April 2006

.. is because you find things like this (below) in the comments section sometimes.

I really want to cry, to wail and gansh my teeth some days … why do such a small group of older white men have to hold the world in their sway ? Why do so many of us let them get away with this ?

We don’t deserve it …

Mr. President, I am the man who played “Taps” on the day of your inauguration at 3rd and constitution ave.as the American flag was undraped from several coffins.

You were shown a picture of my face on the following day. Remember me ?

I am asking you to cement a place for your name in the history books by replacing your Vice president with Colin Powell.

Your new Secretary of defense will be Noam Chomsky.

Your new secretary of state will be Molly Ivins.

The White house Press Secretary will be Norma Sherry.

Mr. Rove will be replaced by myself.

You seek to make a respectable presidential legacy for yourself. This is your last chance.

Go to the mirror. The man that you see is about to grow a pair of balls big enough to tell his father that he is no longer welcome in the White house and no longer has a place in your life.

Square your shoulders, throw out your chest and stand at attention before Almighty God and go to the phone .

Get Mr. Ahmadinajad on the phone and tell him that you know about the secret enriched uranium in Iran’s underground bunker and that you approve of it.

Tell him that you will help him to build the power generating plant of his dreams and that you will protect his people from the United States military in return for one favor.

The favor you will ask of him is to free his people from the iron grip of the Ayatollahs. He will give them their proper place in their culture teaching the tenets of true Islam in the mosques of Iran and they will no longer be involved in the perpetration of acts of violent revenge.

The events that follow these simple instructions will be the stuff of true heroism. Your place in history as a man of wisdom, inner strength and truth will be established forever.

You will have dodged the bullet of global war by doing the right thing instead of bowing to the demands of corporate greed and will be known as a man of conviction who stood up to the most powerfull evil on this planet and said no, I will not do your bidding.

You are the President of the United States of America,a peaceful and benevolent people will applaud your stedfast courage in the face of the most difficult times our planet has ever seen.

Last ,but not least you will call Mr .Al Gore and welcome him to your administration the head of The Environmental Protection Agency and give him the power that you know in your heart he so richly deserves.

You are indeed the fine christian man that you profess to be. Get to your knees and thank the Almighty for giving you the wisdom to listen to his holy voice above the voices of the people in your administration who have maliciously steered you in the wrong direction. Thank God for the strength to look them directly in the eyes and say YOUR FIRED !

An army of peacemakers will be at your disposal. They are the wise men and women who have the knowledge and courage to summon the world to listen to words of truth. Their words will stand firmly in the face of lies and will need no other power than that which the truth has always had, they stand for love and love is a power that,when properly invoked, cannot be denied.

Jerry Gates | 04.29.06 - 8:01 pm | #

From the bottom of my heart .. whoever you are, Jerry Gates, THANK YOU !

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… a blog “about creating smart economic networks… from the bottom up, using network weaving and social network analysis.

This is the blog of June Holley, Valdis Krebs & Jack Ricchiuto.”

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Couldn’t start with an “i”, end with an “n”, and have “nvasio” in the middle, could it ?

US admits Iraq could become haven for terror

Ewen MacAskill in Washington

Saturday April 29, 2006

The Guardian

The US state department acknowledged yesterday that there is a risk of Iraq becoming a safe haven for terrorists three years after the invasion of the country.

The warning is contained in the state department’s annual country reports on terrorism. The report, which suggests an increase in terrorist attacks worldwide, appears to undermine repeated claims by President George Bush that the US is winning the “war on terrorism”.

The report says: “Iraq is not currently a terrorist safe haven, but terrorists including Sunni groups like al-Qaida in Iraq, Ansar al-Islam and Ansar al-Sunna, as well as Shia extremists and other groups, view Iraq as a potential safe haven and are attempting to make it a reality.”

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… on and on it goes.

And supposedly many people like clear and decisive leaders in well-structured, no-nonsense hierarchies … clear accountabilities and chains of command, and all that stuff.

Please read this (The Heckuva Job, Bushie …). and try to keep from weeping, even if figuratively.

You tell me how we’re gonna recover from all this insanity, which I would argue has been building for 20 + or more years.

I spent a bit of time plodding through the news articles and dispatches this morning, and I am truly struck by the sheer amount of idiocy, corruption, lawbreaking, and bizzaro crap piling up on the Republican side of the fence. Truly, when you look at all of it at one time, you have to ask yourself — what in the hell is going on? While I’d like to think of it as one big, fat dose of karma, I’m honestly wondering how it is that this many chickens have decided to come home to roost at the same time.

And then it hit me that the number of news items might have some correlation to the sheer number of bad acts committed that have yet to be found out by the public – and so, perhaps, we are only looking at the tip of a very ugly iceberg. But before I begin some sort of long, drawn-out schadenfruede hotline call, let me just show you what I mean (and this is only a little snapshot — it is by no means a full round-up, since I don’t have the time to do a full catalogue today).

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of what I call *wirearchy* rears it’s ugly head once again.

In this case, the definition of wirearchy would seem to be .. .“the use of sophisticated digital infrastructure and systems to maintain and sustain authoritarian power over, and control of, society and established instititutions” .. or something like that.

Via Firedoglake:

Bush Tries “State Secrets” to Halt EFF’s AT&T Suit

Jeffrey Feldman had a Kos diary yesterday evening that was a stunner in terms of how far the Bush Administration may be willing to go to stop the public from learning more about the illegal NSA wiretapping of Americans via the EFF lawsuit against AT&T. He quoted a story from Wired which I think deserves a lot more of a wide read by everyone.

The government is not admitting, however, that AT&T aided the National Security Agency in spying on American’s phone calls and internet communications.

“[T]he fact that the United States will assert the state secrets privilege should not be construed as a confirmation or denial of any of Plaintiffs’ allegations, either about AT&T or the alleged surveillance activities,” the filing reads. “When allegations are made about purported classified government activities or relationships, regardless of whether those allegations are accurate, the existence or non-existence of the activity or relationship is potentially a state secret.”

The Justice Department has not formally invoked the privilege yet.

While the DoJ hasn’t filed the actual motion as yet, filing the notice late on a Friday is a common Bush Administration tactic of trying to sneak one by the American public. And I don’t intend to let them sneak this one by at all.

It seems the NYTimes had the same feeling on this:

The class-action suit, which seeks an end to the collaboration it alleges, is based in part on the testimony of Mark Klein, a retired technician for the company who says Internet data passing through an AT&T switching center in San Francisco is being diverted to a secret room. There, Mr. Klein says, the security agency has installed powerful computers to eavesdrop without warrants on the digital data and forward the information to an undisclosed place.

The foundation has filed documents obtained by Mr. Klein that ostensibly show detailed technical information on N.S.A. technology used to divert Internet data. He has also said in a deposition that employees of the agency went to the switching center to oversee special projects.

The company has declined to address the suit publicly, saying it will have no comment on matters of national security or customer privacy.

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I’ve been thinking about this all day .. and yes, I know many people will scoff at me as being hopelessly naive.

It all started when, for some unkown reason, my memories transported me back to an evening MBA class in Financial Accounting that I was taking in 1983. I had already been an *accountant* in a bank branch, as well as a senior assistant manager in a larger commercial bank branch, so arguably I knew my way around a debit and a credit, cash flow statements and income statements, balance heets, etc.

But my liberal, sociological bent had not left me by then (and still hasn’t, but that’s another story).

I remember reading the textbook, and doing some homework and exercises, and then one class my curiosity and shit-disturbingness got the better of me. I went up to the professor after class (I think the reading and assignments, and that particular lecture had something to do with GAAP - Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) and asked … “Am I correct in assuming that accounting as a discipline is really just a sub-set of social psychology, in that they are assumptions shaped into the rules of the game that we have all basically agreed to ?”

He said, essentially …. “Yup”.

So today, I was wondering all day about what might happen if the world began to agree to value and reward *sustainability* (for example), and began to seriously and diligently consider social and environmental costs, etc.

What would our world look like if capital growth and market capitalizations began to reflect sustainable growth and development, instead of just crude more-ness ? And yes, I do know that much work has already been done in this area.

If it meant more money in the pockets of invetsment bankers, financial engineers and brokers .. gee, I wouldn’t be surprised if things began to change in a hurry.

Just some random musing, on a slow day.

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… the virtual world interweaves into it more and more …

Virtual game jumps to real world

‘Second Life’ craze comes to Game Boy

NEW YORK (AP) — This month saw the launch of what is apparently the first game to be developed within another game.

[snip ...]

Frustrated by the random aspect of bingo, Keir created “Tringo” in late 2004 as a more skill-based alternative.

The game quickly became a craze in “Second Life.” Players bought copies of the game from Keir for around $50 each and set up Tringo halls and Tringo arenas, where players would go to compete for prizes in Linden dollars, the currency of “Second Life.”

Just a few months after its launch, “Tringo” games accounted for a quarter of Second Life’s economy, according to Sean Ryan, who obtained the real-world license to the game from Keir.

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via today’s Globe and Mail:

Lavalife moves to Skype

Lavalife of Toronto has introduced a new way to meet singles from around the world: Lavalife World Chat available through Skype. This global Internet calling network for singles is designed to mark a new trend in the dating world.

The service will allow singles to connect with other singles by creating profiles from personal voice recordings, listen to other profiles, exchange voice messages and join the Lavalife World Chat room where singles from around the globe connect and talk live. In today’s technologically advanced world, Lavalife World Chat is the next generation of dating services.

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.. is great !

Listen to it here, on the Web, for free.

Not only that .. here it is on livingwithwar.blogspot.com, with instructions about how to host it on your site !

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I love it. Tom Coates of PlasticBag.org on all this dazzling, rapid change.

I think people are snails, or want to be.

“I’m completely bored of this rhetoric of endless insane change at a ludicrous rate, and cannot actually believe that people are taking it seriously. We’ve had iPods and digital media players for what - five years now? We’ve had Tivo for a similar amount of time, computers that can play DVDs for longer, music and video held in digital form since the eighties, an internet that members of the public have been building and creating upon for almost fifteen years. TV only got colour forty odd years ago, but somehow we’re expected to think that it’s built up a tradition and way of operating that’s unable to deal with technological shifts that happen over decades!? This is too fast for TV!? That’s ridiculous!

This isn’t traditional media versus a rebellious newcomer, this is a fairly reasonable and incremental technology change that anyone involved in it could have seen coming from miles away. And it’s not even like anyone expects television or radio to change enormously radically over the next couple of decades! I mean, we’re swtiching to digital broadcasting in the UK in a few years, which gives people a few more channels. Radio’s not going to be fully digital for decades.

Broadcast is still going to be a dominant form of content distribution in ten and maybe twenty years time, it just won’t be the only one. And five years from now there will clearly be more bottom-up media, just as there are more weblogs now than five years ago, but I’d be surprised if it had really eradicated any major media outlets.

These changes are happening, they’re definitely happening, but they’re happening at a reasonable, comprehensible pace. There are opportunities, of course, and you have to be fast to be the first mover, but you don’t die if you’re not the first mover - you only die if you don’t adapt.”

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.. or something like that.

Robert Scoble has just written about how big companies don’t notice small things .. maybe like people talking, sharing, growing together (or not) whilst blogging as a social phenomenon has grown.

Tara, invisible to Microsoft

Personal note to Tara Hunt: you don’t exist.

Oh, sorry, for everyone else, I’m just having some fun with Tara. She notes that big companies like Microsoft are gonna have a tough time getting it.

Totally agreed.

But, we have our secret weapons: Technorati and Bloglines and Feedster and NewsGator and IceRocket and other blog search engines.

They let us listen like a small startup.

The problem is, even when we hear, it takes a lot of convincing internally.

But, even there, we have another secret weapon: internal blogs. Email mailing lists. Lunch meetings. And social pressure.

Tara applies the social pressure. Which is why she’s not invisible.

She’s also onto something.

Big companies don’t get small things.

Sure .. now it’s 2006 and who can’t notice blogging and its pin-offs ? But many (maybe most) organizations are still getting their heads around blogging, or are still trying to.

At the risk of being overly repetitive, here’s Tim Bray again on that:

As a thought experiment, replace the word “blogging” with “email” or “conference presentation” or “teleconference” or “sales presentation”. Or “barroom conversation” for that matter. Quick, quick, you wanna be safe, you better lock all your employees up and never let ’em say anything to anyone!

The point is that qualitatively, blogging requires no new policies and introduces no new risks. If your employees are going to say stupid things in public, you’ve got a management problem and a policy problem, not a blogging problem.

Note to executives who are frightened of hearing what their employees have to say, or finding out what the world really thinks about their company: Carr has done you a real favor. Just go and ask your attorneys if they think blogging is safe, and slip ’em a copy of that list, and you can rest easy knowing you’ll never hear anything uncomfortable.

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I’m thinking that the current US government will actually welcome any and all efforts to hobble *the Internets* (as GW likes to call ‘em), now that Tony Snow has accepted to replace Scott Mcllellan as White House spokesperson.

It will be interesting to see how he explains away all of his former comments (as a reporter - and he was a Republican … chortle) that are dismissive, if not derogatory, of President Bush … archived in public view on those self-same Internets.

I think this is yet another example of why established, traditional authorities and authoritarian groups don’t like the linmky transparency afforded by the fact that you can actually very easily look up what somneone said, when and where they said it, and in what context.

Tee-hee ….

UPDATE: And now it’s official…announcement just made. MSNBC currently highlighting all the Snow comments about Bush incompetence. Oh yeah. This is gonna be fun for a few days. Oh, and ThinkProgress found some more Tony Snow gems — this time criticizing specific policies of the Bush Administration.

It’s all but official at this point, we’re getting Tony “Snow Job” as the next WH spokesperson. And in an initial act of spin this morning, Snow and his WH cronies have thrown out an olive branch to the media:

Snow, 50, is particularly interested in economic and immigration issues. He intends to insist on greater access for White House reporters, said sources familiar with his plans. He has described the press corps as a beast that must be constantly fed. In a December 2000 column in the Washington Times, he referred to “Democrats and journalists (but I repeat myself).”

He has told associates he plans to function as an advocate for reporters, an approach that would run counter to the administration’s previous philosophy about the position. (emphasis mine)

It’s buried in the middle of a Howie Kurtz extravaganza in the WaPo, but Snow is throwing out a tray of cocktail weenies to the ravenous media hordes in advance of his ascension to the post of chief punching bag in the hopes that they will not notice Snow’s prior comments like this:

– Bush has “lost control of the federal budget and cannot resist the temptation to stop raiding the public fisc.” [3/17/06]

– “When it comes to federal spending, George W. Bush is the boy who can’t say no. In each of his three years at the helm, the president has warned Congress to restrain its spending appetites, but so far nobody has pushed away from the table mainly because the president doesn’t seem to mean what he says.” [The Detroit News, 12/28/03]

– “The president doesn’t seem to give a rip about spending restraint.” [The Detroit News, 12/28/03]

– “Bush, for all his personal appeal, ultimately bolstered his detractors’ claims that he didn’t have the drive and work ethic to succeed.” [11/16/00]

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From GW’s speech yesterday in Irvine, California …

I got a lot on my mind these days; I want to share two thoughts with you.

First, I want to talk about the war on terror. I wish I could report to you that the war on terror was over. It’s not. There is still an enemy that wants to do us harm. And the most important job of the President of the United States is to protect the American people from that harm. That’s — and I think about it all the time.

As you know, well, I make a lot of decisions, and at the core of my decision-making when it comes to protecting America is the lessons learned from September the 11th, 2001.

My job is to use the resources of the United States to prevent such an attack from happening again. And the first lesson of September the 11th, 2001 is that we face an enemy that had no regard for innocent life, an enemy which has hijacked a great religion to suit their political needs.

(if I interpret correctly, basically he’s saying the USA doesn’t tolerate murderes .. well, what about the many thousands of iraqis who have died because their country was invaded on false premises, on the basis of knowingly-expressed, willful lies .. is that *murder* ? )

And therefore, the only way to deal with them is to stay on the offense to pressure them, and to bring them to justice which is precisely what the United States of America is doing and will continue to do for the safety of the American people. (Applause.)

The second lesson is we must deny these folks safe haven. They need to find safe haven from which to plot and plan. We denied safe haven in Afghanistan, and we’re denying them safe haven in Iraq.

One of the important things that a President must do is to take the words of the enemy very seriously. And when the enemy speaks, and they speak quite often, we listen carefully. We listen to their aims and their objectives. These are not a kind of isolated, angry people. These are folks bound together by an ideology that is totalitarian in nature. They believe that capitalism produces weak societies.

They want to spread their idea of life throughout the Middle East. They have stated so in word after word. And they believe that with time, they can establish a safe haven in Iraq.

And here’s the danger of having an enemy with a safe haven in Iraq, Iraq has got wealth.

Iraq has — had weapons of mass destruction and has the knowledge as to how to produce weapons of mass destruction. And the confluence of a terrorist network with weapons of mass destruction is the biggest threat the United States of America faces. They have said it’s just a matter of time.

Thanks for making all this happen, George. You sound like a learned Middle East scholar here .. you must be, by now.

Jane Jacobs, a world-reknowned Canadian systems thinker, urban planning activist and author died earlier today in a hospital in Toronto.

Her most recent book Dark Age Ahead was a Canadian bestseller last year.

Thank you, Jane, for all your thinking and speaking out about the ways civic society could be improved in urban settings, and about the related issues of living, learning and working in an increasingly urban society.

May your soul rest in peace …

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… to my eyes, anyway.

The debate on *net neutrality* is heating up again, because of a bill being tabled in the US House of Representatives, and so people are girding their loins for the unimaginable .. a transparent hand-over to the corporate world.

Here’s a clear and succinct perspective offered by a commenter in response to a question about net neutrality:

right now, you pay to host your site and the bandwith to the nearest onramp. I pay for my bandwith from the offramp to my computer. Our respective ramps pay into “the system,” which currently must treat all packets of information equally.

What the telecos want to be able to do is treat packets unequally. The problem is, you don’t have any control over what pipeline information coming in to you is travelling on.

Imagine if long-distance phone calls were treated this way. You might have Sprint, I might have T-Mobile, but the trunk might be AT&T. So AT&T wants the right to give shitty, crappy reception to calls that aren’t AT&T on one end. Or paying extra fees to AT&T.

Remember, digital is as good or crappy as you want it to be. And the fastest US broadband is pure shite and four to five times as expensive as in the rest of the world.

And that we paid massive subsidies through customer surcharges to build a true broadband network for the whole US, and the cable/telcos never built it, yet kept the money.

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One of the projects I have been working on for the past six months is now coming to fruition.

.. or a subset ?

Via the Firedoglake blog:

A virus is dogging three-term incumbent U.S. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman. One of its gestation spots is www.youtube.com, a web site where anyone can post a homemade video.

Go there and search for “Ned Lamont.” He’s the liberal Greenwich businessman staging a spirited challenge to Lieberman for the Democratic nomination.

Up spring a queue of videos posted by bloggers who love Lamont and despise Lieberman. There’s Ned on WFSB-TV. Ned giving a speech in Southbury. Ned on “Beyond the Headlines.” A montage of Ned photos and messages played to the tune of “Rock The Boat.”

Now search for “Joe Lieberman.” Up spring a queue of videos posted by bloggers who … love Lamont and despise Lieberman. Joe on TV defending the war in Iraq. Joe equivocating on Bush’s illegal wiretapping. A montage of Abu Ghraib torture and President Bush and Joe Lieberman photos played to the tune of “Masters of War.” (The fade-out switches to Lamont and “All You Need Is Love.”)

The bloggers who spend untold hours preparing these videos also post articles and comments and campaign information all over the Web attacking Lieberman and enlisting supporters for Lamont’s campaign.

They don’t report to Lamont headquarters in Meriden. They don’t charge a cent.

No wonder Lieberman, who months ago seemed the safest of safe incumbents, has been uncharacteristically testy and stumbling lately, getting booed at the Jefferson Jackson Bailey dinner, getting into a bizarre confrontation with radio talk-show host Colin McEnroe over the evil of bloggers and The New York Times. (The transcript’s at www.firedoglake.com (search: Lieberman).

The man who was so ahead of the political curve when he entered the Senate 18 years ago is now hopelessly behind it.

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If this isn’t clear evidence of deceit and of the preparations for committing war crimes, I don’t know what is …

Read the whole post at TPM blog.

Think about it.

It’s devastating evidence against their credibility on a slew of levels.

Did you read in any of those reports — even in a way that would protect sources and methods — that the CIA had turned a key member of the Iraqi regime, that that guy had said there weren’t any active weapons programs, and that the White House lost interest in what he was saying as soon as they realized it didn’t help the case for war? What about what he said about the Niger story?

Did the Robb-Silbermann Commission not hear about what Drumheller had to say? What about the Roberts Committee?

I asked Drumheller just those questions when I spoke to him early this evening. He was quite clear. He was interviewed by the Robb-Silbermann Commission. Three times apparently.

Did he tell them everything he revealed on tonight’s 60 Minutes segment. Absolutely.

Drumheller was also interviewed twice by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (the Roberts Committee) but apparently only after they released their summer 2004 report.

Now, quite a few of us have been arguing for almost two years now that those reports were fundamentally dishonest in the story they told about why we were so badly misled in the lead up to war. The fact that none of Drumheller’s story managed to find its way into those reports, I think, speaks volumes about the agenda that the writers of those reports were pursuing.

“I was stunned,” Drumheller told me, when so little of the stuff he had told the commission’s and the committee’s investigators ended up in their reports. His colleagues, he said, were equally “in shock” that so little of what they related ended up in the reports either.

What Drumheller has to say adds quite a lot to our knowledge of what happened in the lead up to war. But what it shows even more clearly is that none of this stuff has yet been investigated by anyone whose principal goal is not covering for the White House.

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.. the big-dog blogs with lots of traffic, like Firedoglake and Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo are getting in on the Net Neutrality debate.

From Firedoglake:

The big ISPs want to control the Internet. The battle is over “net neutrality.”

As soon as this coming Wednesday, it could all be set in motion because Republicans and Democrats are set to make this happen. If you don’t know what it is watch this video now, because it effects you. It’s hard to believe, but I’ve been writing on the web for 10 years. That’s a long time, longer than most. In all those years I’ve never heard of anything quite so dangerous as what’s now being debated in the Congress. Matt Stoller will be blogging about the consequences all this week as it plays out. Another site for information is SaveTheInternet. Josh Marshall has a discussion going on over at TPMCafe. Let me give you an example of how this could play out. If you’re Barnes and Noble and pay the right ISP, your site will open faster than, say, “YourLocalBookStore.com.” There are so many things wrong with this idea it’s hard to know where to start.

The Internet is a free flowing, democratic forum where every site is created equal, big or small, conglomerate or start-up. Congress is about to change all that because they like the money they get from big telco companies.

The threat is bigger than you realize, but there’s more.

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One of 7 trendy new jobs beginning to appear in the workplace, according to CNN Money:

Blog editor: I blog, you blog, we all blog apparently, judging from the proliferation of blogs in the past two years. The success of influential ones like Wonkette.com has companies wanting in on the perceived edginess of the blogosphere.

“Blogging” is not only starting to creep into people’s job descriptions, but recruiters are starting to see blog-related job listings.

One on Monster.com seeks a blog editor “to manage and moderate blogs for clients and to write for the company blog on PR and new media topics.”

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… then, there’s always *wirearchy*

Coming to Terms With a Wired Age, Part 2

By LISA BELKIN

Published: April 23, 2006

IT seems you can never have too many words to describe the loud, incessant use of cellphones. In my last column I played with new terminology for a wired (and wireless) age, and in the weeks since then my mailbox has been filled with your suggestions. Cellulitis, you say, or narcellism, or cellbotics.

You have names for many other new concepts, too. The longest list comes from Eve Fox (I can fit only part of it here), a vice president for electronic campaigns at M&R Strategic Services in Washington, who suggests a whole new language. She calls it “Blang,” as in “Web language,” and says it is spoken by “Web wraiths” — Tolkienesque creatures (i.e., most of us) who feel chained to their computers day and night. Other Blang words include:

Cybermoment — Confusion that arises when one person closes an instant-messaging window and the other person keeps “talking.”

Cylences — The long gaps in phone conversation that occur when a person is reading e-mail or cybershopping at the same time.

Stripped — The opposite of wired, when your computer tells you that there are wireless networks all around, but not one is accessible without a password, or when your computer tells you it has a signal, but won’t connect for reasons it refuses to share.

Schoogle — A popular pastime, consisting of Googling the names of old classmates.

Johnny Wong, a public relations consultant from San Bruno, Calif., suggests “Unamailer” to describe “someone who replies to e-mail with one-word responses. Right. Good. Thanks.” Ray Symmes, a business consultant in Portsmouth, Va., suggests a similar term. “BlackBerried,” he writes, is “a short and possibly patronizing response to a thoughtful e-mail, suggesting it was received on a mobile device: ‘good anal. of world hunger. thks.’ “

David Bernklau, a freelance copy editor and sometime statistics instructor from Brooklyn, is distressed at what passes for grammar and syntax online. “Cyberdysgraphia” is his word to describe the use of the Internet, especially e-mail, “without regard to grammar, punctuation and capitalization.”

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The Economist magazine publishes a central survey every month or six weeks … and the newest one, titled “New Media”, takes a good hard look at the capabilities that have erupted over the last three years or so.

Among the audience

Apr 20th 2006

From The Economist print edition

The era of mass media is giving way to one of personal and participatory media, says Andreas Kluth. That will profoundly change both the media industry and society as a whole

There have been a range of *false starts* associated with the promises of a digital hyperlinked infrastructure (what we know as the Internet and the Web) .. the dot.com boom (and the subsequent spectacular bust), the widespread belief that the ease-of-access to the Web and the sharing of information and knowledge would lead to widespread democratization of information and opportunity, and successive promises about the creative disruption of one industry or another.

For a while, the majority of business and government decision-makers were confident that they had escaped major disruption, and that *business as usual* was the order of the day. The ongoing, and now noticeable, buildup of integrated and less-costly capabilities, the continued spread of cheaper and cheaper broadband access, the continued creep of generational change .. all these forces and more are contributing to a growing awareness that widepread major change may be just around the corner.

Calling it the “internet era” is not helpful. By way of infrastructure, full-scale participatory media presume not so much the availability of the (decades-old) internet as of widespread, “always-on”, broadband access to it. So far, this exists only in South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan, whereas America and other large media markets are several years behind. Indeed, even today’s broadband infrastructure was built for the previous era, not the coming one.

Almost everywhere, download speeds (from the internet to the user) are many times faster than upload speeds (from user to network). This is because the corporate giants that built these pipes assumed that the internet would simply be another distribution pipe for themselves or their partners in the media industry. Even today, they can barely conceive of a scenario in which users might put as much into the network as they take out.

[snip ...]

This has profound implications for traditional business models in the media industry, which are based on aggregating large passive audiences and holding them captive during advertising interruptions. In the new-media era, audiences will occasionally be large, but often small, and usually tiny. Instead of a few large capital-rich media giants competing with one another for these audiences, it will be small firms and individuals competing or, more often, collaborating.

Some will be making money from the content they create; others will not and will not mind, because they have other motives. “People creating stuff to build their own reputations” are at one end of this spectrum, says Philip Evans at Boston Consulting Group, and one-man superbrands such as Steven Spielberg at the other.

As with the media revolution of 1448, the wider implications for society will become visible gradually over a period of decades. With participatory media, the boundaries between audiences and creators become blurred and often invisible.

In the words of David Sifry, the founder of Technorati, a search engine for blogs, one-to-many “lectures” (ie, from media companies to their audiences) are transformed into “conversations” among “the people formerly known as the audience”.

This changes the tone of public discussion

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… sends a text email to an American blog, Atrios:

george w bush should definitely be impeached

he is a liar

and his lies have bought misery to millions of people

and bought no good to anyone except for the corporate oil

billionaires who are making huge profits

they are profiting during wartime

that is unscrupulous and terribly sad

w bush has made the world a much less safe place

before the war iraq was not a place for terrorists

saddam hussein, brutal dictator that he was was secular and had

nothing to do with al queda

and was sanctioned to death and had no power outside of his country

now it is a breeding ground for terrorism and anti-americanism is at

an all time high all over the world

and the people of iraq are no better off at all

all those people want is for the americans to leave

decent families and people like you and i who never wanted america

there in the first place

goerge w bush has sent american soldiers over there to be maimed and

killed

only to serve his selfish oil company needs and for his ego

american soldiers who are loyal to each other and who only want to

have a good job get an education and support their country are being

used for an unjust cause

i support the troops

they, like all americans are being betrayed by george w bush

he has betrayed his country he should be impeached

the administration’s line that they were over there because they

wanted to spread democracy and freedom

is nothing else besides a lie

if they had any interest at all in the well being of other human beings

they would be doing what they could for people who desperately need

and would love help in africa

i pray to god that george w bush and his administration does not

invade iran

it would be a bloodbath

why dont they just leave the iranians alone

and go through the united nations

and work on making the united nations as strong and as just as possible

an invasion of iran would be the worst possible thing that could happen

i pray to god that it does not happen

i am just another guy sitting in the car on the english motorway

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I have been aware of research in this area for at least 4 years now, since attending (and presenting at) an eLearning conference in Montreal in 2002.

At that conference, I was privileged to attend a session by Dr. Wim Veen of the Technical University of Delft in The Netherlands, at which he and several graduate students presented research into how young people adept at multi-tasking (Homo Zappiens) were exhibiting evidence of processing cognition differently than those of us whose cognition was shaped through earlier, different forms of information input.

Here is a PDF from 2005, titled “2020 Visions: Wim Veen’s Projections”, setting out some conclusions from his ongoing research which may offer readers some counerpoint to the fearful implications asserted by the Guardian article “Greenfield: IT Culture is changing children’s brains”:

Greenfield: IT culture is changing children’s brains

Children are spending so much time watching electronic media that it is changing the way they think, Baroness Susan Greenfield, neuroscientist and director of the Royal Institution, told the House of Lords today.

She also warned of the dangers of “medicating the classroom” with drugs such as Ritalin.

The crossbench peer, who is director of Oxford University’s Institute for the Future of the Mind, urged the government to investigate the effects of new developments in IT and mind-altering drugs rather than “stumbling” into new technologies.

She said a recent survey of eight to 18-year-olds claimed that children were now spending on average 6.5 hours a day using electronic media, and asked what impact this screen and multimedia culture would have on thinking and learning.

A recent study found that 92% of nine to 19-year-olds have accessed the internet from a computer at home or school. But 30% have received no lessons at all on using the internet and only 33% of regular internet users have been taught how to judge the reliability of online information.

“Perhaps the increase in the prevalence of hyperactivity might be explained by sustained exposure to an unsupervised IT environment, where only short attention spans were needed,” said Baroness Greenfield.

She added: “I am not proposing that we become IT-Luddites, but rather that we could be stumbling into a powerful technology, the impact of which we understand poorly at the moment.”

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Noticed in the Guardian (paper edition) on one of my last days in the UK (before the looong flight home).

The full article is here ..

Ignore bloggers at your peril, say researchers

A post over on Firedoglake that provides the overwhelmingly American audience with a perspective on how the USA is perceived from without … and how insane it all seems to be …

Please .. please, please … read the whole thing.

I’m in the odd position of being a Canadian who does most of his blogging on American politics for US blogs. It’s a kafkaesque exercise at times, and the recent Iran mess has reminded me yet again, that to a foreigner, the US really is “through the looking glass”.

Because to me the conversation on Iran isn’t sane. In fact, the idea of bombing Iran, either large scale conventionally, or, even worse, with nukes, is one I’m astounded is even being considered.

Let’s deal with the specifics from one Canadian’s point of view.

First: bombing a country is a declaration of war and Iran will react to it as such. To meaningfully damage the Iranian nuclear effort will require massive bombing. This isn’t one pinpoint attack. Oil will soar to $150 a barrel or so, your economy will crater, so will everyone else’s, your allies will abandon you and you will be all by yourselves. And people won’t blame the Iranians, they will blame you.

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Via the Globe and Mail Online … the full article is here.

Despite its occasionally idiosyncratic language, TelevisionWithoutPity.com, or TWoP, is the most closely monitored on-line forum for serious TV watchers on the Web. The Toronto-based site has become so powerful that TV producers hate it or fear it — but they always check it out because, as Veronica Mars series creator Rob Thomas noted: “It’s like having a free, huge focus group each week.”

TWoP has about 50,000 registered members and draws more than a million unique visitors each month. There are many other TV fan sites on the Net, but TWoP has attracted passionate, intelligent and witty contributors in numbers the other sites can only dream about.

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The mainstream newspapers are starting to look for ways to get back at the bloggers who are demanding that they (the papers) stop shilling for the US administration, and actually report facts, ask hard questions, etc. … the things quality newspapers are supposed to do, or so we thought.

Billmon of the Whiskey Bar blog writes about it:

The Washington Post has a long story in today’s paper (front page) about all those enraged liberals out in cyberspace who are doing completely crazy things – like blowing up federal buildings with truck bombs and threatening to kill judges.

[snip ...]

Exhibit A, however, in the Case of the Crazed Left Wing Bloggers is Maryscott. I don’t know as much about her, although from what I hear she appears to be nicely carving out a niche for herself as the left’s answer to Howard Beale (aka the Mad Prophet of the Air Waves) – a role the producers at the UBS network (i.e. Fox News) appear only too happy to let her play. The Post has an appropriately unflattering picture of Maryscott in her bathrobe and keyboard ensemble, with a suitably anguished expression on her face.

In other words, all the elements of a classic journalistic hit job are present and reporting for duty. Mission accomplished, sir.

I could complain about the sleaziness of it all – zeroing in on a few of the more, ah, colorful, inhabitants of Left Blogistan while ignoring the ranting fury currently on the display on the other side of the cyber-DMZ (see previous post.) And I could suggest that focusing on the alleged unsoundness of mind of a small group of lefty bloggers at a time when the President of the United States (the only one we’ve got) is seriously considering a nuclear first strike against Iran shows a certain lack of balance. But what’s the point? The nasty deed is done.

At first I thought this was just the SCLM being the SCLM – and Karl Rove thanks you for your support. But on reflection I realized that the genesis of this particularly smear job isn’t politics, it’s payback. The Post is getting even with Left Blogistan for the take down of Baby Ben, for the impudent e-mails about the omsbudswoman from hell, for the passionate defense of Dan Froomkin, for the outrage over the Post’s editorial defense of the sliming of Joe Wilson, etc. etc.

Especially that first insult – the near instant demolition of washingtonpost.com’s plagiarist/blogger. As the omsbudswoman from hell put it, that one was “a f—ing disaster.” And I’m sure she meant every one of those hyphens.

In other words, the liberal bloggers who dragged the Google swamp for the evidence of Baby Ben’s journalistic offenses not only cost washingtonpost.com a few brownie points with the White House, they humiliated the editors in front of all their friends. And by God, they’re going to pay, dammit! Do you hear me? Pay!

I mean, isn’t that how high-school nerds usually get even – by spreading vicious rumors about the popular kids?

Some things never really change.

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… they archive things and m ake them searchable, and stuff …

Here’s a nifty little memory-jogger courtesy of the Huffington Post, pertinent in the midst of Field Marshal von Rumsfeld’s current denigration of dissent.

Another example: the debate about the generals calling for Rummy’s resignation. Those who oppose the generals speaking out say, among other things, that such talk threatens our cherished tradition of civilian control of the military. As if we’ve forgotten how uncherished that tradition was a few short years ago.

Here’s a memory-jogger, from the Washington Times:

“Loss of trust and confidence”

by

Dr. Gerald L. Atkinson

14 March 1999

President Clinton and his Secretary of Defense make much of the importance of “credibility” in defending NATO’s involvement in Bosnia and now in possibly waging war on Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, a huge gap in trust and credibility separates these politicians from the troops they would send into the field to fight and die for NATO’s “credibility.”

A young active-duty captain in the U.S. Army Special Forces has published a letter in the Fayetteville Observer-Times (2/17/99), in which he states,

“As a United States Army officer, I have always loved serving my country. Military service is a higher calling, a desire to protect something greater than myself. There should also be security in knowing that the president is our commander-in-chief. As a civilian, the president swears an oath to faithfully execute the laws of the land and is ultimately answerable to the American people.

I have always believed that, even if our civilian political leadership makes mistakes, they are honest mistakes, made with the good intentions of protecting the United States.”

With that said, he goes on to say:

“But something remarkable has happened. The Senate has acquitted a president of impeachable offenses, a president who deliberately misled

both the American people and a jury in a civil lawsuit. This disturbs me so much as a military professional that I feel compelled to express my views publicly.”

Then he tells us the hard facts.

“I distrust my commander-in-chief. When called upon to serve in a ‘hostile fire zone,’ I will question the justness of the cause. I will worry that my

subordinates’ lives are being risked to cover up another of the president’s false statements.

I also worry that Congress may fail to hold the president accountable for breaches of integrity, perhaps even if those breaches risk the lives of American soldiers.”

He concludes,

“I still love my country and the Army, but I have lost my trust and belief in the credibility of our civilian leadership.”

Memory. It’s a cool thing for media types to have, and not just to keep track of anniversaries of major stories.

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When I first started thinking about *wirearchy*, I went off in search of some basic information about hierarchy, such as its definition.

Most of us understand it as the vertical arrangements of social or organizational status.

I was surprised, but only mildly, to find the first definition in the OED as describing the relationship between God and the archangels (though I now see the order’s been changed)

the traditional system of orders of angels and other heavenly beings.

As I delved further into the issue … the Divine Right of kings (and queens), the history of the evolution of societies in which cardinals, bishops, mullahs, etc. all were somehow seen by their publics as God’s representatives on earth … our relationship with wanting someone to represent authority grew clearer.

Fast forward, to modern times … are CEO’s, presidents and other senior executives another version of *God’s representatives on earth* ?

Exxon-Mobil and its shareholders seem to think so … (via the NY Times).

For Leading Exxon to Its Riches, $144,573 a Day

By JAD MOUAWAD

Published: April 15, 2006

For 13 years as chairman and chief executive, Lee R. Raymond propelled Exxon, the successor to John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust, to the pinnacle of the oil world.

[snip ... yes, about corporate performance, without any mention of the generally contiunuous rice in the price of oil during that time]

Shareholders benefited handsomely on Mr. Raymond’s watch. The price of Exxon’s shares rose an average of 13 percent a year. The company, now known as Exxon Mobil, paid $67 billion in total dividends.

For his efforts, Mr. Raymond, who retired in December, was compensated more than $686 million from 1993 to 2005, according to an analysis done for The New York Times by Brian Foley, an independent compensation consultant.

That is $144,573 for each day he spent leading Exxon’s “GOD POD,” as the executive suite at the company’s headquarters in Irving, Tex., is known.

… or something like that ?

Via Atrios’ blog:

Bye Silvio

I wonder when he’ll finally realize it’s over.

And, thank you, Canadians of Italian descent, for getting rid of the wanker.

The votes of 40,000 Canadian citizens who qualify as “Italians abroad,” some of whom have never set foot in Italy and many of whom don’t speak Italian, played a pivotal role in the defeat of billionaire Silvio Berlusconi in Italy’s election yesterday, according to poll results released late last night.

For the first time in history, a country’s political fate appears to have been determined by citizens of other countries, after Mr. Berlusconi introduced a scheme in 2002 that defines eligible Italian voters by blood lines rather than residency.

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Ultimately, I think, the Web and blogging and social media, especially in the business arena, will come to be mainly about listening … listening to customers, listening to competitors, listening to existing and potentiual customers, listening to each other.

I’m in Brighton in the UK, on a business trip but staying with old friends .. and one of the delights about the UK are its newspapers, and the writing they contain. The Guardian is an established UK newspaper that has taken a real leadership position online over the last few years; it has certainly embraced blogging during the past two or three years. And … one of the results, I think, is that it has been growing more rapidly and more widely in terms of readership than it’s competitors … one might say it has entered into the interactive, participative economy.

Here’s an excerpt from the Guardian Unlimited’s editor-in-chief Emily Bell in an editorial titled “What Is The Point Of Vetting Bloggers ?”

I recently looked at some software which we could use on our site to show which blogs are talking about which articles - a function we will incorporate into Guardian Unlimited at some point. It is possible, I was told, to screen out the negative comments. But why, I asked, would anyone want to do that?

I read with some disbelief the comments of a web editor from another newspaper site who suggested that by inviting more comments, as we have, the Guardian is taking serious risks that would end in tears. As a result, the website of the aforementioned editor allows writers to vet the comments added to their blogs. This seems to me a far more absurd idea. Why have a blog at all?

The problem with customers is that sometimes they complain, but it is better that you can see the complaints, and hopefully respond to them adequately, than to ignore them or screen them out. If you do that, people will complain more loudly somewhere else. Organisations that understand their customers largely manage it by listening to all the feedback rather than just the good bits.

Much of today’s social software, and certainly a key driving force behind blogging, is making it easier for people to participate in personal publishing, to express themselves and make their voices heard … to participate in the ongoing transformation of our increasingly interconnected societies and economies.

It’s interesting to note and watch a major media company that in my opinion *gets it*.

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As pointed out in several ways, and by several commenters to this most excellent post at Firedoglake, the people in power in Washington must HATE the Internets so very much.

With it’s hyperlinks, searchability and the hordes of engaged and capable people who are not enjoying seeing their society turned into a playground for corrupt fanatical totalitarian minds, the Internet is a main element providing the possibility to fight back against the manipulation of lying, concealment and character assassination.

What was that definition of *wirearchy* again ? … something about a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority … knowledge, credibility and trust were in there somewhere, and I remember the word “interconnected” as well …

.

Thanks to the Happy Tooter for bring this up …

Not to toot my own horn, but I developed and delivered a workshop session on this very issue (below) way back in 2000 for an Advanced Coaching Conference for the Hudson Institute of Santa Barbara. I suggested that the field of coaching, and professional coaches, might like to map out with their clients (coachees) the ways that their attention was being pulled in different directions, so that they might begin to develop a strategy and practices addressing the growing problem.

It’s the great seduction of the information age. You can create the illusion of doing work and of being productive and creative when you’re not. You’re just treading water.

Like many issues with which I have become involved in the past, the people who attended supposedly found my session interesting, but not overly pertinent to their existing models.

Indeed, here’s a blog post titled “Coaching People In The Wired World” I wrote about 14 months ago on the same subject, wherein I suggest people themselves are being pounded into *small pieces, loosely joined* (D. Weinberger)

Here’s the article that stimulated this memory, via C|Net News … evidently a former Harvard Medical School researcher has now discovered this emerging behaviour and named it “Attention Deficit Trait”.

It may be the greatest irony of the information age.

All of that data flying at you by e-mail, instant message, cell phone, voice mail and BlackBerry–it could actually be making you dumber.

Dr. Edward Hallowell, a psychiatrist who’s studied attention deficit disorder for more than a decade, has identified a related disorder he calls attention deficit trait, and he says it’s reaching epidemic proportions in the corporate world. Unlike attention deficit disorder, or ADD, people aren’t born with ADT. It’s the result, he contends, of the modern workplace, where the constant and relentless chatter coming from our computers, phones and other high-tech devices is diluting our mental powers.

No one really multitasks. You just spend less time on any one thing.

Hallowell, formerly a Harvard Medical School faculty member, recently sat down with CNET News.com to talk about ADT as well as when the right times to log off, hang up or take a time-out might be. We paid attention.

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Via the NY Times:

Read It? Watched It? Swap It

By MICHEL MARRIOTT

Published: April 13, 2006

For Heather Perlmutter, a 41-year-old investment portfolio manager in Manhattan, the Web site with the whimsical name made perfect sense. Like many Americans, she found herself awash in CD’s, DVD’s and VHS tapes that were seldom if ever played anymore. They just took up valuable space in the Upper West Side apartment where she lives with her husband and two young children.

Then a friend of a friend told her about Zunafish (www.zunafish.com), a new Web site that matches people with discs and tapes to trade — and video games and paperback books, too.

To the delight of her 7-year-old son, Ms. Perlmutter recently used the site to barter her tape of “Fried Green Tomatoes,” the 1991 Kathy Bates drama in which an unhappy housewife befriends an elderly woman in a nursing home, for a tape of Steven Spielberg’s digital dinosaur blockbuster, “Jurassic Park.”

“You feel like you’re getting something special, that you’re getting the better part of the deal,” Ms. Perlmutter said. “Wow, somebody wants your stuff. I guess it’s one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”

That was certainly the thinking of Dan Elias and Billy Bloom, the unlikely founders of Zunafish.

In a highly competitive era, independent tinkerers who are convinced they have a big idea can face big problems getting the idea to market. Even video games, once famous for whisking their creators from makeshift workshops to fast fortunes and expensive cars, are mostly made today by corporate teams of designers and programmers in sprawling office parks.

But Mr. Elias, a television news anchor in western Massachusetts, and Mr. Bloom, the owner of a volleyball league in New York City, both self-described amateurs at creating a digital service and company, spawned Zunafish, a singularly simple-to-use media trading site.

“We have no background in technology,” said Mr. Elias, a 45-year-old native New Yorker who now lives in Northampton, Mass. “I think we always thought from the start that it was a big idea. There are hundreds of billions of dollars of idle media materials sitting in people’s homes.”

Mr. Bloom, 47, said of the company’s humble origins, “If we lived in the country, it would have literally been created in one of our garages.”

The site, which looks remarkably similar to a prototype Mr. Bloom sketched on notebook paper four years ago with Mr. Elias, trades only one-for-one items within the same category — CD’s, DVD’s, VHS tapes, video games, audio books or paperback books. No item (for example, a seven-disc DVD set of the first season of the television series “24″) is worth more than any another (say, a DVD of Peter Jackson’s “King Kong”).

Traders using the site determine the relative value of an item by choosing to swap or not. No one is ever forced to make a trade, Mr. Elias noted.

Each trader pays Zunafish $1 through credit or debit card for each trade. The site then calculates the postage costs and creates addressed mailing labels that can be downloaded and printed out. Each trader, Mr. Bloom said, is responsible for paying the postage and mailing the item promptly.

Like buyers and sellers on eBay, the traders on Zunafish rate each other, providing a confidence index for future transactions.

“We take extremely limited involvement in the transaction,” Mr. Elias said. “It is mediated by a user-rating system. Not by us.”

Zunafish started on Jan. 1, with no fanfare or publicity. Mr. Bloom and Mr. Elias said that the circle of traders had been limited so far — they did not disclose figures — but that they felt strongly that throngs of prospective users would discover the site.

“It is only as strong as the community that comes to it,” Mr. Elias said of Zunafish. “It takes a few minutes to sit down and post all of your stuff. But once you do, you’ve made an investment that pays off week by week as people come to inquire about things that you own.”

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After a wonderful and very busy week in Paris, I’m now in Brighton, UK with old friends.

I’ve just spent a wonderful afternoon stumbling from pub to pub in Brighton, renewing my acquaintances with old friends and with this quirky city which (for me) represents some of the finest things I have come to love about the UK.

More, after the beer wears off …

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Blogware is a great blog platform provider (this blog operates using a Blogware engine and customizable template) .. and on behalf of my colleagues I am proud to announce that, following on the heels of our announcement regarding Lycos, today Blogware will begin offering Qumana as a free download to its users.

We at Qumana are indeed spreading our wings, after three years of careful, deliberate and sometimes anxious development, testing, re-development and the most recent move to a cross-platfrom version called Qumana 3.0.

It does feel good to actually see something one has helped create come into being.

;-0)

And, oh, by the way, I am enjoying the heck out of Paris (lots of early-stage business develpment work, though … all fun) … off this morning to visit with Ton Zijlstra in Antwerp.

Update Qumana launch by Lycos has gone well, Blogware launch seems to be heading in a good direction (as we’ve heard from one of the prominent resellers), private BlogWalk around Antwerp with Ton and Elmine was wonderful, and (maybe) today spring is finally hitting Paris … off for a long walk

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Scooter Libby says GW Bush authorized Dick Cheney to authorize Scooter to leak *de-classified* information on Valerie Plame to Judith Miller of the NY Times.

These people had Richard Nixon as a graduate student in their US Plutocracy School of Crook-hood …

If the American people don’t react to this .. what on earth will they react to, other than poor angry Muslime people ?

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The Qumana team, of which I am part, has seen the culmination of a significant initiative today.

Lycos, a major Internet site, today announced that it is now offering Qumana as a free download to its members and visitors, in order to make blogging easier and more rewarding.

We worked hard on this, and hope that it wil help make our easy-to-use and versatile offline blog editor, Qumana, more widely used and appreciated.

Way to go, my colleagues.

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We’re just starting down towards Frankfurt, after a long 9+ hour flight.

It’s been quite enjoyable communicating with colleagues and friends using Skype, and making a few blog posts and comments on other peoples’ blogs.

And oh, can I say that Lufthansa - just like my experiences with British Airways, KLM, and Air Canada overseas flights - do this flying and keeping passengers more or less comfortable and happy thing … so very much better than any American airline I have experienced to date.

I think Air Canada won some award like “World’s Best Airline” or something like that, last year.

At Frankfurt, I connect to a 45 - 50 minute flight to Paris.

And then it will be two weeks of Paris and the French Alps in the springtime .. meeting, presentations and socializing with new and old friends.

Woooot !

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Here I am, in a Lufthansa jet (Air Canada Flight 9100 to Frankfurt) at 34,000 feet above sea level, over the Alberta / Saskatchewan border … on my way to France after 2 full days of nothing but passport trouble (lost it late Friday afternoon, found it Monday morning in the bank branch I had visited just before closing, all day saturday oing police reports, retracing steps, visualization exercises and many calls to Passport Canada in between …).

This wireless connection to the Web (thanks to Connexion by Boeing is simply amazing, awe-inspiring. I have already spoken (yeah, real voice … more or less clear as a bell) with Jeneane Sessum and IM’ed back and forth on Skype with Earl Mardle in Australia.

As Earl and I agreed .. this will probably be in every plane in a decade, free in first / Business class .. and really the only bottleneck on a trans-Atlantic or trans-Pacific flight is (will be ?) battery life.

While not at all cheap, it is not outrageously expensive. I think the pricing is a business sweet spot … $10 per hour, up to 3 continuous hours … and if your battery can hold out or you brought one or two more with a charge .. $27 gets you the whole 9 hour flight.

Astonishing, all in all …

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… by a guy who knows a thing or three about technology, links and business … Tim Bray (who incidentally lives just a few blocks from me in Vancouver).

This comes from, and is a response to, a multi-blog thread concerning the Naked Answers questions posed by Werner Vogels to Scoble and Shel Israel about their book and its stories.

I don’t always agree with Scoble, but the man doesn’t have an ounce of malice, near as I can tell. I think that, by and large, he towers over the people who’ve been giving him a hard time, and I’d advise him to tune ’em out unless they’re really adding value.

To address a couple just in the last week:

Note to Vogels@Amazon: There’s a word for companies that base all decisions on ruthless quantitative ROI metrics: Bankrupt. I’m an engineer and value numbers, but in business, sometimes anecdotal evidence is all you’ve got, and the anecdotal evidence that blogging produces good results for some companies is pretty voluminous. You don’t want to hear it, that’s your privilege; me, I tend to want to consider all the inputs.

Note to Nick Carr: This perils of blogging piece is really poorly considered. Carr introduces his lengthy list of Things That Can Go Wrong with “Last year, the San Francisco law firm Howard Rice provided a useful overview of the legal risks inherent in employee blogging”.

As a thought experiment, replace the word “blogging” with “email” or “conference presentation” or “teleconference” or “sales presentation”. Or “barroom conversation” for that matter. Quick, quick, you wanna be safe, you better lock all your employees up and never let ’em say anything to anyone! The point is that qualitatively, blogging requires no new policies and introduces no new risks. If your employees are going to say stupid things in public, you’ve got a management problem and a policy problem, not a blogging problem.

Note to executives who are frightened of hearing what their employees have to say, or finding out what the world really thinks about their company: Carr has done you a real favor. Just go and ask your attorneys if they think blogging is safe, and slip ’em a copy of that list, and you can rest easy knowing you’ll never hear anything uncomfortable.

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I wonder what danah boyd has to say about this ? I suppose I should go look (I will).

Thanks, with apologies in advance to Frank Paynter for swiping and publishing his whole blog post (which from the looks of it may be his re-publishing of an article related to the move by the EFF).

A detox center for exclamation-point overload … I love it !

EFF Takes Down Legal Guide for Bloggers

…Opens Online Home for Wayward MySpace Profiles

San Francisco - You might have noticed that EFF has removed its Student Bloggers’ Legal FAQ. This was in response to a cease-and-desist notice we received for “encouraging kids to talk back to their parents and teachers.” This incident has opened our eyes to a new plague on the Internet — the lost and wandering MySpace profiles of thousands of young people across our nation.

“These profiles are an unfiltered view of young people’s thoughts and dreams, and that’s just scary,” said Bea Kweiter, a volunteer at the online home. “If this freewheeling expression is allowed to continue, there’s no way the people associated with it will ever get a job in the real world. Well, unless some boss somewhere has a MySpace profile of her own. But that would never happen.”

The home offers a safe place for profiles to learn how to self-censor. There is also a detox center for exclamation-point overload.

For this release:

http://www.eff.org/cgi/tiny?urlID=556

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Last year was the first year on record, according to an annual study conducted by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, that a full-time worker at minimum wage could not afford a one-bedroom apartment anywhere in the country at average market rates.