Xark!

iWait, Happily

I want to be clear at the outset of this post that a reader should not expect anything profound or political in what follows.  Rather, this should be read simply as something of an encomium to the line management skills at the Apple Store at the Green Hills Mall in Nashville.  While it may have taken them a few days to adjust to the rush on iPhones, they adjusted admirably once they had a day or two to catch their breath. 

Here’s the story:  I’ve spent the last year delaying my purchase of any of the array of phone/digital messaging systems available that would interface with my email at work.  The delay had as much to do with the fact that my Bonnie had visions of me writing emails at a family dinner as it did with the fact that everyone I knew complained about their interface (e.g., Blackberry, Treo) save owners of iPhones.  And despite the fact that I’m an AT&T subscriber, the iPhone didn’t interface with the email system used at work. My friends were telling me that the iPhone was the only way to go, and my work tech guy was telling me that was the one direction I couldn’t choose.

And then came the new iPhone 3G.  Not only is it beautiful and relatively inexpensive, but it synchs perfectly with everything at the office.  Finally, I’m ready to make my purchase.  I knew better than to go anywhere near an Apple store on the first day of sales when all the Day One Tech Geeks are out in force.  I leave that up to my friends like Spibby for whom the iPhone, and some other select gear, serves a function beyond functionality. 

Obama needs to hear from us

To put things in Army vernacular, Obama stepped on his dick last week. And no, I'm not talking about his reversal on fund-raising, which was hypocritical  but tactical.

No, I'm talking about the FISA bill. It was Obama's first true test as the leader of both a party and a movement, and let's be blunt: He flunked it. Badly. 

AP v. Bloggers: The cartoon version

News Item: Associated Press claims bloggers are infringing on its copyright, threatens action.

Right...

Lessig: The flaw in our OS

Reforming our corrupted and corrupting political system is Job No. 1 for Americans during the coming political era, and here's video of Xark hero Larry Lessig laying out the case for his Change Congress movement during his keynote address a week ago at the National Media Reform Conference.

If you haven't donated to Change Congress yet, please do. If you haven't taken the Change Congress pledge, please do that, too. And if you haven't taken the time yet to introduce yourself to these simple but transformative ideas, please watch this video (28 minutes) and wrap your brain around Lessig's clear, profound ideas.

Why we're not blogging here

Today my mother wrote to see if we were OK, because we haven't been blogging much. This, then, is the 21st century: "Now be sure to eat right. And wear clean underwear and a nice hat. And be sure to blog every day."

In fact, the reason we're not blogging much at Xark is because Janet and I are blogging/vlogging and podcasting our collective asses off at SpoletoToday 2008. Janet's in charge this year, which means her dream has finally come true: She gets to tell me what to do, and I have to do it.

Here are the videos I've put up so far...

Monkey: Journey to the Grocery Store

Monkey: Journey to the Grocery Store from Dan Conover on Vimeo.

The second (better) Amistad video

Amistad: Race, art, history and opera from Dan Conover on Vimeo.

CreateSouth & DIY News

Janet and I are heading up the road early Saturday morning with Mike Fussell to the inaugural CreateSouth conference, which is being led by our hero Dave Slusher (with the help of other people, including our hero Heather Solos). The keynote is our hero Ed Cone, who is one of the forces behind ConvergeSouth, in Greensboro, NC.

Our only contribution to CreateSouth this year is to present a workshop, but I'm kinda excited by the concept (and thankful to Dave for letting me explore it): Building an ad hoc breaking news network out of free tools. We're going to try to build one in 45 minutes while talking about how to use it, and this week I started working on the beta (you can see the blog here).

Magic = Doing what you imagine

Twenty-six years ago I sold my clothes and books to buy groceries and Bugler tobacco to last me out the final two weeks of school and exams. Twenty-five years ago I had a script for a 10-minute film I could have shot with borrowed equipment if I'd had less than $200. Twenty-four years ago I could have quit my job cutting greens for $4 an hour and made double that if I could have come up with $500 to buy a used pickup truck and a push power mower.

Later that year (1984)  I thought it might be a good move to start a coffee shop in a vacant storefront on Howard Street in Boone, NC, just a few blocks from campus. Thought I could offer people a place to drink coffee and smoke cigarettes and talk talk talk.  I could have pulled it off for less than $1,000 in 1984, and I even had friends who wanted in on the idea. But they were broke too.

And so we didn't start a coffee house, and I joined the Army instead.

I like to remember this now, because it doesn't really seem that long ago that I lived in a world where I could imagine anything but I couldn't do very much about any of it. Not very many people could. The deck was stacked against people without money or access, and we shaped our dreams accordingly.

More with the New Media, Old Media

A series of Tweets this morning from our friend Dave Slusher:

• All this talk about superdelegates is GOP spin to convince voters that the Democratic party is as autocratic and heavy handed as they are.
• If the mass media starts chattering on a topic and it is not verifiable, I assume it is a lie. "Long Dem primary hurts them." Uh huh. Liars.
• Mass media has the viewpoint of moneyed interests and reports thusly. In the blogosphere it is too hard to buy everyone's opinion.
• I mean "buy" as in pay for, not believe. In the interminable bloggers v. journalists fight, I'm leaning away from journalism ever more.
•   When I interviewed people at Orycon, they made me get a press pass to do it. I fought because I really didn't want one.
• I didn't want to identify as press. I'd rather tell people I'm a piano player in a whorehouse so they don't lose as much respect for me.
• Individual journalists are on the side of the angels but they don't control the cameras and printing presses.

I don't want to talk about Dave's perceptions and opinions and their relative validity. I have no doubt that some of these thoughts resemble those of many, if not yet most, Americans. I'm not even going to defend the integrity of professional journalists -- I've seen or read about too many opaque decisions that "professionals" have staunchly refused to explain.

But from my standing as a pro-jo AND a blogger, I did want to make one observation of my own. I think New Media people, as a group, tend to be overly optimistic about the integrity and immunity-from-manipulation of whatever we consider to be "the blogosphere" (does the blogosphere include the Twitterstream? Or the Videoborg?) these days.

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.

Talking to the next generation

Janet and I are preparing for a trip to the University of Mississippi next week. The agenda: Appearing on a media panel called "Quality in the Digital Environment."

My way of getting ready: Writing up my ideas -- the ideas that I can't (and shouldn't) communicate in a few minutes while sharing a stage with others. I started posting them at my otherwise defunct media blog earlier this month.

Introduction: Waking up the blog.

Quality and other essential bullshit.

Thinking versus Quorum Sensing.

Why quality is a moving target.

Gloom and doom.

More to follow...

Technological Utopia

"It gives us back the ability to create an individually oriented culture . . . It does not cost anything to operate once you have purchased the equipment.  It is truly FREE SPEECH.   . . There are no authorities to consult about how to talk or what to say.  It is decentralized . . . We want to have the control we need over our lives; by having our own communications system we can create and participate in culture and events that are impossible with one-way communications systems . . . It is the door to a new world of communications that has no experts and no authorities, and that promises to become a more and more important part of the culture." 

John Perry Barlow describing the world wide web? OR:

Dave Slusher on advertising

From an Evil Genius Tweet earlier this afternoon:
I'm not against advertising per se, but I am against douchebaggery.
Nicely put.

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.

Iran, I-exaggerate?

I have to admit: My reactions when I saw the headline-alert Tweet announcing the "Iranian naval showdown" story were not pleasant. My first thought was that our government was hyping whatever happened for political reasons.  My second thought was that the News Lords were going to uncritically pound that hype right into the national consciousness.

I don't like either thought, but that's where I find myself today. The federal government says something, and I have to discipline my reaction to make sure that I at least give it the benefit of the doubt. I wasn't this way before 2004, but that where I am now, and it's based on experience, not ideology. The Bush  administration certainly didn't invent politicized bullshit (Gulf of Tonkin, anyone?), it's just that ... great Gawd, there's just so much of it, and the skeptical reporting is just so slow to catch up that it's practically irrelevant.

Our expanded selves & The Construct

I’m not a particularly active dreamer, so when I get strong messages in my sleep I tend to pay attention. On Saturday morning I woke up with an odd idea in my head, which made me take notice. On Sunday I woke up with more of it in place, as if my dreaming self had been installing the idea in segments.

It’s a Singularity idea, although I don’t think it’s necessarily just a post-Singularity idea. And here’s the way I think I’m supposed to introduce it:

We understand cyberspace to be the virtual space between all the nodes on all our computer networks. And I’ve defined my concept of Spookworld as being everything that exists between the nodes of organized deception.

This new concept is called The Construct, defined as everything that exists between nodes of intent. And since I’m really introducing two ideas here (The Construct and “nodes of intent”), I’d better start by explaining the foundational idea: scaling humanity to the Law of Accelerating Returns.

And away we go

It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine. REM

Once,  the biggies controlled the pipelines, deciding whose content was disseminated and how.  But no more. Thousands of little conduits are siphoning the power from the few and allowing art and information to flow up, over, around to audiences, albeit smaller ones, everywhere.

We've witnessed the phenomenon of Radiohead's Web-only album release. Here's another example of a breach in the wall: Ingrid Michaelson.  The NY-based singer/songwriter's road to fame, if not quite stardom, ran through MySpace, where her music was found by TV types, scoring her an Old Navy commercial and a few seconds on Grey's Anatomy.  Now she's gaining traction as an indie darling, with coverage in the likes of The New York Times and  Rolling Stone. Her second album, Girls and Boys, has been rereleased and is doing nicely on Billboard.com (meaning there's radio play) and iTunes.

Why is this so cool? She's never been signed to a label.

Oh yes, the end is coming.

Brooks chases his Long Tail

This morning's confounder? A David Brooks column that ran locally under this headline: "Once-unifying music fragmented by society and technology."

The gist? Hipsters and technology are ruining the country. And the Long Tail (Brooks doesn't capitalize it, or explain it) is bad for the culture.

There is just so much here to discuss that perhaps a fisking is in order. But for those of you with lives and/or better things to do, I'll state my conclusions first:

Brooks' true subject isn't music or  economics or technology or even the "hipsters" who seem to bother him so much. What he's really writing about is the desire for a world that is simple, a world mediated by trusted gatekeepers and ruled by institutions that set the boundaries of everything from legality to morality to taste.

That Brooks could write this piece without even mentioning the monopolization of commercial radio betrays his selective myopia. But for the love of Gawd how do you write about "all-purpose" Rock and Roll as some canonized marketing wing of The One True Establishment without even a trace of irony?

Brooks is popular because he speaks to a common anxiety: The world is spinning out of control. Then he provides a reassuring answer: People like you who remember the old values have the right answer. He explains how things got this way: Hipsters and elites have caused a general breakdown of authority and good order. And he prescribes a solution: Stop it!

But here's the way it's going to be, folks: The world is going to change. Rapidly. More rapidly than you remember. More rapidly than you may be prepared for emotionally.  Values and ethics and cultural connections are going to be hugely important to us, as they are now, but they must be portable. Offering them as talismans against change will fail to prevent change and succeed only in damaging the very concepts you claim to hold in such esteem.

Imagining alternatives to your accepted reality is uncomfortable, but it's an absolute requirement for staying relevant in the 21st century. Our country's established conservative voices seem intent on disqualifying themselves from credibility with the next generation, and believe it or not, that's going to become a problem soon. We're going to need conservatives who understand cultural symbols, technology and change as a force of history. But that's a topic for another day.

Fisking after the jump...

Latest project: Embedded, geo-tagged video maps

Lately my thoughts have been running toward the value of geo-tagged information (How valuable is it? A LOT!) so I've been playing around with Google's custom maps feature and creating content for the paper/website that might have otherwise been presented as a story with a static map. 

My experiment: For the past three Fridays, I've published a short "Fun 5" item on my feature page that points people toward a Google Map I've made of a road-tested local bike route. I figure that's useful for local riders, particularly interesting to visitors who might want to go for a ride, and just kinda cool.  I put a little more info about the route on my Friday 5 blog, and then embed the customized Google Map in my post.