideals of a small part of a generation.

No, that's wrong, too. Beautiful Losers is a film about art. Period. Yes, it's about skateboarding (Ed Templeton) and stencils (Shepard Fairey), love (Mike McGee) and loss (Margaret Kilgallen), New York (Stephen Powers) and LA (where much of the art found its largest audience). It's about record covers and suburbia, friendship and community, self-exploration and -discovery.

Some parts work better than others. Overall, the movie is an excellent documentation of a specific time in art, blending past and present well. At times, the film feels long, and some parts -- such as those including Harmony Korine -- feel somewhat out of place. But if you're into the kind of art featured in Giant Robot and Juxtapoz magazines -- and even if you're not -- it's a must see.

The movie makes me want to carry a Sharpie at all times. That's not a bad thing.

List of Three Men

2008-05-03T12:32:00.000-07:00

Mass Giorgini
Kevin Army
Bill Stephenson

Wait for Trains

2008-05-03T12:11:00.000-07:00

Shay used to wait for trains. Or rather, trains would wait for Shay.

It took him a year to realize it, but Shay never arrived at the Irving Park Road train station and stood waiting for a train to arrive.

No. He would either arrive at a station just as a train was arriving, or -- if he had perhaps arrived at the Ravenswood station just before a train arrived, which was rare -- the train would approach him, aligning itself so its doors lined up exactly with the frame of his body, doors sliding apart as though to apologize for the delay and to caress him until he have in to its ministrations. "It's OK. I'm still your train. Step inside. Come on. What are you waiting for?"

Needless to say, Shay didn't notice this. To him, he merely arrived just as trains arrived, making his way through the turnstiles and through the arriving commuters just before the doors closed. The proceedings had no sense of fortune, no sense of mystery.

Party Line Service

2008-04-30T12:12:00.001-07:00

Last night, I went to Nokia's flagship store in Manhattan for the Webby Awards' People's Voice voting party. I've enjoyed being -- and been honored to be -- a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences for many years, but to be totally honest, my attraction last night was this: Everyone who went to the party was given a free N95.

And it's amazing. I've never paid money for a mobile phone, always accepting the free starter phones they give you with your plan. That means I've been stuck with a no-frills LG and a metered data plan that hampers use of the mobile Web, much less SMS. Word is that the N95 I was gifted is prepaid through June 15 -- whether it's unlimited until then or if it's a set payment I can burn through before then, I don't know. At that time, I'll consider changing service providers in order to continue using this mobile.

So far, I've installed the Gmail and Google Maps apps (love the GPS even though it's accurate to 1,700 meters or something), and I've started looking for solid news and weather sites and apps to use frequently. I can access my work email and calendar via the phone, which is way handy, and I'm even impressed by one of the demo games; the graphics of the car racing game are quite impressive.

I've yet to fully explore the camera and video camera capabilities, but Robert Scoble and Steve Garfield seem to have embraced the N95, using services such as Qik to stream video live from the phone. I'll have to check that out, next.

But I'm really writing this post to turn to you, Media Dieticians. If you use the N95, what tips and tricks do I need to know about? How do you use it? What apps and services do you think I should check out?

I really like this new phone. Thank you, thank you, DMD and the IADAS!

To learn more about the history of party lines, which have little if anything to do with this blog post, read the Wikipedia entry, as well as this telephone history from Privateline. Not to be confused with for-pay party lines.

On Self-Reliance and the Wisdom of Crowds

2008-04-28T18:09:00.000-07:00

Tonight was the first session of a three-part course on the transcendental writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson that I signed up for at the New York Open Center. Each session is a facilitated discussion of a specific essay by Emerson, and tonight centered on the old saw "Self-Reliance."

Led by Barbara Solowey, who also lectures at the School of Practical Philosophy and teaches English at the Beacon School, tonight's session was basically a paragraph-by-paragraph guided reading of the essay, in which we sussed out key points and themes, and discussed how we might apply them to our lives.

One of the things that struck me was Emerson's concerns about society -- and group thinking. "Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater," he wrote. "The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs."

Later in the essay, Emerson criticized the use of group affiliations as shorthand for understanding (or presuming to understand) what somebody thought, stood for, or believed in. "If I know your sect I anticipate your argument," he says. "Most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of those communities of opinion."

What does that mean in these days of smart mobs and wise crowds?

Collective intelligence might be greater than the sum of its parts, but the real wisdom of crowds still relies on self-reliant actors participating in those crowds, I'd offer. And even though the less wise might just need to open their receptivity to cosmic consciousness -- or the noosphere -- how open are we to universal truths? "We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity," Emerson wrote.

Would he be a fan of smart mobs? I think not. Even in systems designed to work around actors who aren't self-reliant -- take our voting system, which is in part based on the concept that polls cast by educated voters will mitigate polls cast by uneducated voters (and I mean educated on issues and what's being voted on, not education in the most general sense) -- such group thinking can be flawed. William Poundstone's Gaming the Vote might be a good entry point to further exploration of this.

That said, these are also days in which prediction markets are all the rage.

Does the success of smart mobs, wise crowds, and prediction markets depend on self-reliant actors?

Reviewing the Neo-Beat Novel

2008-04-28T17:48:00.000-07:00

A review I wrote of Ray Reece's novel, Abigail in Gangland, was published in the March-April 2008 edition of Small Press Review. It's my first publication in one of my favorite long-running small press magazines, and it's an honor to share a page with Richard Kostelanetz, whom I respect mightily. Here's the review draft I sent editor Len Fulton:

Abigail in Gangland
By Ray Reece
2008; 374pp; Pa; La Ventana Budapest in collaboration with Synergy
Books, P.O. Box 80107, Austin, TX 78758. $12.95.

Published in Hungary in 2005 as Szórakozz a nénikéddel!, this is the first English printing of the third novel by Ray Reece, currently a columnist for The Budapest Sun. Packaged as "neo-beat" street lit, the novel features a down-at-his-heels artist who moves from New York City to a gang-ridden neighborhood in an urban area similar to the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex in order to care for his elderly and violently racist aunt -- and have a shot at her inheritance. Facing challenges such as warring youth gangs, adult diapers, and his misadventures in the personal ads, the protagonist rediscovers the value of family, his art, and true love. The ending leaves some plot threads loose, but while I didn't find the street lit and neo-beat positioning persuasive -- the book's like neither Eldorado Red nor On the Road -- the book's an engaging read that's extremely well written and surprisingly satisfying.

The review is one of what I hope will be many that I contribute to SPR, and the book is worth checking out. If you'd like me to consider any small-press poetry or prose books for review in SPR, please email me.

What If Ads Were Content? Redux

2008-04-28T17:39:00.000-07:00

This past weekend, I participated in the second Podcamp NYC, a lively unconference focusing on podcasts and other new, social media. As a followup to last year, I gave a talk reconsidering the idea of social advertising and content-driven advertising -- what Rick Bruner calls Advertising 2.0.

Saturday was exactly 377 days after my last talk on that topic, and a lot has happened in terms of widget advertising, social media, and other experiments involving social ads. Here's the presentation:

| View | Upload your own

Let me know what you think!

South by Podcast II

2008-04-22T17:48:00.000-07:00

The recording of the panel discussion I moderated at SXSW Interactive this year, Online Advertising for Newbies, is now available online. Special thanks to everyone involved: Darren Rowse, Rett Clevenger, Wendy Piersall, and Jim Benton. It was a lively conversation!

Post-Huffington

2008-04-22T17:41:00.002-07:00

Multimedia message
Originally uploaded by h3athrow

This evening -- early, at 5:30 -- I went to my first 212 event, a free talk by Arianna Huffington moderated by Kate Kaye, senior editor of ClickZ.

Because I went more for the content than the community, I didn't network much at all, pretty much making a bee line for a good seat in order to hear what Huffington had to say. In many ways, the talk was one of a single tension -- Kaye wanted (and the audience wanted) Huffington to talk about the impact of online marketing and advertising on the political campaign process, while Huffington seemed to want to stick to politics and campaigning in general. That might be appropriate on the eve of the Pennsylvania primary, but exit polls (read: the conversation during the elevator ride down afterward) indicate that people wanted more on-topic discussion.

Regardless, Huffington had some interesting stuff to say. She criticized Clinton's use of terrorism and fear as a campaign tool, questioned the practice of hiring campaign managers who've lost previous campaigns, claimed that this year's election cycle marks the "first real Internet campaign," suggested that primary campaigns should be run more mindfully that someone from the party will be running -- indicating that primary campaigns shouldn't give the main election's opposition party tools to use against the party's representative -- and proposed that the print vs. Web debate is yesterday's news.

That led to what might be the soundbite of the evening: "The question of print vs. online seems to me to be an obsolete debate. It's like the old barroom argument: Ginger or Mary Ann? It's 2008; let's have a three way."

In fact, that's my primary criticism of the evening's gambit. Online campaigning -- online marketing -- isn't that interesting when considered outside the context of the overall campaign or marketing strategy. This campaign isn't about online advertising. It's about reaching voters in the right way at the right time in the right place. Multiple media can accomplish that goal.

The Democratic candidates seem to understand that, with Obama focusing on the youth vote and using inclusive language online -- just as the Republicans and far right have taken to the air waves with talk radio. Maybe the next election cycle will be the first integrated campaign.

I've not read a lot of Huffington's writing, but on the basis of tonight, I might have to check out her forthcoming book, Right Is Wrong. Like she said, society (and culture and media) doesn't have to accept the framework of the right.

Just like we don't have to look at things in terms of online vs. offline.

The Grand Kinoki Foot Pad Experiment of 2008

2008-04-19T13:41:00.002-07:00

IMG_4673.JPG
Originally uploaded by h3athrow

Not long ago, I bought some Kinoki foot pads on a whim because of an infomercial I saw on television.

They're supposed to be a detox tool, and despite some speculation that they're a scam -- including a segment on 20/20 -- we decided to buy some. We considered the $20 fun money.

Long story short, they didn't seem to do anything. Over the course of a couple of weeks, I wore one pad on the bottom of a foot while I slept. In the morning, the pad was dark, supposedly because impurities had been removed from my system. They're supposed to lighten over time -- as you become more pure -- but I could detect no change in their coloration. And I felt no physical change at all over the course of the two weeks.

There are better ways to detox your body. Kinoki pads are just a fun novelty.

You can see the whole photo set, as well.

Administrivia: Shedding My Skin

2008-04-19T08:51:00.006-07:00

Since I started blogging in 2001, I've used the same default Blogger template. I've decided that it's high time I freshen things up a bit, simplify the layout, and chill out on how many links, widgets, and other add ons I include in the design. So welcome to the cleaner new look of Media Diet! (Changing the template also tidies up how comments and archives are displayed and accessed, but that wasn't the real reason I changed up. Really!)

I'm also changing where I publish Media Diet, stepping away from the fine, fine services of Jon Ferguson and Henry Holtzman. I've redirected the mediadiet.net domain name to the new Blogspot location. Joker willing, there will be little to no discontinuity. If there is, I'll figure it out.

Let me know what you think: likes, dislikes. And I'll try to work some of the additional links and resources back in as time goes on. But I'll try not to go crazy like I think I did before.

Update: The URL redirect seems to work OK, although you won't see mediadiet.net in the URL field now, it seems. Let me know if any old links break somehow, and we'll see what we can do. I also decided to turn on moderation for comments. I don't get a ton, but I'm tired of people pimping their diet sites in the comment field.

Momentarily Delayed

2008-04-13T18:29:00.005-07:00

The following poem of mine was recently published in the spring 2008 edition of Beatlick News. The fourth line is indented some, but I don't know how to do that in HTML yet.

Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Not I, said the girl with the mad-banged hair
as she stooped to retrieve
one half of the book
from the floor of the subway car.
The spine had cracked, the cover torn
and pages sat on the gum-marked tile
like a first-night deb
refusing to speak
a word of Ed Albee's lines

Haiku in Transit

2008-04-07T22:29:00.001-07:00

Rainy Friday morn
The airport could be madder
Grey dilution, peace

Media for Action

2008-04-01T13:48:00.001-07:00

Clay Shirky recently wrote a book called Here Comes Everybody. It's good.

I just finished a book called Here Comes Everybody. The thesis of the book is that group action just got a lot easier. We're living through the biggest expansion in expressive capability in history. The first was the printing press and moveable type. The second was the telephone and telegraph. The third was recordable media. And fourth, the rise of broadcast. There's a curious symmetry in those expansions. The ones that created large groups didn't create two-way communication. And the one that created two-way communication didn't create large groups. This one does both.

The first new communication pattern put into place by the Internet is many to many. What have we done with that? LOLCats and Facebook profiles. But then there's freedom. I'm going to tell three stories I've seen unfold that I think show that the tools don't set the conditions for use. The tools can be used for silly frothy things as well as serious things.

In 2006, HSBC, the bank, recruited a bunch of college students and said we're not going to charge you if you have an overdraft. Then they changed their mind and said we're going to charge you a few hundred dollars. We'll give you 30 days to change your bank accounts. They knew they had the advantage over those college students. Switching costs are high. And they had the advantage of coordination because if the students had all been on campus, there could have been some insurrection. But they were all hiking or on summer break. But they didn't count on Facebook. A guy started a group on Facebook. People posted really detailed notes on how to change bank accounts. HSBC lost the informational advantage. Then the online protests began. Then the real protests began – but that protest never happened because HSBC finally caved. HSBC didn't back down because its customers were unhappy, they backed down because their customers were unhappy and coordinated.

This is an example of people assembling around a very lightweight system we didn't have access to before. We now have the ability to bring organizational solvency up against organizations. The other thing to note is that there wasn't anything terribly complicated in the technology itself. That's not because the tool launched but because there were enough people online. If only 10% of the people had been online, you wouldn't have gotten one tenth of the leverage.

This stuff doesn't get socially interesting until it gets technologically boring. The most important social tool in the next year – the source of the most freakouts – is going to be email. If your mom is goin gto be involved in any of these coordinating effects, it's going to be via email. She's not going to use Twitter.

Second story: Flash mobs. Remember flash mobs? The flagpole sitting of 2003? They were pushed by Bill from New York. Turned out that Bill from New York was Bill Wasik from Harper's Magazine. His whole idea of flash mobs was a critique of the brain-dead behavior of hipsters out to shock the bourgeois. Then the idea spread to Belarus. And in the photos of the people eating ice cream in October Square, there are black-clad police officers dragging off the people. The problem wasn't the ice cream. The problem was the group. You can't have a group in October Square.

When I saw the difference between what Bill was doing as a critique of hipster culture and what these kids were doing in Belarus, I realized something. In high-freedom environments, any new coordinating capability can be used for silly things. In environments in which there's any degree of political control or suppression, use of any new coordinating capability can be essentially political.

Twitter makes it possible to not always have two-way communication. You can outsource some of that to the group. In high-freedom environments, that can seem trivial. But in less-free environments, it can be more critical.

The third story I wish was in the book. There was a group in Palermo that, in 2004, ran around stickering. The stickers said that anyone who pays money to the mob for protection was undermining society. They got a lot of media coverage, but then they decided it wasn’t enough. So they built a Web site to organize the shop keepers. That means something very important to the mafia. They also put up a search engine. If you want to only go to businesses that don't pay money to the mafia, you can find them on that Web site. They provided a coordinating layer to a problem that everyone understood but couldn't act on.

William James the philsopher would say that we have brains to figure out what to do next. The same thing is happening to media. We now have media for action. You can get access to media that doesn't just say something but also helps you do something. In Belarus, the LiveJournal page helped lead to action, the protests in October Square. They didn't just bring ice cream. They brought their cameras. Because they wanted it to also lead to more media. They wanted those pictures online.

This is starting to be manifested in ways that aren't just about the early adopters and the techies. It's starting to spill over to other areas of society. And I'm optimistic about that. But here's the big asterisk. The danger here, it seems to me, is a regulatory one. Imagine you live in a society that wanted three things: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and a category of speech acts that they didn't want with no prior restraint. You can say anything you want except the stuff you can't say, and we won't do any policing in advance. We all live in a world like that, or we have until recently. Like a trellis, the law grows up around the structure of the society we're in.

Media used to be something only made by professionals. That didn't just create an engineering bottleneck, but it created a class of professionals with a vested interest in defending that model. It's an iterative game of prisoner's dilemma. The people who own the newspapers or television stations have been in collusion with the politicians. They might have something explosive about a leader, but they might not publish it because that they want to publish their newspaper again tomorrow.

I teach at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU. The average age of my students has remained relatively stable, but my average age has grown at the alarming rate of one per year. I've had to start teaching about the '80s and '90s as ancient history. I can see them register it but not feel it. Prior to the mid-'90s, if you had something to say in public, you couldn't. You had to get someone's permission.

So what does the regulator look for? A new class of professionals to exercise self-censorship. We're playing an iterative game with you. Watch what goes out over your pipes. We may exert the same force we used to exert on the other professionals. The removal of the Wikileaks domain. GoDaddy's removal of the RapeMyCop domain. Domain names are in that stack.

We have to find a group that self-censors. That brings back the threat of that kind of regulation. It used to be that freedom of speech and freedom of the press were different. It used to be that freedom of speech and the freedom to assemble were different. We now have a medium that allows all three freedoms to occur together.

The biggest threat right now is to prevent the TSE style of we're going to sue you until you're like the bus commuters you used to be model. We all have to watch out for that to preseve those freedoms.

The Usefulness of Data Bits in Addressing Climate Change

2008-04-01T12:40:00.001-07:00

Robin Chase founded ZipCar and blogs.

I'm talking on the same topic but with a different bent. It's more specific and less specific simultaneously. When I think about this, I tend to think about history. This is Anne Frank's hiding place. Would I have had the courage to do what they did? This is another picture more recently. This is Elizabeth Eckford, who's desegregating the Little Rock, Arkansas, high school. She's 17. She's one of five people. Look at those angry white faces. Would I have been a heroic person?

The question is, what kind of person am I? And what kind of person are you? We have the chance to determine who we are. It's because of climate change. There are those among you who are believers. There are those of you who are not. I'm not a climatologist. I'm just channeling the two best climatologists in the U.S.

What's a catastrophic effect? It's a 50% drop in species. It's a 25% drop in wheat despite doubling population. John Holdren is director of the Woods Hole Institute. In September he had a presentation to the UN. If US CO2 emissions peak in 2015, we have a 50% chance of averting catastrophic climate change. If we continue the status quo for 10 years, we have 0% chance. What are we working with?

We're working with the next 2-3 years. We're all like little ostriches. We hear about 2015, 2020, and we put our heads in the sand. Cap and trade will do nothing in 2-3 years. We have to work with behavior, marketing that affects behavior, and a carbon tax, which really affects behavior.

This 2-3 year timeframe is upon us. We need to do all of these things to get the effects, but we need to keep track of the fact that we need to get emissions down in the next 2-3 years.

The power use of technology is the 2% piece that was talked about. We can address this by machine and chip design, reducing the number of devices, cloud computing, and deistributed data centers selling heat byproducts. I'm a strong believer in low-cost, ubiquitous data bits as a tool for behavor change. We can have efficient use of resources, customization, group intelligence, and quick access to expert intelligence.

My realm is transportation. We think about cars. 20% of our CO2 emissions is our personal cars. Filling them with motor fuel is another 9%. A lot of people talk about lightbulbs. That drives me out of my mind. The largest part of what you control at home is your electricity bill. Residential electricity produces 17% of CO2 in the US.

I run a company called ZipCar. 25-50 people are car-satisfied with one vehicle. 10-20 cars are off the road for each ZipCar. The quality of life improves for all. The parking paradigm changes. Because we pay for your car by the hour, the lump and sunk charges change dramatically. People choose to use their car correctly relative to their other transportation options. We have 80,000 people driving 5,000 cars. From an environmental perspective, people drive about 90% less than if they owned their own car.

And it's 100% technology enabled. The 80,000 people have each bought a fraction of a car. As a person, I have 5,000 cars at my beck and call across the geographies. We've been able to make this expensive asset more efficiently used.

My more recent company is GoLoco. We're trying to do with ride sharing what we did with car sharing. It's your car, your friends, your trips, your money creating your own transportation network. It’s the long tail of transportation. We combine social networking and alerts from your friends traveling places, as well as the money management online without anyone having to worry about it. GoLoco can solve the transformation ills of people who aren't anywhere near transit statins.

I also like the shared bike network in Velib, France. And this is another favorite: the Interstate Wireless Mesh System. We're testing congestion pricing, which is a trial for road pricing, in which you'd pay by the mile as well as by your type of car. How will we build out this infrastructure? I'm trying to get our government to open excess capacity to abutters.

I'm a two-trick donkey, and I'm sharing these tricks with you because I think we can get this stuff done. We can improve the efficiency of expensive resources that were previously privately held. And people create the infrastructure using Web 2.0, infrastructure, and financing 2.0. We don't have to have someone spending billions and billions of dollars. Each of us can take just a small bite.

As congestion pricing is to pricing, so too can we do with our use of electricity. Don't turn on your dishwasher in August at noon when everyone's running their air conditioners. Do it at midnight. We can all be superheroes.

The Carbon-Negative Internet: Kathy Brown

2008-04-01T10:29:00.004-07:00

David Isenberg: We who run the Internet have a responsibility. We're responsible for about 2% of the carbon emissions put into the atmosphere. The airline industry is responsible for about 2%. We can not only use the Internet to reduce the total emissions by at least 2%, we can do a lot better than that. That's why this panel is called the Carbon-Negative Internet.

This is too important an issue to have factionalism. It's not about Bell heads versus Net heads any more when we're talking about the survival of life on the planet.

***

Kathy Brown works as Verizon's SVP for public policy development and corporate responsibility.

I don't even know what a Bell head is. I came to Verizon about five years ago. Before that, I spent my time at the Department of Commerce and the FCC working on the information superhighway. We did a lot of thinking about how we use the Internet to solve real problems, like hooking kids around the country up to the Net.

Before I came to Washington, I lived and worked in New York. My work there was all about energy. What we were struggling with then was how to conserve energy. As we go now into the new century, the issue now is our carbon footprint. My daughter sent me a photo of the Antarctic ice mass breaking in two to remind me what kind of car to buy.

How can we think about bringing down our energy usage so we're more efficient? It's amazing to me that ICT isn't part of the energy policy I'm hearing. We're not going to reach the kinds of efficiencies I think we can reach without high-speed broadband networks in our homes.

Back in the '90s, we talked about the productivity gains we could make with the Internet. We were able to produce amazing productivity with respect to almost anything. This technology, the Internet, and what was attached to it at the edges has caused us to rethink how we do things. The growth of broadband is a significant and fundamental change. I want to think about a way to frame this discussion so energy efficiency isn't something we wring our hands about. How can we bring it front and center?

2% of global carbon emissions have to do with our industry. We're all in a huge coalition right now. I want to concentrate on the other 98%. The notion that we can affect that 98% by a better use of broadband technologies and the Internet isn't something I hear a lot about. As we discuss efficiency in our homes, it's not up front in the discussion. We talk a lot about the various things we can do – fluorescent light bulbs, turning your thermostat down – but there's more we can do.

We sponsored a study looking at the major issues confronting our country and customers over the next 10 years. The American Consumer Institute found that the use of broadband networks can decrease our dependence on oil up to 11% over the next 10 years. That's worth thinking about.

Let's take the logical things first, the things we talk about all the time, like telecommuting and teleconferencing. We've talked about this forever, but we've basically walked away from it. Cisco's high-resolution telepresence product is amazing. I use it. It's a big screen. It's over high-speed lines. We use it to not get on an airplane. You overcome the human problem with videoconferencing. We're putting into the market right now a 20 up and 20 down product so you can have a virtual presence right in your office.

We see 1,751 pounds of emissions not dispersed because of telecommuting. Every time I don't go to India, the amount of jet fuel I'm saving allows me to use my telepresence technology twice a week for one year.

What about the e-conservation idea? Downloading music and books saves time and energy. Let's take CDs. It's plastic. It's a disc. There's a plastic jewel box. There's a wrapper. You have to go to the store to get and then you go home. What about books? The Kindle let's you just download it. No paper is consumed. Driving 20 miles to the store uses one gallon of gas. Shipping 100 products uses one tenth of a gallon because you aggregate them.

But there's so much more that we can do. Like Thomas Friedman says, you can't make a product greener without making it smarter. What does smart green growth really mean? There are a lot of small things that we can do. In Fort Wayne, Indiana, has installed FIOS as part of their smart green homes. The idea is for the whole community to bring down its usage.

What's Verizon doing beyond thinking these things? We're rated highest on our environmental practices. From lifecycle management and paperless billing to video conferencing with EDS and a huge experiment with fuel cell technology. It's an approach a telecommunications company is taking to figure out how to use this technology to deal with the issues we're all facing. The deployment of ubiquitous broadband must be part of the energy solution.

The State of the Internet

2008-04-01T08:21:00.002-07:00

John Horrigan serves as associate director of research for the Pew Internet & American Life Project. What follows is a rough transcript of his remarks. Corrections welcome.

When David asked us to talk here, the topic was the State of the Internet, which seems heavy with gravitas. Because I research the users of the Internet, I think I'll focus on the users. We do a lot of random phone dialing interviews, and I thought I'd share some of the insights we've learned about Internet usage patterns.

There's a large variety of Internet users. Our data shows that the distribution is very interesting. For lots of American adults, the Internet is just peripheral to their lives. Given that not everyone is an ardent user of ICT, even with broadband deployment and getting infrastructure right, we're still not going to hit adoption nirvana. I want to talk about those frictions.

Let me share some of the things we've learned about the people online over the last few years. We've focused on the many-to-many Internet. More than 20 million Americans were active in online communities even with dial up. They were willing to clear the substantial slowness of dial up.

2004 was the first time we picked up on more people having broadband at home than dial-up users. As broadband began to gain a foothold, we saw not just many-to-many communication but many-to-many participation. E-healthcare is a great example of that. People share a lot of information online to participate in their healthcare with their doctors.

We see 54% of Americans with broadband at home. The always-on information appliance is now in line with the always-present information appliance. 42% of people with wireless devices use their handheld device to do something other than make a phone call. We're seeing people really get engaged. It's not unlike the dial-up hurdle in 2000. People are often dealing with slow connection speeds.

In 2006 we did a typology of different Internet users, looking at their assets and attitudes. Some are just peripheral users. Some people have a hard time trouble shooting their devices. They might have trouble getting broadband to function correctly in their home. These people tell us they just don't find the Internet that useful to their lives. They don't see a lot of content that's relevant to them. Usability and content are two important barriers.

In terms of Carlota Perez's book about technological transformation, we're currently in the installation phase. As we start to see institutions adapt to the information revolution, we need to keep in mind the users. Their rate of adaptation might be different than that of institutions. Think about the user experience and the frictions that people encounter while using technology.

There's a derath of information available about broadband technology and its quality. I'm going to turn the podium over to Drew so he can tell us just where this technology is.

Drew Clark is founder and executive director of Broadband Census and an active blogger to boot. Usual disclaimers apply.

We invite people to share information about their broadband. We've partnered with the Pew Internet project to bolster the research they're doing on broadband adoption. The site invites people to enter in their ZIP code. The government won't release information about who provides broadband service in a given area. In my ZIP code, the FCC says there are 15 providers in McLean, Virginia. Our census covers three. You can rate the service, and you can take our speed test.

There are other provider who are doing some piece of this. There are plenty of speed tests. That's really positive. There's not enough information abou the availability and quality of broadband. As soon as we can compare our broadband to our neighbor's broadband, we can make better decisions. Think of it like the real estate market. You can learn a lot about a neighborhood, but in broadband, there's not a lot of power on the consumer side.

We use the NDT network diagnostic tester used by Internet2 to do the speed test. More broadly, though, what we're trying to do is build a pool of data that's useful to a lot of constitutencies. Our speed test tends to underestimate, so there's always something to refine. We always welcome feedback, input, and your engagement.

The last thing I would want to say is to encourage you to get involved. There are three things I encourage you to do. Take the speed test yourself. Grab a button for your blog. And we're working to get these committees together.

Our Rights Online: Danny O'Brien

2008-04-01T07:03:00.004-07:00

Danny O'Brien currently serves as the EFF's international outreach coordinator. He also founded the excellent newsletter NTK, which is understandably on a hiatus of sorts. Here's much of what he said. If you have any amendments or corrections, let me know.

I'm running on incredible constraints this morning. David told me to be funny and to talk about international human rights. If you've seen the Amnesty Internation Big Book of Jokes, you know that's not easy. Another thing David likes is salacious personal histories. Here's mine: How I First Got on the Internet.

I was a humanities student in the UK in 1989. The Internet hadn't really reached the UK at that point. It belonged to the technological priesthood. We have one of them in our computer room. I was just a humanities student typing up my essays, but there was some disgruntlement that this priest held the keys to the Internet. He used these PCs just as they were terminals. Someone wrote a keylogger that recorded his brief incantations to see what he did. And a few people got to see the Internet. There wasn't a whole lot there. Tim Berners-Lee was just starting to write the Web. It was basically a telnet proxy.

It was like seeing the stars in the sky for the very first time. You saw how simple it was. You saw how much power you coud wield because of those simple terminals. If you could just pull at that wire that connected that small set of terminals, reconnect, and connect again, you could build a bigger and faster network. We wanted it very badly.

My job at the EFF is that I'm the international outreach coordinator. Bonjour! There's a lack of understanding of how the Internet spread to and transformed other countries. Many of the values we pick out here enabled that. The construction of the Internet was able to ignite and contain the explosion of interest and demand.

How the Internet reached the UK was basically a model for how the Open Rights Group started. It was a group of people coming together. They put up money. There you have it. You have a network. Within 10 years, Demon, which was the corporation, was a multimillion dollar organization. The Internet beat the proprietary, commercial setups.

There's also a moral value to these attributes. We were both lucky to come up with this idea and to catch this window of opportunity. Once it had spread past a certain critical mass, people being able to add their own nodes to the network made it a done deal.

I feel the same way about human rights. We're extremely lucky. The UN Bill of Rights has signatories all over the world because it has the same attributes as the Internet. Once you have this idea in your head, you compare everything else to it. There's very little disagreement about what human rights are. There's a lot of debate about when we get to break them.

The Brazilian constitution has their equivalent to the First Amendment. It says expression of thought is free but anonymity is forbidden. So it's moot for us to debate that because it goes against what's in their constitution. There are limitations to the argument. There are variations. The growth of the Internet has been mapped out in different places differently. Its not easy, when we do these comparisons, to work out which will work out and which won't.

The arrangement of the economics of the network means that a lot of our own ISPs won't roll out their own DSL offerings but just rebrand BT's DSL offering. The problem that arose was that when the BBC offered their YouTube-like service, BT was charging them per gigabyte, which was eroding their profits. We have a strange situation.

We tend to step in when there's a state intervention that's not in the interest of the network or the citizens themselves. The EFF spends a lot of time in organizations like the EU, venues in which people come together to do proactive regulation. Our biggest problem right now is that in the attempt to pre-emptively harmonize, the spirit of innovation declines and disappears.

Were we lucky to get the Internet, or were we lucky that the Internet wasn't stopped? The more we allow innovation internationally, the more we'll see the network grow and thrive. Closed networks simply aren't as good as open networks. I just went to Beijing. It's very interesting to be behind the great firewall of China. The Internet just doesn't work very well.

Our Rights Online: Suw Charman

2008-04-01T06:58:00.003-07:00

Suw Charman is cofounder of the Open Rights Group, as well as a social software expert and blogger. This is a rough report on her remarks at Freedom to Connect. If you have any amendments or corrections, let me know.

The Open Rights Group in the UK is a bit like the EFF only with fewer lawyers. We are a community of people who have opinions on issues like privacy, identity, and copyright – areas in which civil liberties and consumer rights are affected by digital technologies. In less than three years, the Open Rights Group has convinced the treasury that an extension of copyright on musical recordings, which is currently 50 years, would be a bad idea. We provided our community with a voice by putting the consultation document online and soliciting comments. The document that came out was very good.

We're one of the first groups to observe e-voting. We wrote a report on the findings, which was quite alarming. Not just how the e-voting worked but how people interacted with the technology. For example, in Scotland, they almost didn't realize that the results printed out on two pages.

ORG started nearly three years ago, in 2005. It started at a conference called Open Tech. There was one panel called Where Is the British EFF? Talking about whether we, in fact, needed something like the EFF in the UK. Toward the end of the question and answer session, someone stood up and said, well, I'll pledge 5 pounds a month, who else will? Almost everyone else rose their hand.

There was a real will for this to happen. There wasn't just one person standing up and saying someone shoul ddo something, there was a group of people who came together to do something. The key thing that got us together was the reaction of the blogs and the greater community. We had people nagging us about giving us money before we even had a bank account. We didn't even have a name, but we'd started a campaign on data retention. Even though we were a fledgling organization, the demands to get our act together got us going.

In the old days, when you wanted to start a movement, you had to get a photocopier. Now, you organize people online. That community has really been key to ORG. They comment on our consultation documents online. That helps us in two ways. Firstly, it helps us get a sense of how the community thinks. We've got an advisory council, but we also have a large group of people who deal with these issues all the time. The MPs respond really well to this. They know we're not an organization putting forth one particular view because we're an industry. They know we represent their constituents.

But it's not just about facilitating conversation between us and government. It's about connecting activists. And finally, we don't want to be a wagging finger organization pointing out what's wrong in government. Oh, you're being naughty. We also want to be positive. It's been really instructive to me how people will come together to discuss and tackle these issues. We can make the best of what's happening.

Our Rights Online: Bruce Schneier

2008-04-01T06:49:00.003-07:00

Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist and blogger. This is a partial transcript of his remarks. If you have any amendments or correction, let me know.

I have approximately five points to make. Before, I want to talk about something that was said during the introduction, that the Internet was founded on trust. People are good and not bad. Practically everything about our species is founded on the fact that people are good and not bad. All of society requires that all of us are good most of the time. There has been a dishonest minority. There has been a minority of bad actors. It's not on the Internet that we're surprised that they existed. It's that we didn't realize they existed before. The Internet is just people communicating.

What the Internet does is different. When I read Clay Shirky's writings, I do it from the security guy perspective. How does culture and community foster security? Because they do. The ability of this group to form as a community is a form of societal security. It allows good ideas to propagate. It allows change to happen. It serves as a back stop to bad, repressive politics. The Internet fostering communication and community fights against oppressive politics.

We are building the Internet. It's still very new. We don't know how it will shake out. We're still understanding the social ramifications of this new way of communicating. This is a very disruptive technology. You see that in the political battles.

Connection fosters community, and that is a security device. It protects us. It's something valuable. That's the first poiint.

The second point is that there's social value in privacy, in anonymity. This is not a nice to have. Privacy is fundamental to human dignity. Privacy is not about having something to hide. It's not ill intent. It's not criminal activity. Privacy is necessary for democracy – the secret ballot. Anonymity is required. All speech cannot be named in a democracy. As a regime becomes more oppressive, anonymity becomes more important.

Too much we're caught up in the battle of security vs. privacy. That's a false dichotomy. That's my two and a half point. When someone says security and privacy say door lock, tall fence. Most of the ID card checks are complete nonsense. The real dichotomy is liberty vs. control. That’s the dichotomy.

That leads to my third point. What's key here is the power imbalance, the power balance between the disparate bodies. If there is an oppressive government, these technologies can help them be more oppressive. If there is a free people, they can use them to be more free. This is where I think a lot of people who say everything will be public and it'll be OK are missing a very important point. Power imbalance matters. When a police man stops you on the street and asks to see your ID, your being able to see their ID doesn't do a lot. They have a lot more power. The power imbalance is magnified through forced openness.

What privacy does is it increases the power of the citizens with respect to the police. We live in a world where all interrogation rooms have cameras and are recorded. That increases the power of the citizens. This is true of lots of technologies. That's why you see the media companies using the technologie sthat will eventually make their businesses obsolete. They can use the tech to increase their power.

Point four: All technologies can be used for good and evil. Yes, the bad guys can use the Internet to communicate, to plan, to organize. That's been true about the telephone. That's been true about the automobile. Bad guys go to restaurants and eat lunch. There are more good guys than bad guys. Having restaurants is a good idea even though they feed criminals because they feed even more non-criminals. It is not the technology.

Sometimes the imbalance is there, and we try to ban a technology. The good uses of landmines don't seem to outweigh the bad uses of landmines, so we ban them. The quintessential argument here is guns. We're not going to do the argument, but do the beneficial uses of guns outweigh the negative uses? When you ban a technology, yeah, you take it away from the bad guys sort of, but you definitely take it away from the good guys. Let's say you put a speed governor in ordinary automobiles so people can't drive faster than 55 and use them as getaway cars. The bad guys may or may not be able to circumvent that technology, but we definitely can't drive faster than 55.

Sometimes that's worth it. Take landmines. You might argue about it. Take handguns. That's fundamentally what you're debating. You're trying to decide the right social policy.

The fifth point, and my last one, is that technologies make change. Those changes are resisted by those who have a vested interest in maintaining the old ways of doing things. Every time there's a disruptive technology, it changes the nature of business.

What's sort of new is that these are happening relatively quickly when before they used to happen every couple of decades. There are some very powerful interests that don't like that. Their business model is built on the old way of doing things. There are lots of places where the Internet makes it different.

When you have a long-run bet, you might want to bet on the natural flow of the technology. Trying to make the Internet behave as a system of scarce resources is kind of like making water not wet. There's a lot of interests in making water not wet – the entire copy protection industry. They're trying to make the natural ease of copying and make it not true. That could be a long and difficult run. That's where we are now.

That's the battle we're in. Whether it's the freedom to connect, upload, download, make copies, save copies, view copies, in the natural world of information these are properties like water is wet. That's not going to work long term. You can't remove what the bad guys do by removing the technology. Cheap copies of a movie will appear on the streets of Taiwan regardless of what happens. But our abilities will be limited very easily.

Whose rights win out in the end? Us, or Sony? They have rights, too. The rights that win in the end are the rights that foster community, democracy, and liberty. They're the rights that flow naturally from people using technology to do what they do. You can tell a law makes sense when there are millions of law breakers. But when your grandmother is a lawbreaker because she makes a copy of a movie for her grandson without really thinking about it, you've got a problem.

We've got to make it intuitive. Take drunk driving laws. What do you mean, I can't drive my own car? Smoking laws are a more recent example. The rights that win are the rights that foster community. We're going to live in a world with free information exchange. We're living in the decades where we have the turbulence. Big business doesn't abandon their business models easily, and they shouldn't.

Administrivia: Removing Snapshots

2008-04-01T05:39:00.002-07:00

This morning I removed the script for Snap Preview because I noticed that it'd begun to insert links to phrases that I didn't link off of. I didn't mind the page previews, but I don't want other people to be determining links off Media Diet.

The Wireless Third Pipe, Net Neutrality, and Everything

2008-03-31T13:25:00.003-07:00

Brett Glass runs a wireless ISP in Laramie, Wyoming. He's presenting a "lightning round" to flesh out the open wireless session. You can access his presentation online.

Suw Charman offers a better report on this session in Corante's Strange Attractor.

Open Wireless: Rich Miner

2008-03-31T12:57:00.004-07:00

Rich Miner serves as group manager of open platforms (Android) for Google.

I'm group manager of mobile products. We announced an open handset alliance, roughly 34 partners working with Google to build Android, a Linux-based mobile platform. We also announced a software platform that allows third-party developers to build applications. It was a huge shout by Google about openness in the mobile landscape.

I'll talk a little about the handset space. Most of us carry mobile phones. Today, they have roughly the equivalent of the power that a desktop computer had in 2002. If we look at our mobile phones today, they fall far short of what we could do in 2002 online. There's a huge gap between the capabilities of the hardware and what the industry is offering in terms of software. There's a stifling of innovation because the ecosystem is a closed one.

The platforms we use to operate mobile handsets are closed. Symbian is cleared as an open platform because it has an API. But if you're trying to develop applications, openness by publishing APIs isn't as open as you'd like it to be. It doesn't allow you to choose what applications ship with that handset. It doesn't allow you to find a bug and fix it.

There are other kinds of control and lack of openness. If you're a developer, you can't just go to a consumer and let the consumer download your app to their handset. There are huge hurdles you have to get through. Your destiny is controlled by an operating carrier who's going to make an arbitrary decision.

It's the same with content. On the Web, it's all based on best in quality or the moment, right place right time. In the mobile industry, there are barriers, huge walls. If you look at the number of PCs shipped every year, 200 million PCs, there are about a billion mobile phones shipped every year. If Google wants to make the world's information easily accessible, mobile phones are strategically very important.

The process to develop our mobile apps, the process of distributing those apps, the model's a bit broken. For the last three years, we've made a pretty big investment on the mobile platform Android. We hope it results in significantly more innovation. That's why we built the SDK.

There are a lot of initiatives looking at open source in the mobile industry, but not one of them was looking at allowing you to build a complete phone. We're building a platform that we're open sourcing and giving away. We hope the manufacturers and carriers build a lot of phones on it.

We want to break down the closed mobile platforms and open up the world to a more open handset experience. We're working with carriers to understand the benefits of openness and want openness. The world we envision is more openness on the handset side and then breaking down the walls of innovation.

I've mentioned that it’s open. I've mentioned it's Linux. To just say you're going to take Linux and build a mobile phone probably isn't the right way to do it. It's not the best consumer desktop experience. You need to put a bunch of dedicated software layers on top of Linux to make it a consumer product. When you stack up the architecture diagram, you'll see Linux at the bottom and then a bunch of software that Google or somebody else – like Packet Video – has written. It's a rich stack.

Another thing we thought about was the choice of licensing. We don't want to discourage innovation or limit Sony. We're using the Apache 2.0 software license, which is a very good license when you want to encourage people to make derivative products but don't want to open source everything. Once we ship the first handset, we'll open source the platform. At that point anybody will be able to license the software stack and add their own value.

The pitch to the carriers – and carriers look at Google as competitive – is that we can help make them lots of money but also that they can take this platform and build as tightly branded handset as they'd like. They don't have to build open phones.

This message of openness is starting to resonate throughout the industry. Google feels comforted by that fact. It'll be uncomfortable for carriers if they deliver very closed phones. In general, smart phones should be smart. They should be open. That's our goal.

Suw Charman offers a better report on this session in Corante's Strange Attractor.

Music to My Ears

2008-03-31T12:30:00.003-07:00

One of my favorite things about Isen's events is the musical entertainers he enlists. This year (like last year, when I wasn't here), the musician in residence is Howard Levy, whom I first encountered on Bela Fleck and the Flecktones's 1990 eponymous album. Levy's been alternating between the harmonica and keyboard, and he's joined by guitarist Chris Siebold, who's also sung a couple of numbers. Good stuff.

Open Fiber: John St. Julien

2008-03-31T12:08:00.004-07:00

John St. Julien: The name of this session is open fiber. I'm of two minds about this open thing. One side of me, the geek and the wonk think it's about open systems and that it'll all work itself out. The other part of me is the historian and activist. These two guys don't get along, so I've segregated them. You get the historian and activist.

What is this open fiber thing? We're not citizens of the Net, we're clients. We're little better than serfs. A key element of any feudal system is that the lord of the manor controls access to the land. Think about your terms of service with AT&T and Cox. This is roughly your condition. They can kick you off for next to no reason. They don't have to follow their own rules consistently. They give themselves an amazing level of structural arrogance. That's what's driving us toward some kind of geekish and wonkish solution. But I don't think that's what we want. We want to be full citizens.

In medeival times, they did the Enlightenment, and then they did a revolution. They overthrew the old order. As soon as they realized there was something better, they went after it. We don't believe that that's possible. Tim is the perfect case of the counter-example. Of course it's possible. We can own our own network.

Lafayette, Louisiana, is a place in which we've done just that. This is a very hopeful thing, more hopeful than wiring up all of Vermont because Lafayette is one of the most conservative cities in one of the most conservative states. It's an oil town. It thinks Houston takes second stage in purity. But it's really something they want to do. How could it happen in Lafayette?

Back in the day, there was a bunch of malcontents that convinced a group of economic leaders it'd be a good idea to put in fiber just for government. There was all sorts of opposition to that. It was from the lords of the manor, who acted like it was outrageous. They did it anyway, and there was basic resentment that built up from that. Then they said this is crazy; we should provide retail service to every home in the city.

The malcontents lost that, but people heard the argument. People remembered the argument, but they forgot who said it. We got a new mayor who was really naive. He asked the incumbents if they would do this for him. They said no in such insulting terms that they offended him. So he went to the mat. The malcontents immediately jumped in and got on board. They got a big grassroots movement.

The assumption was that there'd be a group of old-money guys who'd run the thing. They'd do expensive polls, a big TV campaign. Their opposition faded. They weren't there. More power was handed to the grassroots operation. We won two to one, a clear, stunning victory.

Did we get what we wanted from it? We just wanted to be treated with some respect. We're going to get a network that's basically one huge intranet. Average speed citizen to citizen will be 100 Mbps. They'll offer it for 20% less than the incumbents were offering it. We'll have our own stable, static IPs to work out of. We'll have a wireless network hanging out that. Because we have fiber running down every street, it won't have to be meshed. You can do what you want with that much wifi.

We're also exploring a different kind of digital divide issue. What the current plan is is to use every cable box to provide wireless Internet as well. What you end up with is a whole swath of people having access who never had access before.

The question isn't so much the technical issues when we talk about openness but whether you want to own it in the long run. If you don't own it, you don't get the right to make those choices.

Open Fiber: Tim Nulty

2008-03-31T12:01:00.001-07:00

Tim Nulty: I have a career in telecommunications in which I have steadily sunk in the system. I retired in Vermont, and I was inveigled to help Burlington bring back a ubiquitous fiber to the home network. The initial financing for the real network was signed in December 2004. We broke ground in 2005. We signed up our first customer in 2006. And in 2007 we went cash flow positive for operations. Covering our debt and being profitable will happen in about 2009. That's stunning for a very capital-intensive telecommunications operation.

The foundation of that was (a) be universal, design to cover everybody, (b) it's open access; I don't mean we don't offer services – if you don't do that, you'll go broke – offering retail services means we make money, but open access for us means we have an almost infinite resource, and (c) be financially self-sufficient. In much of Europe, the foundation is in some form taxpayer. That's fine. That's great. Good idea. In the United States, that won't happen. In some states, including Vermont, it's illegal to build it with taxpayer funds. (d) Be future proof. Forget DSL, cable modem, and all that nonsense. We all know that won't last 10 years. You need to build something to last a long time.

I resigned from Burlington telecom in November because we were getting so many calls from all over saying, that's great, but can we do it? I want to see if we can take this model into two places that were substantially different than Burlington. Can you bring it to genuinely rural America? None of these towns is big enough to do it on its own. The biggest town is 11,000 people. Can you do it with an assembly of 35 towns? Can you organize that? It's really more of an organizational question.

We do expect to do this. We've had votes in all the towns in March. They were about 95% in favor. The worst was in the capital, Montpelier, where we had about 80%. We're doing a presubscription now, and some of the towns are 47% presubscribed.

The bottom line is that this vision can work in a practical way in the United States in really rural areas. The network we built is one generation more modern than than the FIOS system. We're just a little more modern than Verizon.

Open Fiber: Adam Peake

2008-03-31T11:59:00.003-07:00

Adam Peake: What is the Japanese broadband miracle? 28 million is about 55% of households. That's a good number of people. We have it. In the United States, you don't. In Japan, this can be traced back to the language of the 1996 act. A good number of you came over to tell us what a good broadband policy would be. We've really been involved in watching the Internet grow.

In the early 2000s you had an incumbent who decided that IP networks were good and something they should embrace. That’s important. We talk about speeds. Here I have a brochure for a housing development in Japan. It's overlooking the fish market. And they advertise that the mansion building has 1 Gbps to the basement. You don't have 1 Gbps to your home, but you have access to that technology.

Randy Bush is one of the people who's driven the Internet around the world for the last 20 years. He's got fiber to his home, it's 100 Mbps, and he can tweak it so he gets maybe 80 Mbps out of it. Don't be misled by that. You won't get it. But you will get extremely fast service, and extremely affordable service.

Fiber, fast DSL will be about $35 a month. You can get 100 Mbps with telephone and the Internet for under $70. That's quite good.

The open access model can work if the conditions are right. We've adopted many of the ideas from the 1996 act. What are the conditions that allowed Japan to get where it is today?

The first difference is that we don't have a major cable television industry. It's all about telephony and opening up the incumbents' networks. The legal system is also not litigious. That means the NTT didn't spend its time going to court and fighting this. They accepted it, and that's how Japanese business works. They also had a regulator who stood by it. The goals were set at the national level.

We're moving to an information society. It's more than broadband. How do you use this in society? We have 100 million mobile subscribers. 85 million of those are 3G. 87 million of those have an Internet contract. 40 million have contactless payment cards in them already. 20 million of them are digital televisions. Very sophisticated set of uses. The end result is a ubiquitous networked society.

Japan doesn't really have a particularly good broadcasting industry. It's somewhat moribund. The programs aren't particularly good. They don't even have a popular sport. Think about the United Kingdom, where BT says there are no commercial opportunities for the them to bring fiber to the home. That's because they have BskyB, subscription satellite television to the home.

I hope that gives some idea of the background of where Japan is. It's important to think about what the problems are and what the future might bring. There are two issues, really. One is the Japanese view of network neutrality. It's important all around the world. In November 2007, the ministry responsible for communications accepted an amendment that was similar to the four principles of network neutrality, but they made them rules that should be followed.

IP networks should be easy to access and easy to use. They should be accessible to any terminal and support end-to-end communication. Users should be provided with equality of access at a reasonable price. Those are the principles. And they're meaningful principles people will adopt and follow.

Next, we have a more problematic situation. That's one of packet shaping and network congestion. One of the impacts of accessible broadband is that it pumps out a lot of bandwidth. This is a worry. Some companies have begun packet shaping on peer-to-peer traffic particularly.

There's a particular problem on an application called Winny, the national peer-to-peer application. It's extremely easy to share your whole hard disk. And prone to viruses. Winny is basically a pig, and there's no way anybody's going to defend it.

Open Fiber: Dirk van der Woude

2008-03-31T11:57:00.001-07:00

Dirk van der Woude: I'm not an American, so I didn't learn how to present in public in kindergarten, so I need PowerPoint. I'll start to tell you more about why this meeting is important for the Netherlands, as well as American telecommunications and connectivity. You see, approved by Brussels.

I see people, children, walking around very proud. This is a campaign map of New Guinea in 1944. They came to a territory in which people were living in the stone age. The child you see is now, but her grandfather was born in 1920. In two generations, you can go from being in the stone age to being in the modern world. Yes, we can.

This is Europe. All of France is occupied except for this small, small village in Normandy. It's still fighting. This is how Amsterdam has felt for some time. All of the Durch old-fashioned incumbent telecoms are now owned by English and American corporations. Just a few percentage points are still owned by the Dutch. This is what it feels like to be a colony. Some people say we never should have given away the copper network, but we did.

In 2005, we started with a fiber network. What's the average citizen's perspective? Are we at the end of the last mile, or the first mile? We didn't want to be locked in.

In 1926, people started to think about highways. The highway was built. They started far before Hitler. The market had the vision, but it didn't have the long-term money. To head back to Amsterdam, you know we have canals. They bring in the tourists, and Americans complain about things being expensive. We have some paintings, and that's good essence. We have a harbor. It used to be the largest in Europe. We didn't take care of it, but it's still a lot of jobs in Amsterdam. We also have Schilpol Airport. And we have another harbor that's No. 1 in the world, the Amsterdam fiber exchange.

Because of that development, we started to think about whether today's networks are going to cut it. Or should we have another network? What we learned in Amsterdam is that you have to invest in infrastructure if you want to keep up with technological development.

It's not so much the backbone that's going to be the problem, it's the first mile. What's the state of the first mile at the moment? .2Mpbs per second is still counted as broadband. What to do about that? Do we want fraudband? The real world will have shared bandwidth.

Let's talk about fiber to the home in Europe. There's a great example in France. They decided to do the fiber thing, and it's 60 million Euros in subsidy. The most important thing is what happened in Germany. They were very slow, but suddenly, fiber started. In Cologne, two fiber networks were deployed in parallel. Now it's in Hamburg and Munich, where they've done 60-70% of Munich. In Germany, when they start something, they end it. This will be a big, big thing in Europe.

And in Amsterdam, we believe that a city with a great future is not a city without fiber to the home. We got the approval. We have three programs in Amsterdam. The fiber to the home program has 40,000 address. I can't say what we're doing for the other 400,000 homes. We also have fiber to the theater. The last theaters in Amsterdam are now provided with 1Gb/s. And 70% of all the children under 18 have parents and grandparents who weren't born in the Netherlands. So we're connecting the schools. We want them to connect to the theaters. And we want them to connect to the museums.

This is the network. We have a passive infrastructure that's 33% municipal shares and 20% municipal Euros. The wholesale operators sell capacity at 100% market terms. And the service providers are also market. The problem is that in the Netherlands, none of the ISPs are independent any more.

From a business perspective, the passive layer has a high CapEx but a low OpEx. The active layer has an average CapEx and a low OpEx. What do you get? One size fits all. 99% availability. I now myself have a 30 Mbps connection for which I pay 50 Euros. There are four Internet connections. One is for the Internet, and the other three are for whatever you want. Everything ends up in a utility cabinet in the home.

What are you going to do with it? Having ubiquitous broadband and this grid will also be good for wireless connectivity. It'll be green as well. Why do we do it? Economic growth. This network is going to bring in more economic profit than it's going to cost you.

In France, they had 18th century wifi – semaphore. 140 miles, 15 stations, 36 characters in 32 minutes, all records broken, a resounding success. There was this guy who said, can I have a portable one? That was Napoleon. He could. In 1845, someone said we should invest in a copper network. And that was that.

Open Fiber: Introduction and Jim Baller

2008-03-31T11:34:00.005-07:00

This session was a series of presentations moderated by Jim Baller, who advocates for a United States national broadband strategy.

There were a number of participants. Dirk van der Woude works as program manager of Amsterdam's world-leading fiber to the home offer. John St. Julien is a grassroots champion of Lafayette, Louisiana's, fiber to the home network. Adam Peake serves as executive research fellow for GLOCOM, the Center for Global Communications of the International University of Japan. And Tim Nulty was formerly chief economist for the House and Senate commerce committees, and is a fiber to the home activist. Any errors are my own, and I welcome amendments and corrections.

Jim Baller: Let me begin by observing what these folks have in common. Each one has a hand in some of the most advanced efforts in the world in terms of fiber connectivity. Lafayette, Louisiana, decided it wanted to be one of the most progressive fiber cities in a state that was not. John will tell you about that project. Tim Nulty has an incredible background that I can't begin to summarize. Tom started a fiber project in Burlington, Vermont. His philsophy was do it conservatively step by step and those steps resulted in a coalition of 20-25 towns that want to do it as a group. Next over, we have Adam Peake, who has a catbird seat in Tokyo where he is with the International University of Japan. He's here to tell us how the Japanese have achieved their miraculous assent to being one of the leading countries in the world in communications. And a special hero of mine, Dirk van der Woude from the city of Amsterdam.

The other remarks will follow in a series of posts.

Politics, Democracy, and the Internet

2008-03-31T08:13:00.005-07:00

This is a rough transcript of a panel discussion of sorts moderated by Micah Sifry, cofounder of the Personal Democracy Forum. Alec Ross is a tech policy advisor to Barack Obama's campaign. Matt Stoller is a political Net-roots activist and blogger for OpenLeft. And Donna Edwards is a candidate for Congress from Maryland. Any errors are my own. Amendments and corrections are welcome.

Micah Sifry: This is my third time here, speaking, and it's a thrill. David was the first person to invite me to a tech conference when I first got into this. I'm going to take a couple of minutes to introduce the session. Our topic is politics, democracy, and the Internet.

We are living in amazing times. We're still in a transition, but the old one-to-many system is being joined by a peer-to-peer, many-to-many, people-intensive system. It's not pretty, but these are exciting times for those of us who've been frustrated by how gridlocked our political system is.

I hope we spend most of our time looking at how we can change governance. That's the easy topic. The fun one is what happens when Net-centric thinking and policy enters the halls of power. We're going to start with Alec Ross, who's here in his capacity as an advisor to the Barack Obama campaign. He's going to talk a little bit about Obama's thinking about transparency. This does not imply an endorsement of any candidate, but the Obama campaign has some of the most interesting tech policy statements.

We're then going to segue to Matt Stoller and Donna Edwards. If the Obama tech policy is all about what we can do to change the executive branch, they'll dig into what we need to do to fix Congress.

I do a lot of work with the Sunlight Foundation. They're soft launching a new project today, PublicMarkup.org. We've drafted a detailed bill for transparency at all levels of government. You can read the draft bill, as well as comment and improve it. We're still lining up sponsors, so if you're interested in getting more involved, please talk to us. Why can more legislation be posted on the Web so people can get more involved?

Alec Ross: Before I talk about some of the specifics of Senator Obama's proposals in terms of transparency, it's important to consider the attitude and mindset of the candidate and the campaign.

The fact that Obama hasn't been in Washington for decades means that he feels more of a connection to people outside of the Beltway rather than within. The solutions to problems come from outside of Washington. What's become clear is not technology for technology's sake but how technology can play a unique role in connecting people to the process.

Obama's fluent in technology, but he's not a coder. When he started his campaign, he didn't have an organization or apparatus. He had to figure out how to organize his campaign very quickly. How he did it was using technology. It was a huge leap of faith.

Win or lose, one of the stories that will be told about this campaign will be about how he got power by giving up power. He used his Web site not as a way to raise money but to organize the campaign. Thousands of offline events have been held because of whats happening online.

The principles of using technology for openness have made themselves manifest in the campaign. He's brought a lot of people who aren't involved in the process into the process.

The specifics are where Obama's been most bold. Online, you'll see pretty deep proposals. Let's take all government data and make it accessible in machine-readable data. This is data you own and pay government agencies to figure out. If that content lives in the Department of Energy, let's put it on the Web so you can find out what the relative environmental safety in your community. Citizens with information can make decisions that are in their own self-interest.

[...]

When Barack Obama becomes president, people better be ready to get to work. We've shared some very specific ideas about implementing government transparency. We need to make sure congressmen are aware of those issues.

Sifry: Of those proposals, where do you expect the most resistance?

Ross: There are two. Making communications public. That basically means people getting their mail read. That will face some opposition. The other one is taking government data and making them machine readable so they're accessible. That can be done technologically, but people will ask whether we should spend tons of money to do so.

Our federal government does not have a chief technology officer. You get ridiculour siloing. Let's take clean technology. That would involve half a dozen government agencies. There's no coordinating body. There's a lack of coherence from the federal government.

Part of what the chief technology officer's role is to bring a level of organization to the federal government that doesn't currently exist. That requires a strong hand.

Matt Stoller: Can we open up government? Yes, we can, and yes, it's already happening. Politicians are getting more feedback than they've ever gotten before.

Congress is us. We elect these people to Congress. If we're so angry at these people, how do we take responsibility for that? We haven't connected the organs of the Internet to the organs of power. I want to share two stories about that. One is a success, and one is a failure.

I worked for John Corzine in New Jersey. I encountered one blog that was hyperlocal, why is the train so slow? There was an issue about why a local pool was so expensive, and one person said it was because there were too many lifeguards. People were debating that, and then the lifeguards got involved. It's really hard to be a lifeguard! That really changed the conversation. That's a success because it changed how people talk and relate to each other.

I was also involved in Legislation 2.0, which was hosted by a number of blogs, including my own. We had people discussing broadband policy. There were some really exciting people who came, but it went nowhere. It looked like we were really going to have a dialogue, but it didn't do anything. It didn't turn into new power for Senator Durbin. Somehow we failed to connect it to real political power.

How do you take social context and connect it to real political power? How do we create the bridging pieces? That's what I want to figure out.

Donna Edwards has a long career in public advocacy. She pairs toughness and sympathy. When she got elected to be the nominee for Maryland's fourth district, it was the first time the power of the Internet has been able to seat someone into an electoral position. At least we were one piece of that.

Donna Edwards: If I'm one of the most remarkable people Matt knows, he needs to expand his universe. I apologize for being late this morning. I might have to run in two more elections before I can run in the November election. I'm thinking about the Internet because we're going to have to toll up how we reach people online.

Sometimes, people don't even know an election is taking place. We were able to engineer a conversation about the race that was able to elevate it from the mire of all the other discussions.

Years ago, I was a systems engineer for Lockheed working on the space program. My job was developing and tested software and hardware. A lot has changed over time, but not a lot of communities have been able to be involved in that change.

Where I live, I have dial-up Internet service. Oh my god. Last night I was at home and I needed to do some work on the Internet. I couldn't get on, it was slow, and I just quit. The reason I have dial up is because Verizon says they provide broadband service. That's sort of true unless you live 200 yards away from where the service is routed. That's where my home is.

There are children who don't have access to a computer at home. Many of our most vulnerability communities lack the ability to jump into the technology age the way they should. That's shameful. Looking around this room, you don't look like some of those communities.

From a campaign perspective, what that means is that we can use the Internet to generate energy and communicate a vision for the future. At the same time, folks come up to me and say, please, can you just bring us a piece of paper? We can't get onto the Internet. That seems extraordinary.

We have to operate in two worlds, one in the 20th century and one in the 21st century. In terms of public policy, we're not at a time when we can hope that the technology service providers will just do right. We have to legislate and mandate that kind of stuff. Some of us will have access, and some won't because it's not efficient for those companies to reach out to those vulnerable communities.

How do we develop technology policy that works for our most vulnerable communities? Matt forced me sometimes to blog about the campaign. I was being interviewed by the Washington Post, and an editor asked me if I couldn't answer my questions more quickly. "You don't have to think about it so much." I thought thinking about my answers was a good thing.

We want to have the ability for legislators to have contact with a wide range of people, but I'm not sure I want to put all of that into email. I don't know if that's the best way to judge whether someone's engaged in effective policy making.

The importance of having the Internet and open access to the Internet is that I don't want anyone else deciding what's good for me. Let me add it. We have way too many gatekeepers. Our communities and the vibrancy of the Internet require us to limit and put a kibosh on the gatekeepers. We're pretty smart people.

Technology can work to build all of our communities. It can be useful for us without getting in the way. I'll be blogging when I'm in Congress, too.

Connect with Freedom to Connect

2008-03-31T07:25:00.005-07:00

If you use Quicktime, you can watch the event streaming live. You can also join the backchannel chat via Campfire. (To sign up for a Campfire account, use this link.

Paying Per Packet? Don't Be Selfish

2008-03-31T07:01:00.001-07:00

Brad Templeton serves as chairman of the Electronic Freedom Foundation and is a blogger. What follows is a near-realtime transcript of his remarks. If you have any additions or amendments, let me know.

I am the chairman of the EFF. It's not saving the Internet that's hard, it's audio visual. We got into a battle in this town against the president of the United States, suing AT&T for letting everyone wiretap. I want to talk about the history of regulation in data communications. I'm also involved in BitTorrent Corp., but I'm not speaking officially on behalf of that today.

Most of the people here are in favor of an open network. The Net was created as a peer-to-peer environment. This allowed people to come up with the concept of the end-to-end or stupid network. It's a great thing, and hopefully we have a choir here.

But the real invention of the Internet wasn't a technological invention. Believe it or not, the thing that made the Internet great was it's pricing model. It was an economic invention. It's pricing model didn't involve money. I pay for my line in the middle, you pay for your line to the middle, and we don't care about what happens in the middle. We don't sweat the small stuff. That still involves paying for things but enabled a whole bunch of applications.

Paying per packet means that every application on the network had to be justifiable. Network providers are run by bean counters. One of the earliest Web sites was a video camera trained on a fish tank. That would have been shut down by the network. But some of the best applications aren't financially justifiable. Paying per packet also leads to a network of timid users. The cost of books shouldn't matter to us. But how many of you see a book that's $1 more than it should be? Paying money on an incremental basis has a psychological cost.

There's a bit of a monster hiding in the pricing model. Everybody oversells their Internet capacity now. They really want to sell you shared access to a pipe they don't intend you to use. They sell you oversaturated pipes. They advertise unlimited use. Is that a business? Whose bandwidth is it? Do they sell the bandwidth to the customer, or don't they? There's a dissonance.

Meanwhile, the upstream component goes unused most of the time. That got exploited by peer-to-peer publishing tools. Peer-to-peer file distribution is the best technology for publishing a file cheaper. It's no surprise that people who want to do copyright infringement pick the best technology to do it. It's used for both honest distribution and otherwise.

There's always going to be some application that's a bandwidth hog. There's always going to be one that uses more bandwidth versus less bandwidth. We don't want to beat down the winner. Right now, peer-to-peer is the villain, but if you get rid of that, there will be another one.

I'm going to go in the opposite direction when it comes up with coming up with a law for Net neutrality. I'm going to make a rather bold statement that's not entirely true. All the telecom regulations have actually caused more harm than good. They all turn sour in the long run. They do some good in the early days, but before long, they go bad.

Simply having paperwork and asking raises an effective barrier. Even if it seems like you're not asking for too much. Solving Net neutrality is like putting out a fire with corn-based ethanol, which is itself the result of activity by the corn lobby. We've got the telcos in a briar patch. Br'er telco is more nimble in the briar patch than br'er fox. We're br'er fox.

It subsidizes phone service for poor people. Long ago, maybe that helped. Years ago, a friend and I decided we'd drop a phone booth in the middle of the Black Rock Desert. You can actually bring wireless to the rural user cheaper than you can put in an urban landline. Two guys could do that. If you need to subsidize something, just subsidize it.

E911 is another example. If you want help in an emergency, you don't want to say that something that looks like a phone is the means to it. $1/use/month kills… Let's look at CALEA. Why didn't we learn more from 80211?

If I were put in charge, I would replace the FCC with three words, "Don't be selfish." Don't interfere with others. Don't be overly sensitive to interference.

The one regulation I would say is somewhat successful is the one we're suing AT&T over. Back in the '70s, there was a president that Congress decided wan't trustable. He did wiretaps. So they made a law that said phone companies couldn't allow wiretaps on all traffic without warrants. We sued them under that law. So the president got the Senate to pass a law. The House hasn't passed it. Thank you, House.

Technology changes so quickly in telecommunications, that any policy should automatically sunset. The time they change from good to harm is remarkably short. Be careful what policies you have. Review all policies every few years. It's the monopoly, stupid! There's no need for a natural monopoly. We've created these monopolies and allowed people to use them. We need to get in there and use the dark fiber.

There's plenty of bandwidth. If we really open this up, I'd like to see people able to go into small electronics stores to install small networks in their neighborhoods by just burying the fiber in their yards. Make a technology mass market, and lo and behold, it's $20 at Fry's in just a few years. This technology is possible.

People say the Internet can't scale for video. That's totally wrong. IP multicasting can work if we want it. Peer-to-peer also scales up. It can provide the ability to distribute vast amounts of data. What's popular only goes over the line one or two times, and then it's in the local cloud. A lot of people who built these networks made the assumption that everybody would be a consumer.

Comcast did a deal with BitTorrent on Thursday or Friday. What Comcast did was sort of sly. They didn't do that much interference with BitTorrent. They put detectors on the network to see what people had finished downloading. Then you become a seed, and other people can access it. If you were seeding, and if you were seeding people who weren't on Comcast, that's when they went in and decided they wanted to stop you. The thing that got them in trouble was putting in synthetic packets that would say that the person on the other end had hung up.

The network rose up about that. There was regulatory threat. Comcast realized that, crap, we can't even do this. They've agreed now that they're going to be protocol agnostic. They're going to balance bandwidth. They'll put more upstream in the network. They'll do new research so there's more local caching. And they're going to be more transparent about what they do.

The best lessons in the network come from the edge, both in technology and network neutrality.

The Music of Countervailing Stories

2008-03-31T06:50:00.007-07:00

Susan Crawford is founder of OneWebDay, an ICANN board member, and a blogger. This is a partial transcript of her remarks. If you have any amendments, let me know.

Life is short. We might as well tackle some big questions while we're here. What makes a life significant? Life contains an inner ideal. There's some aspect that's intellectual and conscious. These ideals need to be joined to will. They have to be accompanied by action.

My father's life is drawing to a close. The ideal for him is to sit and listen to music. The ideal is pure human expression in music. As his body gives up on him and his brain decays, the music remains.

We spend a lot of time talking about network operators. The logic of it is constrained and controlled by companies we call network operators. There's inadequate competition. We're paying a lot for slow speeds. These companies aren't monopolies. This is an oligopoly. There are a few sellers acting with consideration for the industry as a whole. The prices themselves don't signal the ebb and flow of user desires. It's not a monopoly, but it's not competition. It's something in the middle.

Instead of ruinous price competition, there are lots and lots of ads showing us the differences among these operators. Oligopolists have power similar to monopolists, but there are few actors. What's the solution to this? Is it anti-trust? That would undermine the very fabric of the American economy. We have a lot of oligopolists. They're not working together to keep prices high. They're acting in deference and knowledge of how the entire industry is doing.

We get stuck on the idea of competition. We need to think differently. This is where music and John Kenneth Galbraith comes in. Galbraith suggests that in a oligopolist economy, restraints come from the retail level or consumers or users. You have oligopoly and then countervailing power. Let's look at the retailers. We've got an integrated market.

We need to find a way to make the user power aggregated, present, visible, organized in a way that would make restraints on the oligopoly real. If there were adequate power coming from users, we could draw them together. We can be as smart as we want to be, but without votes, we're nowhere. The Net neutrality movement isn't always connected to people who vote.

The source of countervailing power needs to be user stories, not gadgets or technology. The story of being enabled to further your life purpose can be connected to this policy debate. We need to simplify the message and make it as human as possible – as musical as possible.

John Kenneth Galbraith, our friend with the theory of countervailing power, always went to a new year's party. He always led the singing of Auld Lang Syne.

If I die tomorrow, I want to make sure I've talked to you about my efforts to bring these stories together via OneWebDay. The purpose of OneWebDay, which is Sept. 22, is to globalize a constituency that cares about the future of the Internet. It's a way for us to all tell stories and teach about our connection to this network. This constituency will provide the countervailing force.

I ask you today to do something to make the Web real for the community around you. That's my message. We need a countervailing force. Competition isn't going to do it.

Suw Charman also offers a transcript via Corante's Strange Attractor.

Welcome to Freedom to Connect 2008

2008-03-31T06:15:00.004-07:00

I'm going to take a stab at confblogging this year's Freedom to Connect. Here's host David Isenberg's opening remarks (he emailed me his talk, so these notes are practically exact):

I am honored to be among so many remarkable people. We have to be remarkable people, because we have a hell of a job to do. The Internet has been given to us. It is a miraculous gift, and a boon to our lives . . . at least in part because it accidentally matured outside the purview of profit and loss. Now the money has arrived. If you want to see what happens when the money arrives, look at Nigeria or Venezuela or Russia or Iraq.

I challenge you to expand the discussion over the next two days. Our planet is in danger of becoming hostile to life. I'm not talking about the flooding of Miami and New York and Bangladesh. I mean that because of the carbon we humans put in the air, Earth could become Venus, a place where life can't live. So I believe -- and I put this forward as a hypothesis -- I believe that we can use the Internet to conserve more atmospheric carbon than its infrastructure generates. Furthermore, I believe we can use the Internet for global participation that transcends tribalism and nationalism to end war . . . for discussion!

We're a remarkable group. We've come from Japan and New Zealand and the Netherlands, from England and Canada and California. We're from 23 states, and two provinces.

We're innovators and activists, academics, investors, lobbyists, lawyers, regulators, reporters, builders of networks and a man of the cloth. Among us is a Son who brought his Father to Freedom to Connect, and a Mother who brought her Daughter. This is good -- saving the Internet *should* be a family affair.

Some of us are here because they don't think the Internet needs saving . . . or if it does, it needs saving from people like me, who are dissatisfied with what the telcos and the cablecos and the Bush-Martin FCC have been doing. I welcome them, because too often we only talk with our friends. I honor Richard and Scott and John and Brett for having the courage to be here. I have no illusions that anybodys minds will change, but I look forward to their contributions to the discussion, and perhaps to some degree of mutual understanding.

The story we will tell in the next two days is not widely told.
It is a story of telephone companies and cable companies, and the disruptive power of the Internet.

It is a story many of us wrote. Some of us wrote it in networks strung across neighborhoods and nations. Some of us wrote it in blogs. Some of us wrote it in C code. Some of us wrote it in The Federal Register. Some of us wrote it in a checkbook. Some of us wrote it in wrinkles on our faces and hands.

It is a story we will not find in the mainstream media, because it would be the story of their own Internet-wrought disruption . . . or even destruction.

It is a story of A Telephone Company that I loved, and hated, and worked for, and tried to save, called AT&T. That AT&T doesn't exist anymore. AT&T created the digital switch, but failed to understand that when digital switching matured, it would make AT&T's business obsolete.

It is the story of a Goliath composed of a thousand Davids. I am one of them. AT&T shaped me. It made me who I am today. Like Barack Obama, I'm of mixed heritage . . . half BellHead, half NetHead.

AT&T had other Davids too, who not only invented the digital switch, but also the transistor, stereo recording, photovoltaics, Information Theory, digital signal processing, C, Unix, DSL and the Cable Modem.

It is also a story of managers who didn't understand technology so they sent consultants to Bell Labs rather risk displaying their ignorance in a personal visit.

It is the story of a corporate culture so deeply rooted
that its assumptions were not only un-questioned
-- they were unquestionable.

It is a story of a system that couldn't possibly be merit-based, because managers had to rise through eighteen layers of management in a 20-some-year career. It is the story of an AT&T CEO that said the Internet was a toy. It is the story of an executive who drove AT&T's computer business into failure, then he presided over AT&T's NCR's failure, and then he was promoted again. It is the story of a failed credit card business, a failed cable business, millions of dollars of failed Silicon Valley partnerships, and a cell phone division that would have failed over and over if it had not been tied to such a large mother ship.

It is a story of a telephone company called Qwest, that built a transcontinental fiber-optic network of unprecedented capacity, and then sold twelve fibers to create competition so capable that the competitor almost put Qwest out of business.

It is a story of hundreds of facilities based competitors that were created with the stroke of a President's pen in 1996, and then -- just a few years later -- these same companies were put out of business by a million tiny pen strokes by the Courts and the FCC .

It is a story of a nation that passed a law mandating competition as a substitute for regulation, and then competition was destroyed.

It is the story of the rise of a neo-conservative economics that correctly notices the market-signalling power of money, but mistakenly denies that non-financial signals are meaningful. By this mistake, the Neo-Econs reject an 800 year old principle of common law that when you offer public services, you have public duties.

It is a story of people struggling to be free. When every major record label abandons DRM, this is a victory! When when one third of iPhones are unlocked, this is a victory. When Verizon Wireless says it will accept any device, this is a victory. When Comcast abandons network management by packet forgery, this is a victory. The Neo-Econs say these are responses to market forces, but they're WRONG. These are victories -- our victories!

The struggle to keep the Internet free is just like the struggle to have our vote count, just like the struggle to control the size of our family, just like the struggle to work a 40 hour week, and just like the struggle to end stupid wars. We win, AND can't stop fighting. Nobody's going to say, "Hey have some more rights." If we want a free Internet, we have to take it!

The story we will tell in the next two days is the story of the future of the Internet.
It is an unfinished story. We are writing it. But we do not know how it will end.

But let me show you some technology that illustrates what is possibile.
*** SHOW FIBER CABLES***

This cable has 864 fibers.

Each fiber carry 160 different wavelengths, each wavelength can carry 10 Gigabits.
The technology to do this has been in the marketplace for at least five years.
This 1.6 terabit signal can go from Washington DC to Chicago without active regeneration.

How big is a gigabit? One gigabit can carry the entire conventional telephony load of a city of 100,000 people. So one fiber can carry 1600 Gbits, or 160 million people -- two or three fibers would carry the conventional telephony of the entire United States.

Here's another way to see this cable. If all 6.5 billion people on earth had a telephone, and if they were all off-hook, generating 64 kilobits a second, and all those conversations were routd to this cable, there would be 100 fibers still dark.

Now imagine this running down your street. Imagine that each house could have two or three fibers, more bandwidth than a telco in each house.

In other words, the problem is completely mis-framed. Comcast and Verizon -- and even Net Neutrality Advocates -- are are talking how to manage scarcity. We should be talking about how to achieve abundance.

But -- and there is a big but here -- All of this transmission capacity takes energy. And this is a problem. Global computing and communictions uses as much energy as the airline industry. We Netheads have a social duty to reduce the energy our infrastructure uses. I believe that we can go much further -- I think we can use the Internet to manage energy, to cut traffic congestion, to reduce travel, to actually conserve more energy than we use. We'll devote almost all of Tuesday afternoon to discussing this hypothesis . . .

How will the Internet story end?

Will a few of the smartest telephone companies, such as BT and Verizon who have the wisdom and foresight and courage to sponsor Freedom to Connect, evolve to be the abundant Internet access providers of tomorrow?

Or will the biggest telcos corporatize and homogenize the Internet in the image of Clear Channel?
Will they lock it down so that personal expression and innovation are driven into an isolated ghetto accessible to only a small minority, where people must devote their lives, like monks, to gain its benefits? Will an oppressive government make the Internet so invasive that nobody creative goes there anymore?

Or will new entities, maybe cities or non-profits,
but maybe new forms of organization made possible by the Internet itself,
arise to build and operate the infrastructure we must have.

Or will other countries, such as Japan and the Netherlands, or maybe China or Brazil, show the way, assuming the United States is capable of seeing what they put in front of our collective face?

Welcome to Freedom to Connect. I can't wait to see how the story of the Future of the Internet evolves over the next two days!

Not all of my confblogging today will benefit from the speakers' notes. If anyone has any corrections as the day progresses, let me know.

Learning Kicks A$$

2008-03-15T12:26:00.003-07:00

But what I love most about SXSW is this.

You have an idea. You meet someone. You share said idea. And magic happens.

I described an idea I had to John from Metanotes, and he made it happen. The result: Everything I Know About X, I Learned from Y.

We're going to find a proper place to host this (right now, it's a gift), and we'll see what happens.

For now: What have you learned... from whom?

South by Southwest Trip Report

2008-03-15T11:30:00.003-07:00

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of participating in the 2008 South by Southwest Interactive festival. I flew down Friday evening and stayed at a hotel about three miles south of downtown, just off I-35. And even though I wasn't in the thick of things, things were thick enough.

This year's festival was probably 50-100% (my gut sense) larger than last year's, and I heard that attendance capped out at almost 8,000 people. That's too big. Last year's felt a little too big, but this year was big enough that I didn't -- and couldn't -- run into everyone I wanted to catch up with randomly in the halls like I've been able to in previous years. So the reunion aspect of SXSW might be effectively over.

That said, I did see some long-time friends (Harper! Kyle! Thomas! Srini! Larry!), attended a couple of great parties (including one hosted by Threadless, Etsy, and Moo -- and DJ'd by Flosstradamus), made some new friends, ate some good food, went to one of my favorite record stores, and moderated one awesome panel.

The subject was Online Advertising for Newbies, and we had a stellar lineup. Darren Rowse, Wendy Piersall, Jim Benton, and Rett Clevenger all stepped up to share what they've learned in terms of the earliest stages and steps of adding ads -- and otherwise monetizing -- blogs and small- to medium-sized Web sites. It was a standing-room only audience, with more than 100 people in the room. And if you're interested, Tris Hussey of MapleLeaf 2.0 liveblogged the session. SXSW should offer a podcast of the proceedings soon.

It was a great trip, and I hope SXSW makes it past the growing pains well!

Products I Love XXIV

2008-03-15T09:43:00.002-07:00

Do you know how much water you use when you shower? Do you know how long your average shower lasts? Chances are, you use more water than you need to -- and that you shower for longer than you need to. I know I do!

Not long ago, C. and I got a shower timer from Envirosax. It attaches to your shower wall with a suction cup, and it's basically a four-minute hourglass that spins around in the holder. When you start your shower, turn it around to start the grains (ours are coral pink) flowing. And when they've run out, you're done.

Or you should be. I've found that if I shampoo but don't use conditioner, I can shower in four minutes or less. But if I condition, I have to go a little longer. Sometimes, C. will turn off the water and stop the timer in order to conserve water.

It's an interesting challenge -- and a good thing to be mindful of. Also helps you get ready faster in the morning.

Green Frog from Kyoto

2008-03-15T09:05:00.002-07:00

Before heading out for the laundromat this morning, I sorted through some piles on the kitchen table. In one, I found a small plastic bag with a tiny porcelain frog figurine inside. We're talking smaller than your fingernail. I've had this for years and never really looked at it closely -- always figured it was a knickknack too small to display anywhere. But this morning I opened it up and found this little slip of paper:

GREEN FROG from KYOTO

In Japanese, the word "kaeru" means both "frog" and "return." It is said that anyone carrying this frog in a coin purse will have the good fortune of having his money returned to him.

The thing has utility! So we dropped it in my coin purse, a yellow Puwawa coin purse from Sanrio, oddly enough.

Do you have any talismans that you carry with you? Does anyone know anything more about this green frog from Kyoto?

Happy Birthday, E-Commerce

2008-03-05T17:25:00.003-08:00

The 25th anniversary of online retail almost slipped by me quietly and unobserved. Thanks to Alex Randall, a professor of communication at the University of the Virgin Islands, these birthday wishes are belated. I would have had no idea of the importance of Tuesday, March 4, 1983, were it not for an email Randall sent the Air-L discussion list.

25 years ago yesterday, the proprietors of Boston Computer Exchange -- including one Alex Randall -- sold a computer online via Delphi, a BBS of the time. The buyer was dialed in from Chile.

While it's arguable whether this was the first online sale -- surely, sales had been arranged via email -- the date could very well mark the first time a database of products was synchronized with an online network. And that's notable.

You can watch Randall tell the tale himself.

Any other notable online business milestones? This is fascinating stuff.

Clothes Whore XVIII

2008-02-23T13:39:00.001-08:00

IMG_4656.JPG
Originally uploaded by h3athrow

And this fuzzy photo makes four.

Clothes Whore XVII

2008-02-23T13:38:00.003-08:00

IMG_4658.JPG
Originally uploaded by h3athrow

Yet another shirt from Northern Sun.

Clothes Whore XVI

2008-02-23T13:38:00.001-08:00

IMG_4659.JPG
Originally uploaded by h3athrow

Another shirt from Northern Sun.

Clothes Whore XV

2008-02-23T13:37:00.001-08:00

IMG_4657.JPG
Originally uploaded by h3athrow

One of the shirts I got from Northern Sun.

Products I Love XXIII

2008-02-22T20:35:00.002-08:00

I used to be a religious -- as in, frequent -- customer of Northern Sun, a progressive mail-order retailer based in Minnesota. I was especially fond of their "recycle this envelope" labels, which you could affix onto a business-reply envelope in order to address it and use it. For years, I just reused business-reply envelopes. Now, I'm not so picky, and the labels appear to be discontinued, so go figure.

But I recently dropped $20 their way in order to get some T-shirts I could work out in at the Greenpoint YMCA. We joined the Y in early February, and I've been hard pressed to single out T-shirts -- and I have too many -- that are worthy of sweating in... and then still wearing in other settings. So far, I've pegged a ratty Septophilia Records T-shirt as one that's not nice enough for everyday wear, but otherwise, it's Threadless and other shirts too nice to sully.

Northern Sun has this deal where you can get discontinued T-shirts for $5 a pop. You can't choose them, but you can buy them. I just got four -- and they're awesome.

Pomes

2008-02-22T18:43:00.002-08:00

So, I've been writing more poetry lately, even though I don't consider myself a poet.

A couple were just published by Klyd Watkins in The Time Garden. Today, you can see them by clicking down the nav bar twice.

More to come, I'm sure.

The City As Video Game

2008-02-20T09:57:00.002-08:00

Jim Munroe's promotional video for the video game N makes me want to go outside and run around.

It's like parkour crossed with Pac Manhattan.

A Book I'd Like to Read

2008-02-19T18:43:00.005-08:00

I might not be -- far from! -- one of the first 50 people to blog about this book -- John Grant's Green Marketing Manifesto, but if I am -- or even close -- dude, email me.

I'm on a conference call right now with What Is Enlightenment? editors and readers about their recent feature story "A Brighter Shade of Green." They name drop Bruce Sterling, WorldChanging, and William McDonough as inspirations. And there's tons to think about -- and do.

Just recently, I read about a new book about green marketing that focuses on the shift from environmentally oriented marketing to health-oriented marketing. And for the life of me, I forget its title and author. Do any Media Dieticians know what book I'm remembering? I've got some loose threads I need to tie into a knot.

(P.S. Brooking rocks.)

Media Diet Book Club: February-March 2008 selections

2008-02-16T17:48:00.003-08:00

I'd like to start a Media Diet Book Club. I'm not totally sure how it will work, but my thinking is that I'll select a title each month, Media Dieticians can buy it if they're interested, and we'll have an email-based discussion group to explore key topics and themes in the text.

If you'd like to join the book club, sign up for the list.

Here are the first two titles:

February 2008: The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret by Seth Shulman

March 2008: The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World by Wagner James Au

We'll see what happens! If anything, this'll help focus and direct my reading somewhat.

Media Diet Book Club: Forthcoming Books 2008

2008-02-16T17:14:00.005-08:00

This is an incomplete list of media- and journalism-related books scheduled to be published this year. If you're aware of others that you think are worth mentioning in Media Diet, let me know!

Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web

A Journalism of Humanity: A Candid History of the World's First Journalism School

Can We Trust the BBC?

Principles of Convergent Journalism

Media in the Digital Age

The Place to Be: Washington, CBS, and the Glory Days of Television News

The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York

Center Field Shot: A Hitory of Baseball on Television

Scandal and Civility: Journalism and the Origins of American Politics

Understanding Media Economics

From Betamax to Blockbuster: Video Stores and the Invention of Movies on Video

Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means

Stealing Empire: P2P, Intellectual Property and Hip-Hop Subversion

Shock Jocks: America's Talk Radio Problem

Power, Politics and Identity in South African Media

Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human

Virtual Identities: The Construction of Selves in Cyberspace

The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30)

It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap As News

Playing the Past: History and Nostalgia in Video Games

The Environment and the Press: From Adventure Writing to Advocacy

We're All Journalists Now: The Transformation of the Press and Reshaping of the Law in the Internet Age

Off the Record: The Press, the Government, and the War over Anonymous Sources

The Media and Peace

The Mechanical Bride (Facsimile)

Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge

Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software

White News: The Untold Story of Racism in American Media and the Journalists Who Fought It

A TV Guide to Life: How I Learned Everything I Needed to Know From Watching Television

The Conservative Resurgence and the Press: The Media's Role in the Rise of the Right

Sounds of Change: A History of FM Broadcasting in America

Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment

The Social Media Playbook: Listen, Look, Join and Lead

Global Bollywood

Digital Destiny: New Media and the Future of Democracy

Global TV: Exporting Television and Culture in the World Market

The Encyclopedia of Reality Television: The Ultimate Guide to Over 20 Years of Reality TV from The Real World to Dancing with the Stars

The Al Jazeera Effect: How the New Global Media Are Reshaping World Politics

Losing the News: The Uncertain Future of the News That Feeds Democracy

Cory Doctorow's Futuristic Tales

2008-02-16T13:23:00.002-08:00

Science fiction and comic books have almost always led parallel lives. Their history and fandoms have many similarities, and the two have almost always had a slightly uneasy relationship. While there have been several examples of successful licensed science-fiction properties in comics -- for example, Star Wars -- two examples of sf comics have affected me most strongly.

In the early '50s, Al Feldstein adapted 27 of Ray Bradbury's stories for EC Comics. They accurately capture the tone and tenor of Bradbury's writing, particularly stories such as those in the Martian Chronicles, where Bradbury blends malaise and energetic speculation quite ably. And I vaguely recall a backup story in an issue of Captain Victory, that Jack Kirby comic published by Pacific Comics in the early '80s, that almost blew my mind. I don't remember the artist or writer, much less if there were a previous source, but it's about a comet that turns out to be inscribed with alien script. Shades of Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen King's Tommyknockers, things don't turn out so well for the astronauts who make that discovery.

The first issue of Cory Doctorow's Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now doesn't hit me as strongly as those previous examples of science-fiction comics, but it is an interesting case. And I'd like to thank Andrea Larson of Elure Marketing for sending me the issue. With a Sam Kieth cover (oh, that Maxx! That Zero Girl!), the first issue adapts Cory's story "Anda's Game," which is a play on Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game.

The interior art by Esteve Polls isn't as impressive as the cover, but it's a solid interpretation of Cory's story, which was originally published in Salon and Cory's collection Overclocked. Perhaps more interesting is the brief interview with Cory by editor Tom Waltz, which touches somewhat on the adaptation process.

So, does Cory's work translate well to comics? "Anda's Game" might not translate especially well because it's an idea story and a political story that doesn't lend itself terribly well to action or high-impact visuals. But I enjoyed the read and hope to see the others at some point -- perhaps they'll be collected.

Burn to Shine: Seattle

2008-02-16T13:07:00.003-08:00

I can think of few better ways to spend a welcome, sunny but cold Saturday afternoon than watching the fifth DVD in the Burn to Shine series. Produced by Brendan Canty and Christoph Green, the series is impressive on multiple levels. One, each edition meets the needs of the best mix tape or compilation record: They turn you on to great new music, while including and introducing some elements you might not seek out on your own. Two, it's a fun concept: Gather a bunch of local musicians who represent a given scene in a certain state in time, and film them in a house that's about to be destroyed; then film the demolition. And three, visually and musically, the DVDs show a love and care for music that's not precious or protective; they're pure celebration.

Thanks to Deb, who turned me on to a previous edition, I ordered the Seattle DVD, which was recorded on Jan. 27, 2007. There's nothing on here that's bad, and what's good is great. I especially appreciated the performances by Harvey Danger, Dave Bazan, Benjamin Gibbard (who organized the musicians who performed), and the Long Winters. I was a little surprised by how much I enjoyed the Eddie Vedder selection, and it was really Gibbard who emerged as my favorite. He's a songwriter and performer to follow.

This is a wonderful project -- elegant in its simplicity and beautiful in its execution... if not sheer existence.

Class Inaction II

2008-02-15T13:53:00.001-08:00

Due to low enrollment, my NYU course, Enter the Blogosphere, has been canceled. Sadness!

We'll see if I can get back on the teaching tip next semester.

Class Action II

2008-02-01T10:36:00.000-08:00

I just received an email from a student who's registered to take this spring's NYU class Enter the Blogosphere. While I've yet to confirm that there are enough students registered for it to be a go, things look heartening.

It's not too late; if you're interested in taking a 10-session media studies course focusing on blogs and blogging, check out last time's class blog to check out the syllabus, reading list, and other reportage on the course.

And please consider signing up! Should be a great class.

On the Rejection of Friends

2008-01-30T17:02:00.000-08:00

In recent days, I've received a swarm of Friendster requests from people in the Philippines, mostly young women. I rejected them all.

Usually, I tend to approve most anyone requesting a connection through the main social network services. I have few restrictions and use friend connections as a way to bookmark people -- in the social network services, I can keep track of there where- and what-abouts, and in a pinch, I can contact them through those channels.

In MySpace, I reject requests also -- unless they're really people I know or musicians I might find interesting. Accepting musician add requests is a way to support their music even if you haven't connected with them otherwise.

Does that approach make those visible friendships meaningless? I don't think so. But how do you use social network services? I think the choices we make are more nuanced than many people studying the social dynamics of the Web might realize.

Best AltWeekly Writing and Design 2007

2008-01-20T13:13:00.000-08:00

I also recently received a copy of the Best AltWeekly Writing and Design 2007 book published by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Press.

As a judge for the Website Content Feature category this past year, I had a hand in selecting the winners recognized in the book. While I was pleased to have some of my comments on the pieces quoted in the hard copy, I was disappointed that the online articles weren't actually reprinted in print form. Regardless, you can check out the winners online.

This is an underpromoted effort. While the best American magazine writing warrants its own annual anthology series and we have the Project Censored effort, the AAN awards should be just as recognized. Alt.weeklies contain some of the most critical and important journalism today, and the best of the best should be lauded appropriately. Similarly, the Web categories should be given similar shrift as the print categories. Print articles are reprinted in this volume, and online articles should be, too.

Regardless, you should buy this book every year. You'll be glad you did.

Using Zines to Construct and Craft Meaning

2008-01-20T13:00:00.000-08:00

A piece I wrote in the early '90s, "From Fandom to Feminism: An Analysis of the Zine Press", has been reprinted as part of the current Stepping Out course book published by Pearson Professional Learning in Canada.

The course book is a 250-page guide to constructing and crafting meaning for writing instructors who specialize in grades 7-12 education. I originally reprinted the paper, which was written for a class while in university, in the spring 1997 issue of Media Diet (the print zine). Chip Rowe later included it in his Web site for The Book of Zines.

And now, it's included in a writing teachers' guide, accompanied by the following questions.

In your opinion or experience, is zines' material or topics likely to be useful to your subject area?

How important is it that -- as a teacher -- you stay abreast of popular culture influences, such as zines?

It's an honor to be reprinted in such a book, and if you're at all involved in writing education, please consider the Stepping Out resources for your class work.

Rethinking What We Wrap Around History

2008-01-20T12:35:00.001-08:00

One of my favorite locations in Brooklyn is the Old Stone House, a reconstruction of a 17th-century Dutch farmhouse in Brooklyn. It currently sits in a public park near Prospect Park, and various groups are currently considering some renovations to the park.

Tuesday, January 22: 7 pm - 9 pm

Play space, open space, green space - what do you imagine?!? Join us for a group discussion hosted by the Old Stone House and Brooklyn Parks to get your input on potential renovations to the 5th Avenue side of the park between 3rd and 4th streets.

Please RSVP and let us know if you are planning to attend -- [via email] or 718-768-3195. This is a wonderful opportunity for community input, and we look forward to hearing from you.

If you live nearby, or if you'd just like to lend your voice and ideas, get involved! It's a wonderful structure in the midst of a modern urban area.

Dissecting the Times

2008-01-20T12:20:00.000-08:00

While I'm pretty sure I stop shy of being obsessive compulsive, I do like to put things in order. I like alphabetizing my records. When catching up on reading back issues of magazines, I read them in date order. And, if this morning's read of the New York Times is any indication, I like to read my Sunday newspaper in a specific order.

Struck by that observation this morning, I took note of how I organized the various sections of the newspaper before reading it. Half of the paper is delivered on Sunday. I don't know how the following list falls out in terms of what section was delivered when, because I don't read the Sunday Times on Saturday. It's the Sunday Times.

Regardless, before reading the paper, I unbag both days' deliveries and arrange them in the order I plan to attack the sections. Here is that order:

Book Review
The City -- I'm especially fond of the FYI Q&A column
The Metro Section
Magazine -- I look for Rob Walker, Dan Clowes, and I save the Acrostic for Caitlin
Sunday Styles
Arts & Leisure
Real Estate -- the first section. The second is all listings and less interesting
Week in Review
Business
Automobiles -- a quick flip
The front section
Sports
Travel -- usually my least favorite section, and therefore, the last to be read

I don't know how consistent I am Sunday to Sunday -- I'd imagine there's some variance -- but I found this interesting.

What Sunday newspaper do you read -- and how do you do so?

Travel Reading

2008-01-17T18:51:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week, I received the prototype issue of a new magazine planned by 8020 Publishing, the San Francisco-based business behind JPG Magazine. Titled Everywhere, the magazine's tagline is "Travel is all around you," and that seems to be a solid theme throughout: Place matters.

This prototype issue is edited by one Todd Lappin, the man behind Telstar Logistics, a member of the Well, and one-time editor at Business 2.0 and Wired. The man's got cred!

I had some time to spend with the magazine this evening, and it's an interesting read. Like Monocle, they map their content in the front of the book so you can pick your bits geographically if so inclined. But otherwise, all places are roughly equal to another, and there's a heavy international angle. The magazine's about finding yourself places, and what it means -- and how it feels -- to find yourself there. It's not travel how to, and it's not adventure travel. It's more like being travel. Wherever you are, there you go. Do, be, do, be, do.

My favorite items included pieces on old postcards and re-photography, the Postcards section (akin to JPG somewhat), the "Tokyo People Watching" article and accompanying guide to street food lanterns, the "Geeky Tucson" and "Tumbleweed Tucson" companion pieces, the Dan Gillmor gear bag roundup, and the mention of the Point It book (I agree; it's a necessity.).

Given Everywhere's relationship to JPG, it's little surprise the mag is as photo heavy as it is. That's not a bad thing, necessarily, but it would be neat to get some more writing in there. And maybe even some more resource listings. The blog mentions are OK, but it'd be good to highlight some of the Yelp-style hotspots in some of the locations, if possible.

Still, I'm a growing fan of 8020's Web-meets-print community publishing model, and if JPG and Everywhere are at all successful, the model is highly extensible. Not to encourage them to spread themselves too thin too soon, but picture, if you will, similarly styled periodicals on cooking, parenting, and other lifestyle-oriented themes. Pretty cool possibilities!

Can't Help But Pop

2008-01-15T19:08:00.000-08:00

Katy Perry might not have been destined to hit it big, but I bet she does. She kinda can't not, you know? Even though her debut album doesn't drop until this spring, based on a CD EP released in November and some live performances, including a New Year's Eve gig in San Francisco, Perry's got a resume that just says superstar.

Even though she's yet to release an album, Perry's appeared in music videos for Gym Class Heroes, POD, and Carbon Leaf. She's had a song on The Hills. She's got a song opening the Oxygen show Fight Girls. She had a song on the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants soundtrack. And she was on the ABC Family program Wildfire.

That's an impressive resume leading up to your first full-length release! She's even attracted the attention of Perez Hilton, whose mention in his blog last March earned him promo package placement. Blurbed! Perry's been working with some pretty impressive people: Glen Ballard (producer of Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill), Dr. Luke (who produced Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend"), and Greg Wells, who co-wrote Perry's breakout single "Ur So Gay." And she's sung for the Matrix, the songwriting powerhouse behind hits by Lavigne, Hilary Duff, and Britney Spears. All by the age of 23.

The record's been three years in the making, according to press materials, and earier this month, I got a copy of the EP courtesy of Jules Di Cesaris. For the last couple of days, I've been giving it a listen.

The single, "Ur So Gay," is a slow-paced giggle-fit slam on an emo boy who might have broken Perry's heart. While the repetitive melody is somewhat infectious, the song doesn't have a lot of lasting power. In addition to the SMS-text slang in the title, the song has a homophobic undercurrent that's as conflicting as it is "funny." While I'm no fan of using "gay" as a derogatory term, I can imagine the remix getting turntable time at gay dance clubs -- as well as straight ones.

You might get tired of the song by EP's end, because it's on it five times. There's the edit -- as opposed to the actual song? -- the remix, an instrumental, an instrumental remix, and an a cappella version. It's the a cappella version that's my favorite. Stripping the song of everything but Perry's voice let's you focus on her and her alone. Can she sing? Kinda. But just see if you make it through the scat singing without taking her even less seriously than she's taking herself.

It would've been nice if she'd taken her cover of the Outfield's 1986 hit "Use Your Love" (which peaked at No. 6 on Billboard's Hot 100 Singles chart) a little more -- or less -- seriously. From the initial guitar riff, the cover's just a little too close to true, despite its distorted, synth-driven vocals. Similar to the Ataris's cover of "Boys of Summer," the song just begs an original approach rather than a dead-on copy.

But the inclusion of the cover might telegraph Perry's goal. She's not aiming for high-minded new-school jazz like Nellie McKay. She's not working out her blues like Amy Winehouse. She's not pop tarting up punk rock like Avril Lavigne. And she's not trying to reinvent herself like Alanis Morissette. She's going for camp. "Ur So Gay" will get the jocks giggling. The remix will get folks of all persuasions out on the dancefloor. "Use Your Love" will tug the heart strings of the '80s reminiscence set.

And "Lost," the outlier on the EP, will keep us guessing. Can she really sing? Does she really want to? Or is Katy Perry so tightly packaged and promoted that she can't help but pop?

Life Drawing

2008-01-01T20:34:00.000-08:00

I've been on a bit of an idea binge tonight, planning much of my media intake for the year in terms of book summary services, newsletters, and the like. And while it's been awhile since I've spent any time with ChangeThis, a 12-page piece by Ralph Perrine has rekindled my interest in the service.

Drawings That Will Change Your Life offers four different hand-drawn models you can use to make decisions, set priorities, and otherwise make your life work better. It's a bit of a pitch for a calendar Perrine's selling -- that contains 12 different drawings -- but there's enough meat here that you can start using his ideas immediately.

My favorite might be the 360 Degree Awareness drawing in which you map what you're aware of -- and make new connections among existing ideas, tools, partners, and projects to come up with something entirely other... something you weren't aware of. A useful exercise that might help you discover a new direction.

Archives and Sour Dreams

2008-01-01T07:01:00.000-08:00

I've been lazy to address this, but my blog archives stop at 02/18/2007 - 02/24/2007 even though I've been posting since then. Does anyone have any idea what I need to do with Blogger to make sure all my archives are accessible and visible?