Xark!

iPhone Rashomon

Sloop flatters me with his story of my tech geekiness. Like him, I have waited for over a year to get my hands on the marvelous (if not entirely unproblematic) device known throughout the universe as iPhone (now, 3G). And I'm very excited for Sloop to be able to get one, and hope that his wait goes smoothly. For my part, I'm restraining myself by not texting him daily about how I'm texting him daily on my iPhone 3G. He has no ideas how hard that is for me not to do.

Anyway, instead of responding to Sloop's eloquent post, I thought I should provide an alternative version of events; not to dispute Sloop, but to provide additional perspective. My iPhone saga goes a bit differently than his, and although I consider it to have a happier ending -- in as much as I left the store with an iPhone in my possession -- it certainly came through much more frustration than his blissfully patient meditation. I provide this account solely for the historical record.

The Empire Strikes Barack!

Info R/Evolution, Intertwingularity & Xarkism

I built this blog began in the summer of 2005 based on a couple of insistent thoughts:

1. The standard media/cultural categories for topics and discussions were entirely too sterile and limiting for the way I wanted to think and talk;
2. Based on my mode of working as a reporter (diving intensely into one topic after another) it was increasingly obvious to me that my learning in one area (quantum physics) influenced my thinking about another subject (microbiology), which provided insight into seemingly separate topics (mass media, sociology, politics, etc.).

Hence, Xark began with a foundational statement: Because there are no unrelated topics.

Our thought? Maybe by involving people from multiple backgrounds in multiple topics, we'd have more interesting and productive discussions and insights. I based this on the notion that communites that grow up around "themed" blogs tend to evolve into monocultures. Ecosystem biology teaches us that a monoculture (tree farm) simply isn't as sustainable, healthy or as valuable as a naturally diverse ecosystem (rainforest).

These days I'm happy to observe how well those concepts fit into our developing understanding of knowledge and human intelligence in the networked world. From Peter Morville and his book Ambient Findability to Dave Weinberger and his Everything is Miscellaneous, the leading edge of the culture is rapidly incorporating radical ideas about the semantic structure of information -- quite literally, how the Web works better when we pattern our information systems on human-ness. The Web has rather haphazardly grown into an extension of ourselves. The next step (generically, The Semantic Web) may be very deliberately built as an extension of human consciousness.

So Ted Nelson's notion of Intertwingularity (1974) re-emerges in a new contest and reflects its futuristic light on the notion of Xarking.

Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged -- people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchaical, categorizable and sequential when then they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled.

So Anthropology professor Michael Wesch begins to make sense instantly: Everything is connected. Nothing is separate.

I suspect it was always this way. Perhaps we saw it differently before because information and communication was so slow and precious and difficult before. It took improvements in maritime and navigational technology before we could "see" the Earth as round. Maybe it takes the explosion of networked media for us to "see" that everything is an expression of the one, that technology is evolution by non-biological means, that political, economic and social systems based on keeping us artificially separate and oppositional are wasteful relics.

The rest of the world doesn't think this way right now. We're still in the minority. But that could change.

What are your favorite apps & tips?

did an inventory today of stuff that I use (Web apps, free downloads, free utilities, bargain coolnesses, etc.), with the thought that it might make a pretty cool Friday topic if I divided up the best, most useful, most helpful, most fun, etc., by categories.

Here's my  (incomplete, unfinished ... I'm tired now) starter list of nominees. What would you add? What would you replace?

THE BIGGIES (regardless of category)

1. Firefox: Without a doubt the best browser I've ever used.
2. Twitter: Simple, but so many uses.
3. Google Reader: Best RSS reader I've used. Share with friends. Post to site. Supports tags.
4. G-mail: I should use it for everything, just haven't made the switch yet.
5. Stumble: I don't randomly surf anymore, because Stumble is better.
6. Vimeo: A video-sharing/hosting site with a decent FLV codec and lots of free bandwidth.
7. Facebook: Even if you're not sure about social sites, this one is useful.
8. Portable Apps: With OpenOffice portable suite, this is an amazing set of tools.
9. OpenOffice: Why buy MS Office?

For all you twentysomethings...

From this morning's XKCD...

Best. Tech. Satire. EVER.

It's BRONZE ORIENTATION DAY!

If I'm ever again in a position where I'm supposed to speak to a bunch of newspaper and newspaper website people about new technology and web culture, I'm going to show this video and move on. And when people say stupid stuff, I'm going to give them stones.

Saw this last night on my new favorite show, That Mitchell and Webb Look.

"... zeitgeisty, and most importantly, slightly shiny!"

More pop-culture zombie evidence

As per my Tweet on Wednesday... zombies are everywhere...

For those of you following the soap opera progress of Brunch of the Living Dead, I've been working out some production schedules and roles and I'm planning to go talk to a restaurant owner on Saturday.

The headlines?

• There will be three subsets of zombies: porch, focus group, and brunch-only.
• I'll need just four zombies for the porch and six for the focus group, but these subsets do not overlap.
• However, both porch and focus-group zombies are welcome to appear in the brunch finale. We'll fill that out with "brunch-only" zombies.

Sorry this takes so long to work out -- but we have to do our creative and collaborative work in the margins of our jobs.

Thinking in x,y...

Previously on xkcd...

New device from an old idea

Over at my media blog: An appeal for a new interface between printed products (newspapers, magazines, maps, tickets, etc.) and the Web via... (wait for it)...

Your cell phone!

It's the failed dream of the :CueCatters/GoCoders, but the advent of the iPhone makes this development all but inevitable. A phone that can display Web pages and take photos? Bingo. Now all we need from the user-end is a scanner to read a tiny bar-code icon.

Testing: BlogTalkRadio

One problem with geeks who do journalism: They tend to make everything sound easier than it actually is, and much of what they write is flat-out misleading to people who don't come to the material with their level of expertise. People who write the copy and user-interfaces for new Web-based services are just about as geek-centric, too.

This is why I've tried so many products and services -- I'm not an early adopter, I'm just trained to verify things from the perspective of the user. Which brings us to Robert Scoble on Feb. 22, writing about BlogTalkRadio.com:

I just call a phone number, +1-646-200-0000, (you can call it too). I record a conversation with my cell phone, and then it builds an RSS feed that points to MP3’s of my conversation. What’s the URL? It is my cell phone’s phone number. No need to sign up. No need to give personal details, or even agree to anything.

This way I can make a podcast whenever I want. Utterz does something similar, but you gotta setup Utterz before you make your phone call. I like frictionless publishing and no signup before you start makes a lot of sense to me.

So I called the number, recorded something... and... then... confusion.

Where do I go to find my recording? BlogTalkRadio? I guess that the URL is a dot.com and try that. It asks me to sign up. I search from something with my cellphone number as a URL. Nothing. I browse by new content. Nothing. So I create a user account, give it some info, blah blah blah. And there it is.
Now. How do I link my user account to my cell phone? Because my Profile setup never asks me for my cell phone number. And now I'm really confused about what BlogTalkRadio is supposed to be. It's certainly not introducing itself the way Scoble described it.

So I backtrack. What's the URL I looked up for Scoble's feed? I apply a little domain logic (which the average computer user probably lacks) and figure out that if I take that URL and change the number to my cell phone number, I should find...

Bingo. An RSS feed based on my phone number, and I can play the MP3 file.

But now I'm wondering about utility. And the security of my phone number. And whether this fits into what I do. Or would think to do.

With Utterz I can post live to my blog from anywhere. Could I use an RSS feed for my phone posts? Possibly. I'll add it to my tool box, along with dozens of other free Web services for which I've registered and tinkered and forgotten.

BlogTalkRadio -- despite an incredibly valuable plug from A-List blogger Robert Scoble -- has failed to explain itself to me. Will it get a second chance? Only if I find a reason to put some energy into caring about it, and right now, that's not likely.

There's a lesson in there somewhere, folks.

Another g-damn magnum opus

I just published an enormous overview of my ideas about the future of media ("Foundations of 21st century journalism") over at my revived media blog. I'm rather appalled by how long it is (3,275 words), but it's a big topic. And I'm not writing for everyone.

The subheads:

Monoculture to ecosystem
Structured and semi-structured data
Scalability
Open Source
Informatics
The Blur: News, information and advertising
Newsbots and Intelligent Agents
Multiple revenue streams and business models
The Intelligence Briefing model
Mainstream retrenchment
Nichestreaming
E Pluribus Unum
Watchmen watchers
Credibility grading
Death of monopoly pricing and profits
Game theory
Social technology -- virtual and otherwise
The Web is Local
True Convergence
Curating information
New elites
The Creative Middle Class
Surplus people
Yes, newspapers are going away

This was written for the students and faculty at the Journalism Department at the University of Mississippi, but you're all welcome to have your say.

Meme 2008: "Control doesn't scale"

Three words of infinite simplicity and value (via Dave Weinberger):

"Control doesn't scale."

Want to understand the convulsion that lies ahead of us? The transitions in economics, technology, management, politics, media and art that must be made if we're to benefit from the new tools? The divisions that animate our "culture war" bullshit sessions? 

Three words: "Control doesn't scale."

Think that's a recipe for anarchy? Think again. Think it's unprecedented? It isn't. Think distributed control is a geektopian pipedream? I disagree.

Human beings have been giving up control in exchange for the expanding wisdom and benefits of freedom for as long as we've been a species, so there's plenty of historical precedent to instruct us on what course to follow. The unprecedented part is actually the rate of change, which means that the challenge in the scaling issue really lies in the feedback loops we imagine. We can't wait around and expect the old culture to vet new ideas for us. We'll have to invent the "new normal" on the fly, and  we'll certainly screw that up a few times.

But this is the central issue. And the other thing history teaches is that the people who have control generally don't like giving it up. So that's our short-term future in a nutshell.

Meanwhile, elsewhere...

Over at the cartoon blog, this week's caption contest is up...

While over at the work blog (now largely defunct), I've got an instructional video for people who are just starting out on Twitter...

Twitter get-started tutorial from Dan Conover on Vimeo.

Twitter's business model

Today both Dave Winer and Jason Calacanis wrote about the business model for Twitter (which I'm not only using, but working up for a Friday 5 treatment). Their posts came in response to this one. I liked this idea by Calacanis, which isn't so much about Twitter as it is about business:

Bottom line? Ev shouldn't worry about a business model for another two years. Just build the service to *massive* critical mass. Get to 100M users--which is where the service is headed. If the service gets to 100M monthly users it will be worth a couple of billion... That's what I learned at AOL: Once you have critical mass you can't help but make a fortune. An absolute idiot with 10-20M users can make a ton of money. So, get to tens of millions of users and forget about money... Running a startup is NOT about revenue anymore--it's about critical mass. It's about scale. When you're playing in the big leagues with unlimited access to capital you shouldn't worry about revenue BEFORE you have critical mass.

Running a startup isn't about revenue... if you've got capital and trust and a really good product that people want. But I still dig the thinking in this case, and it's kind of a riff on his opening-session comments at ConvergeSouth in October (from my live-blog notes):

His thought: It's just as hard to make a small business as it is to make a large one so...

"You might as well go for the moon shot... Think big but take very small steps... Do something that a large group of people (it) would appeal to..."

I am Zelig*

This will mean nothing to the non-geeks, but last week Dave Winer** introduced a product that he's been hinting about for months: FlickrFan, a Mac-only application that turns your screensaver into a silent Flickrstream slideshow.

I keep Dave on my Google Reader, but didn't read much over the weekend because I was so stacked up with other stuff. So the first word I got about this came via Andy Rhinehart, who -- en route to losing to me yesterday in fantasy football -- retorted that, well, at least HE got a mention on Scripting News.

Well, here's the cool part: the mention was about Dave's visit to Spartanburg on Feb. 15 2005, the date that marked my moment of entry into my modern, geek-centric phase of life. Andy let me come up and hang around with him and Dave, which led to me writing two newspaper stories about blogging and podcasting, which led to my first conversations with Ed Cone and Dave Slusher and others. Those conversations changed my understanding of this medium, made me dissatisfied with my then-blog, and inspired me to create a new kind of blog... which led to the launching of Xark in June 2005.

Twitter jitters

I've got three functional ways of accessing Twitter, none of which work right now. And a brief scan through Technorati suggests the problem is universal. It's amazing how quickly you integrate something like this into your life, and  jarring  to discover -- through losing it -- that it's become part of your extended identity. Because dammit, I want my Twitter back.

First thought: Are the apparent problems at Twitter related to yesterday's secondary news, which was that the coverage of the Bhutto assassination was driven to some extent by Tweets from Pakistan?

Could this afternoon's issues at Twitter be the result of thousands of newspeople around the globe saying, "Wow, I gotta get this Twitter thing"?

Mitchell Baker on Firefox

This is from May, but I like what comes through here. Mitchell Baker (my new crush object) is talking about a piece of software, but the experience she's relating is the "soft" core of the cultural revolution that's taking place online -- a difficult-to-define experience that is both individual and social. I know it's not her subject, but I can't help but sense its animating presence. What If Your Business Plan Was Love?

...so we ended up or started down this path of people really loving Firefox and sometimes I think it sounds funny to describe how much people actually love a piece of software and how excited they get and how much people are willing to do to help other people adopt that and to build it, and create it. But it actually happens [laughs].

So we saw our user base grow, we saw the level of excitement -and another overused word -- ‘passion' -- related to Firefox - extend beyond our core development community to unbelievable numbers of people and that is an asset that's priceless. And there is that sense of trust that yes it's a great browser and it's better than I had before, but I also trust it.

But that is the most fundamental aspect I think of Firefox and partly it's because the product is great, partly for those that know it's because we are a public benefit organisation and we are not trying to maximise our revenue and we're not trying to generate massive private wealth for a few people. The asset is owned by the public.

I think that many people don't know about the open source nature or how it is built, but actually somehow feel that in the product, that the end result reflects how it's made and it is made in a very community‑based, very user focused way and that comes through somehow.

Holiday traffic report

Here's a snapshot of what search terms are bringing people to Xark today (and it looks like Santa's naughty list is getting longer by the second)...

Dave on software

"Software design, if you're creating wholly new products, is like haiku. Find the smallest subset of a mature product that will attract people and ship it."

--Dave Winer, writing about feature comparisons between Twitter and Blogger

To boldly go...

Noticed this morning whilst looking for information about the world's largest space agencies...

This is the United Federation of Planets emblem from Star Trek...

And this is the Starfleet emblem from Star Trek...

And this is the logo of the China National Space Agency...

On the bright side, it looks like somebody on this planet looks has a long-range plan for space exploration...

Who needs consultants now?

These came via our friend Mike Fussell yesterday, but I was so busy that I didn't click the links until this morning. It's a Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator, and with verbiage like this now available for free, I expect we'll see expensive consultants across this great land training for new employment any day now.

Monetize this, bitches!

New business: Subscribe to a personal computer

Observation: Technology advances at a rate that exceeds our capacity or budget for staying relatively current with technology. So purchasing tech is as much about anticipating where the market will go in the next year as it is about assessing your current state of tech readiness. And unless it's your job to stay current on the latest trends, the odds are you're always running behind and probably making poor decisions with you capital investments in tech. Beyond that, you've got software to evaluate, keep current and personalize, and then there's security, maintenance, repairs. Your computer is a sensitive, complex environment, and if everything isn't clicking, your productivity slows to a crawl.

Solution: Instead of buying hard