You know more than me, we know more than you, and wherever this all going, we're going there together.
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for May 2007.
I’ve been breezily suggesting for the last couple of years that eventually we’ll be able to walk into a room with a screen rolled up under our arm (say, like a yoga mat), hang it up on a wall, plug it in and then have video conferences via broadband wireless … without really know what I was talking about or whether any real R&D was being done in this direction.
Looks like I may have been saved by Sony .. phew.
I’ve been in the UK a week now .. most of the time in Brighton, with several day trips into London, notably to meet with Euan Semple for a short walk and catch-up …
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I thought I’d take this quiz that Listics pointed to rather than do my novenas before coffee this morning (in the garden in the European version of a small city in southern California - Brighton .. the weather has been SPECTACULAR since I arrived in the UK).
With respect to 50 short and wildly weirdly worded questions, I have discovered that I am a classic liberal when it comes to the Bible and Christianity.
… and then cede him total control of governing the USA ? If Katrina was practice, then I’ll bet most people would rather have almost anyone else running the government.
I’ll bet I am not the only one who has had a fleeting thought about what kinds of "catastrophic emergencies" might emerge prior to November 2007.
Do you think it’s funny-strange that the television and newspaper news don’t seem to have picked up on this (at least not to my knowledge) ? I do.
From stumbling through Progressive.org via Improprieties (link to a previous C & L story)
Bush Anoints Himself as the Insurer of Constitutional Government in Emergency
In a new National Security Presidential Directive, Bush lays out his plans for dealing with a “catastrophic emergency.”
With scarcely a mention in the mainstream media, President Bush has ordered up a plan for responding to a catastrophic attack.
Under that plan, he entrusts himself with leading the entire federal government, not just the Executive Branch. And he gives himself the responsibility “for ensuring constitutional government.”He laid this all out in a document entitled “National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51” and “Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20.”
The White House released it on May 9.
Other than a discussion on Daily Kos led off by a posting by Leo Fender, and a pro-forma notice in a couple of mainstream newspapers, this document has gone unremarked upon.
The subject of the document is entitled “National Continuity Policy.”
It defines a “catastrophic emergency” as “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government function.”
This could mean another 9/11, or another Katrina, or a major earthquake in California, I imagine, since it says it would include “localized acts of nature, accidents, and technological or attack-related emergencies.”
The document emphasizes the need to ensure “the continued function of our form of government under the Constitution, including the functioning of the three separate branches of government,” it states.
But it says flat out: “The President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government.”
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… but first and foremost I must emphatically declare that I am not very knowledgeable about the technical issues and whether or not creating a new architecture would serve humans better.
I am (very) wary about government and corporate involvement in this initiative (link and excerpt from the Globe and Mail below). Rather than do the work of explaining myself, I’ll let one of the comments to the newspaper article say essentially what I have to say. Project Clean Slate wants the Net to be a corporate and governmental service first and foremost.
sean smith from Canada writes: The US government and their corporations continue to try to censor the internet. Their primary concern is it’s hard to commercialise such an open system and they even argued they are forced to carry speech some corporations disagree with (apparently it violates THEIR right to free speech). The cable companies are the one’s leading the charge for "a tiered" internet (allowing their commercial applications to take precedence over those who don’t pay them additional fees). In Canada, Telus went as far as blocking access to any website that was favourable to the workers striking the company. With an open internet it is virtually impossible to censor for any period of time as Telus found out.
Fortunately people around the world are fighting back. In the US grass roots support from all corners united to preserve net neutrality. The internet is the last forum average people have to communicate on a large scale with each other. This "clean slate" will ensure it doesn’t remain that way and must be challenged as vigorously as before. Check out: http://www.savetheinternet.com/
Untangling the World Wide Web
CHRISTOPHER DREHER
Globe and Mail
May 18, 2007For the past few decades, a huge network infrastructure has provided billions of people with access to information and technology that was inconceivable to earlier generations.
But if the cybergelicals of the 1990s were right about how the Internet would transform everyday life, they were less prophetic about what exactly those transformations would look like. As the number of users and applications has expanded, so have the frustrations and risks of plugging in.
This week, the United States banned soldiers from websites such as YouTube and MySpace – concerned that downloads and social networking could overload military systems and lead to security breaches. Some banks have reverted to snail mail to help customers steer clear of phishers trying to bilk them out of their money.
“Over all, the situation is not getting better, it’s getting worse,” says David Clark, a senior researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the early creators of the Internet.
[Snip ...]
He points out that thousands of researchers have been trying to remedy Internet security issues, among other flaws, for decades. “We’re not going to get there by trying harder, but by trying different.”
Which is why a growing number of programmers and network specialists – increasingly skeptical about jury-rigging solutions for today’s sprawling, technically discordant Internet – are asking a seemingly heretical question: Should we throw out the Web and start over?
Last month, a group of computer scientists at Stanford University in California formally launched a research program called the Clean Slate Design for the Internet Project. Their goal is to reimagine the Web’s basic architecture.
“It’s a fundamental change in thinking,” says Nick McKeown, an associate professor at Stanford who directs research at Clean Slate. “Instead of trying to fix problems for today, we’re trying to figure out what the Internet should look like in 15 years.”
[Snip ...]
As now-popular mythology has it, the democratic – almost anti-authoritarian – nature of burgeoning Internet culture also helped it make the leap from scholars trading thesis drafts to mainstream use. And ultimately deepened the potential of the network.
But ironically the Internet’s openness is also its albatross. Because of ad-hoc innovations, the Web has become a kind of unwieldy trailer park of technology – where security and even fundamental stability remain highly problematic.
For example, early adopters and researchers weren’t worried about an interminable stream of e-mail from strangers hawking Viagra or spammers posing as eBay asking for personal financial data, so security has been developed in a patchwork manner.
[Snip ...]
“In every other high-tech field, it’s usually typical to see massive innovation,” Prof. McKeown says. “And although we’ve seen huge implementation of new applications, Internet technology is built on the same ideas it was built on 40 years ago.”
Still, after you get a flat tire, you can drive on the rim for only so long before you have to pull over, or risk worse damage. This is why Guru Parulkar has long advocated the “clean slate” solution. Currently the director of programming for the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Va., he believes that the Internet has become dangerously “ossified.”
In August, he will take the helm of Stanford’s Clean Slate Design. The ideas researchers come up with there will then be tested on a beta network of sorts he spearheaded at the NSF called the Global Environment for Network Innovations. It will cost $300-million to $400-million (U.S.).
STARTING FROM SCRATCH
Although the work at Clean Slate involves highly technical considerations – such as a redesign of the wireless spectrum allocation to better use limited network capacity – its success could greatly affect our daily lives.
Better wireless spectrum allocation, for instance, would finally mean faster and more foolproof data communication between handheld wireless devices such as phones and PDAs. It would also fulfill at last the promises of devices that combine the capacities of a television, a DVD player and a home computer.
Likewise, improving network security would mean that instead of spending billions of dollars preventing spam, virus attacks, malicious hacking and other dangers, businesses could expand on some of the life-altering real-time uses imagined by pioneers of the Internet.
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Inventor: Camera phone evolution has only just begun
SANTA CRUZ, California (AP) — The chilling sounds of gunfire on the Virginia Tech campus; the hateful taunts from Saddam Hussein’s execution; the racist tirade of comedian Michael Richards.
Those videos, all shot with cell phone cameras and seen by millions, are just a few recent examples of the power now at the fingertips of the masses. Even the man widely credited with inventing the camera phone in 1997 is awed by the cultural revolution he helped launch.
"It’s had a massive impact because it’s just so convenient," said Philippe Kahn, a tech industry maverick whose other pioneering efforts include the founding of software maker Borland, an early Microsoft Corp. antagonist.
[Snip ... ]
Kahn, 55, is well aware of how the camera phone has since been put to negative uses: sneaky shots up women’s skirts, or the violent trend of "happy slapping" in Europe where youths provoke a fight or assault, capture the incident on camera and then spread the images on the Web or between mobile phones.
But he likes to focus on the technology’s benefits. It’s been a handy tool that has led to vindication for victims or validation for vigilantes.
As Kahn heard the smattering of stories in recent years about assailants scared off by a camera phone or criminals who were nabbed later because their faces or their license plates were captured on the gadget, he said, "I started feeling it was better than carrying a gun."
And though he found the camera-phone video of the former Iraqi dictator’s execution disturbing, Kahn said the gadget helped "get the truth out." The unofficial footage surreptitiously taken by a guard was vastly different from the government-issued version and revealed a chaotic scene with angry exchanges depicting the ongoing problems between the nation’s factions.
Kahn also thinks the evolution of the camera phone has only just begun.
He wouldn’t discuss details of his newest startup, Fullpower Technologies Inc., which is in stealth mode working on the "convergence of life sciences and wireless," according to its Web site.
But, Kahn said, it will, among other things, "help make camera phones better."
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After a long flight, I am sitting in a friend’s house in Brighton & Hove, on the south coast of the UK.
I’m just visiting for a few days, taking in the lovely frenzy of downtown Brighton, quaffing a few Harvey’s Bitter at my friend’s new pub, going for a couple of long walks, and reading David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous out loud to friends and engaging them in a process of anecdotes, stories and arguments
Via the Globe and Mail …
Study finds 25 countries censor websites
Associated Press
May 18, 2007NEW YORK — At least 25 countries around the world block websites for political, social or other reasons as governments seek to assert authority over a network meant to be borderless, said a U.S.-British-Canadian study out Friday.
The actual number may be higher but the OpenNet Initiative had the time and capabilities to study only 40 countries and the Palestinian territories. Even so, researchers said they found more censorship than they had initially expected, a sign the Internet has matured to the point governments are taking notice.
“This is very much the revenge of geography,” said Rafal Rohozinski, a research fellow at the University of Cambridge in England.
China, Iran, Myanmar, Syria, Tunisia and Vietnam had the most extensive filters for political sites. Iran, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen had the strictest social-filtering practices, blocking pornography, gambling and homosexual sites.
In some countries, censorship was narrow. South Korea, for instance, tends to block only information about its neighbouring rival, North Korea.
Yet researchers found no filtering at all in Russia, Israel or the Palestinian territories, despite political conflicts.
Governments generally had no mechanism for citizens to complain about any erroneous blocking, with Saudi Arabia, Oman and the United Arab Emirates being among the exceptions.
The OpenNet Initiative, a collaboration between researchers at Cambridge, the University of Oxford, Harvard University and the University of Toronto, has previously published reports detailing censorship in specific countries. The latest study was its attempt to compare filtering worldwide.
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Via the Globe and Mail …
Amazon store to sell music free of copy protection
Reuters
May 16, 2007NEW YORK — Amazon.com Inc. said Wednesday the company will launch a digital music store later in 2007 with millions of songs, free of copy protection technology that limits where consumers can play their music.
The Seattle-based company said music company EMI Group Plc , home to artists ranging from Coldplay to Norah Jones to Joss Stone to Pink Floyd, has licensed its digital catalog to Amazon, the second such deal in a month.
“Our MP3-only strategy means all the music that customers buy on Amazon is always DRM-free and plays on any device,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder and CEO.
Digital Rights Management, or DRM, has been demanded by the music industry to contain piracy by preventing users from making multiple copies; but its critics say it restricts consumers and therefore hinders the growth of legal music uses.
Early last month, EMI said it would make its music available online without a key anti-piracy measure, becoming the first major music group to take the risk in a bid to grow digital sales.
With all music companies struggling from a drop in the sale of physical albums, EMI, announced its first deal with Apple Inc. and the iTunes online music store in April.
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CNN.com has just interviewed futurist Alex Steffen about the effects of the Internet.
He suggests that people are using it to connect, talk, share information … "something that the (…) Internet experts of the last generation didn’t really anticipate".
Is the Internet the future of democracy ?
CNN: It doesn’t sound like the Internet that a lot of people imagine.
AS: It’s something that the people who are most famous as Internet experts of the last generation didn’t really anticipate: that most people don’t want to stay in their little cubicles and play Internet games all night. Most people want to get dates, buy presents more easily or meet up with their friends and family — "Where can I go to get the business of life done more efficiently and be more like the person I want to be?"
[Snip ...]
CNN: When did people first use the Internet as a campaigning tool?
AS: The most notable examples, although people didn’t comment on them at the time, were the anti-war protests at the beginning of the second Iraq war. All over the world, enormous numbers of people got together to protest the idea of that war. That was done almost entirely with online advocacy. Most of the people putting together those protests were tiny little groups that really didn’t have the budget to do it in the normal way — sending out lots of flyers, having people build phone trees. This time round, it was Web sites, e-mails and text messages, and lots of people talking.
CNN: What sort of an impact do you think the Internet had on those protests?
AS: I don’t think those protests could have happened the way they happened before those tools were available.
However, it’s an intermediate step, not least because it showed that protests of that sort — a bunch of people using new technologies to go hold signs together — are not as effective as they need to be, because essentially the President of the United States of America could say, "I don’t care."
CNN: So what do you think the next step would be?
AS: We’re still figuring out what the next step is. I think we’re going to start to see a new model of civic advocacy where people get together once in a while to protest, but it’s more about an ongoing, sustained engagement in issues, networks and communities about which people care. We’re already seeing the beginnings of it.
There’s this great phrase, "continuous partial attention," to describe what people do online. They look at a little thing here, a little thing there, and they keep track of it all. It’s the ultimate multi-tasking in our brains.
We’re going to see the Internet facilitate continuous partial attention more and more for local issues, for political issues, for community events, for things happening in your social network. We will find that’s a great deal more attention than people previously paid with these things.
While it’s still in the early days, when it really comes to fruition it’s really going to change everything.
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A delightful little piece of snark from Harold Jarche …
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All of this citizen participation that is breaking out made me think about a poster created by demonstrating French students in 1968.
Is someone else profiting from all of these social networks, or is it truly a citizen-led phenomenon?
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For those challenged by French, this is a grammar exercise in the conjugation of the present tense of the verb "to participate", followed by the present tense of "they profit"
… says Ross Mayfield in this brief video interview titled Web 2.0 For The Enterprise (The Wisdom of the Employees) by Dan Farber at the Web 2.0 Expo.
Matthew Glotzman expands upon the "mass customization of work" while working in a group, and "finding ways to get things done"
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"These people grew up doing their homework on MySpace and it’s called cheating, now they do it at work and it’s called collaboration"
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I have riffed on this any number of times before … for example, here’s The Wisdom of the Organizational Crowd from February of this year.
On a personal note, I am SO tired about hearing people talk about employees "goofing off" when they are not head down, on-task .. when they may be browsing or chatting.
With thanks to this comment on the Firedoglake blog, citing Phil Carter, an Army reserve junior officer on Plan F and Plan G.
It’s past time to leave … and my position remains that the invasion and occupation should never have been allowed to take place.
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Plan A - Attack
Plan B - Beat ‘Em Up
Plan C - Clusterfuck
Plan D - Denial
Plan E - Escalate
Plan F - Failure
Plan G - Get The Troops Out
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Update:
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I have been a journo/ broadcaster, I have screwed up, not even intentionally, just through being dumb, and the people that I screwed up had, essentially, no recourse. Have you ever tried to make a formal complaint to a broadcaster, sheesh.
Now they, and we, don’t have to wait, don’t have to plead, don’t have to hope; we blog, we name names, we tell our story and, where necessary, we post our own recordings of the conversation, the interactions, the emails and then we tag the post with the original title of the story and the names of the people who offended us and the topic and let Technorati and Digg and google move the riposte around so that anyone who wants to, make up their own mind.
Newspapers call the big name along the top of the front page "the masthead", they see their publication and the agendas that it carries as some kind of vessel and that ship is leaking like a seive because it was caulked with the ability to control both the message and access to the channel through which it flowed.
Gone.
Good.
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… on Terry Heaton’s clarification about why the Internet has changed "reporting" for good.
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Another Big Challenge For The Old Way Of Doing Things
In a nutshell, Wired Magazine is doing a story about Michael Arrington of TechCrunch. Michael’s a lightning rod, and my guess is Wired finds this interesting. Wired wants to interview others about Arrington, including Jason Calacanis and Dave Winer, both of whom know him well.
Well, Jason and Dave want the interviews done via email, a technique I personally find increasingly useful. Wired doesn’t want that, and so the whole matter is being openly discussed in the blogosphere and eventually, one hopes, in the mainstream press.
Here’s part of what Winer wrote to the Wired reporter:
“Not generally doing interviews these days. If you have a few questions, send them along, and if I have something to say, I’ll write a blog post, which of course you’re free to quote. Sorry that’s about the best I can do.”
Here’s a portion of the Calacanis reply:
I’m an email guy like dave winer.. And I own my words as well, and often print them on my blog (after stories come out).
A wired writer who won’t do an email interview–thats ironic!
Frankly, you need to adapt. Journalists have misquoted people for so long–and quoted them out of context that many people like to have their words on record.
I don’t want someone taking half a sentence or paraphrasing me… Just too much risk.
Besides I have 10,000 people come to my blog every day–i don’t need wired to talk to the tech industry.
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Notwithstanding that Jacques Chirac was arguably right-of-centre, with the results of France’s election today, it seems that the affluent countries on the planet continue to move towards right-wing authoritarian leaders.
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USA - George Bush (with prospects for the 2009 replacement
No, that’s not the headline for my review of David Weinberger’s new book Everything Is Miscellaneous.
Rather it is a furtive cry into the ether because I went traipsing on foot, in the rain, to three separate bookstores in Vancouver to purchase Everything Is Miscellaneous if I could.
Duthie’s Books … first, they pretended they had not heard of it.
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Via the European edition of the International Herald Tribune.
Forget who’ll win in France. Change is a loser
PARIS: IN the months leading up to Sunday’s presidential voting in France, there was a lot of talk about breaking with the past. Don’t bet it will happen.
The French are notoriously resistant to change, and any new president would be hard-pressed to deliver any dramatic departure from the way people here live and work and get along with each other (or don’t).
It was the French, after all, who first observed, "the more things change, the more they remain the same."
"I have the impression that things will move, yes. But will France resemble Britain? No," said Michel Winock, a French historian, referring obliquely to Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s showdown with British unions and the eventual economic boom her policies helped bring. "We have traditions, attitudes, an attachment to social welfare and, even if change is desirable, we won’t accept change overnight."
[Snip ...]
First, life in France is, on the whole, plenty comfortable. The French flirt with the idea of change, but few in the mainstream want to risk losing France’s "exceptionalism" — that warm bed of traditions and entitlements that lets so many enjoy the benefits of living here.
And the benefits are great. Listen to the conversation with the waiter at the table next to you in a Parisian restaurant at lunchtime and more often than not it will involve a nuanced discussion of what is best to eat and just which wine to drink. Later, the diners will often pay with meal vouchers from their employer.Cumbersome and costly as the system may be, it’s not exactly broken. So why risk trouble?
Second, there is something about the French that resists a change, even in times of trouble. Historians famously trace it to the Enlightenment, when France developed a republican model based on the collective will. By contrast, republican models in Britain and America stressed the primacy of economics and individualism — what the French still, with a shudder, call liberalism.
"French society remains attached to the idea of the collective," said Jean-Claude Mailly, national secretary of the Force Ouvrière union federation. "A whole series of things are managed collectively." And that, by its nature, makes things move more slowly than Americans are accustomed to.
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The song Sweet Surrender was a favourite of mine in the early ’70’s … and it still is.
Corporate organizations of medium and large come to be and grow originally to enable or satisfy a vision that almost always comes from one person or a small group of people. The dynamics of said organization change as its size and the complexity of the market(s) in which it operates increase.
Employees are not elected, nor do they elect the organizations’ leaders and management. I don’t think everyone should be preoccupied with nor deciding on vision, mission, strategic objectives, etc. Nor do I think that good ideas, good questions and thoughtful dissent should be ignored or blocked because of an organization’s structure or power politics.
Notwithstanding all my bumpf about wirearchy, I agree with this statement by Tom Davenport …
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"The absence of participative technologies in the past is not the only reason that organizations and expertise are hierarchical. Enterprise 2.0 software and the Internet won’t make organizational hierarchy and politics go away. They won’t make the ideas of the front-line worker in corporations as influential as those of the CEO.
Most of the barriers that prevent knowledge from flowing freely in organizations – power differentials, lack of trust, missing incentives, unsupportive cultures, and the general busyness of employees today – won’t be addressed or substantially changed by technology alone. For a set of technologies to bring about such changes, they would have to be truly magical, and Enterprise 2.0 tools fall short of magic."
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While I agree, I also think that more and more people are working within a new set of conditions, and participative technologies as we are coming to know them are really quite new. Longer term, demographic changes, expectations and a deeper and broader range of experiences involving participative technologies that have worked well for a purpose will increase the flow of knowledge in organizations, and increase its constructive use. Some companies will get it right, and reap the benefits with customers, with more satisfied employees and with the bottom line. I suspect many more won’t, but the pressures relative to an interconnected and interlinked ecosystem of employees, customers, suppliers and the browsing public at large will not go away.
I also agree with Andrew McAfee’s coda with respect to Davenport’s assertion above …
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Tom is correct to say that these platforms won’t by themselves turn our existing hierarchical, political, and busy companies into egalitarian gestalts of knowledge creation and continuous bottom-up innovation. What they will do, I believe, is give managers who want more lateralism, egalitarianism, crowdsourcing, idea percolation, self-organization, collective intelligence, etc. a new and unprecedented opportunity to obtain them.
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… and that’s what companies seeking increased responsiveness, flexibility, higher performance, greater public credibility, etc. will be wanting to experiment with and work at realizing.
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… to build awareness and activate citizens’ energy …
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Our mission
As major new challenges like climate change and escalating religious conflict threaten our common future, people from around the world are coming together to take global politics into their own hands. Avaaz.org (Our name means "Voice" or "Song" in several languages including Hindi, Urdu, Farsi, Nepalese, Dari, Turkish, and Bosnian) is a community of global citizens who take action on the major issues facing the world today. Our aim is to ensure that the views and values of the world’s people — and not just political elites and unaccountable corporations — shape global decisions. Avaaz.org members are taking action for a more just and peaceful world and a vision of globalization with a human face.
In our inter-connected world, the actions of political leaders and corporations are having a profound impact on all of us. To match the power and reach of global leaders and borderless corporations, Avaaz.org members are building a powerful movement of citizens without borders.
As citizens without borders, we might not have the resources of governments, corporations or the media, but working together we can bring together millions of people around the world and make global public opinion really count on major global issues like poverty, climate change, human rights and global security.
Using the latest technology, Avaaz.org empowers ordinary people from every corner of the globe to directly contact key global decision-makers, corporations and the media.
By signing up to receive updates from Avaaz.org, members receive emails and text messages alerting them to new campaigns and opportunities to act online and offline, and to make a real difference on pressing global issues.
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.. and a slightly roundabout but well-argued pushback (block quote & italics below) to Andrew Keen’s argument contained in the new book the cult of the amateur - how today’s Internet is killing our culture.
I already know I disagree with Keen from what he has written in ZDNet articles and a few quick sorties onto his blog.
It’s actually hard to believe that this has happened, notably here in Canada.
simonmack (41 minutes ago)
the first time i heard this song was on a roof in manhattan the night of 9/11. because there were no cabs we hitched up town. about 25 of my dear friends and i sat on the roof of our building. we cried. we loved. we were empty…some of us hid down below and snorted lines. some of us couldnt. i asked my friend to make this song play…over…and over.please…lets learn just one thing. try to love your fellow man as you might love yourself…god bless, sleep well tonight …
Thanks to unknown YouTube commenter "simonmack"
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Via today’s Toronto Globe and Mail …
Microsoft, Yahoo reconsider merger: report
TAVIA GRANTMicrosoft Corp. [MSFT-Q] and Yahoo Inc. [YHOO-Q] may be in early-stage discussions over a merger or partnership of the two companies, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday, citing people familiar with the situation.
The talks would come a year after the companies explored the idea of combining in a bid to compete with Google [GOOG-Q]Inc., the newspaper said. Those talks fell apart, but now the companies seem to have renewed efforts.
Discussions would come as Google has made a string of acquisitions and benefited from a surge in Internet advertising. Earlier this month, Google snapped up DoubleClick Inc. after beating out several rivals with a $3.1-billion (U.S.) bid, a move that will secure its dominance in online search and advertising.
It was that purchase that spurred Microsoft to intensify its pursuit of a deal with Yahoo, asking the company to re-enter formal negotiations, The New York Post reported.
It put a price tag on Yahoo of about $50-billion (U.S.), citing Wall Street sources.
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Scanning commentaries across a range of blogs this morning, there’s the distinct sense that one was looking at the past …
We’ve reached open advocacy of fascist principles in the mainstream media. Lord knows it’s already appeared in veiled form everywhere: The state is more important than the individual. State power should rest in one man, and that man is above the law. Collusion between private interests and government are inevitable and are no cause for concern.
Masculinity, tradition, hierarchy trump understanding, reason, debate.
I’ve seen many other comments mirroring those above … all white males over 55, all wearing the same suit, penises, black, brown and yellow skins missing. much sternness and patriarchal parental authority on display, etc.
Via David Weinberger’s JOHO … a pointer to an example of a local newspaper’s (BostonNOW) enthusiastic and fresh foray into blogging.
Hey, our blogging area is finally “live” and the experiment can finally begin.
All my traditional newspaper friends tell me I’m crazy — or they’re holding their fire, waiting, I think, to see what happens before committing themselves. But they, too, are probably thinking, “What newspaper in its right mind would publish bloggers in the paper?”
Well, the way I see it, we’re inviting the readers into the paper to make it more relevant, more fun, more intriguing, more curious, and more reflective of our community. Think about it — the traditional daily newspaper is run by a small group of mostly males who are mostly white and mostly older and mostly living outside the city (by way of full disclosure, I fall into each of those categories, sadly on some of those counts).
So I think it would be a blast of fresh air to include in the paper the thoughts and writing and photography and videography of lots of different people from all around Boston. To help with that, we also open the planning of the paper to the public with the webcast of our daily news meeting, Sunday through Thursday, at 1 p.m. — just click on the NewsroomNOW tab at the top of the home page.
I can’t wait to see who comes to blog on our site and what kinds of stories (and photos and videos) they’re going to post.
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For those of you who don’t know me well, it may interest you to learn that I am bilingual (French being my second language) and that I am a hopelessly devoted francophile.
I pass a surprising amount of an average week speaking or reading French, have a pretty healthy network of friends and "colleagues" who are francophones, and I take any opportunity I can to take in French movies and plays, spend time in Montreal, or heave myself over to France (I hope to spend a couple or three days in Paris in about three weeks on my way to Reboot 9 in Copenhagen).
Anyway, tomorrow night I am going to a lecture / discussion with a francophone friend, la belle Isabelle, on a relatively new book titled The Story Of French, a book I almost bought when I was in Montreal two weeks ago.
Some additional interesting facts about French:
FACTS ABOUT FRENCH (For those interested in facts and figures)
from The Story of French
GLOBAL STATUS
French is second only to English for the number of countries where it has official status – 33 as opposed to 45.
And the number of countries that are members of the Francophonie is equal that of the Commonwealth, at 53.French is also the only language, with English, that is taught in every country of the world,
with 100 million students and 2 million teachers – 20 % of whom outside of francophone countries.French is still a working language of the UN, the EU and dozens of international organizations
including the International Red Cross committee, Doctors without Borders, and the International Labour Organization.
Francophone countries form an important bloc in the UN, the EU, the African Union and the Arab League.Two G-8 countries (France and Canada) and six European countries (France, Belgium, Switzerland, Romania,
Luxemburg, Monaco) are fully or partly French-speaking.LANGUAGE
About a third to a half of basic English words come from French, including pedigree, surf, view, strive,
challenge, pride, staunch, mayday and war. (IMO, those are poor choices of examples, and there are so very many words that are clearly from the same root in both languages).French has more than a million words and 5000 new ones are created every year.
IN CANADA
Canada is one of the few countries that uses the Common Law in French, and Quebec’s language protection
measures have been a model for policy in Spain, France, Brazil, and 33 US States.In Canada, 300 000 children are enrolled in French immersion programs.
IN AMERICA
There are eight million francophones living in North America, and most are descendents of
only 10 000 original French colonists (my clarification - most of these people are of course in Quebec, with smatterings in Nova Scotia and Louisiana).In the United States, French is the number four native language and
the second most taught second language after Spanish.The main centers of French in the United States are New England, Louisiana, California and Florida (New England … a few francophones in New Hampshire and Maine from back when boundaries were less clear, some diplomats and professionals in NYC and Boston, ex-pats from the Montreal film industry in Hollywood, and a (pretty large) bunch of what are euphemistically called "snowbirds" (escapees from the winters of Quebec) in Florida).
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I’ve blogged about the Sunlight Foundation before, and I think many bloggers interested in politics probably know about it by now.
Sunlight Foundation Announces Open House Project
Collaborative project, welcomed by Speaker Pelosi, will develop transparency recommendations for House from wide array of experts
This new initiative looks interesting and promising, and if ever implemented would be a victory for facts, archiving and accountability of people elected to represent "the people" … as opposed to the mainstream news corps, who seem to be selected and salaried for the purpose of maintaining the status quo with a tenacity that borders on the absurd.
I can no longer keep track of the number of times I have seen in comments sections words to the effect that the blog world of links and the voices of people engaged in issues is those peoples’ increasingly legitimate alternative to "the news".
It also reminds me of the phrase I saw on the Firedoglake blog back when all the documentation about the US Attorneys imbroglio was offered up. So much documentation, so little time … solution ? Turn it over to the blogging community for "Open Source Congressional Investigation".
Give bloggers Capitol access
By Robert B. Bluey
April 30, 2007This is the first article in a weekly series, exclusively in The Hill, exploring the recommendations of the Sunlight Foundation’s Open House Project, which advocates online transparency in Congress.
Members of Congress are increasingly turning to bloggers as a way to communicate about public policy. Yet these citizen journalists who cover Congress lack what most mainstream reporters in Washington take for granted: access to the U.S. Capitol.
According to the Sunlight Foundation’s Open House Project, a collaborative and bipartisan effort to increase the House of Representatives’ online transparency, Congress can take several simple steps to improve transparency and foster a new spirit of openness. Giving bloggers credentials to cover Congress would be a groundbreaking way to shed light on the inner workings of government.
The debate over bloggers and online journalists on Capitol Hill isn’t a new one. In recent years, they’ve clashed with congressional press galleries as the Internet has grown in popularity and prominence.
In the absence of a congressional press gallery for online journalists, the Periodical Press Gallery has taken on the responsibility of credentialing these individuals. However, given its history of dealing primarily with magazines and newsletters, the gallery’s rules are not well suited for news websites, citizen journalists and bloggers.
The problem isn’t necessarily resistance from politicians wanting to keep bloggers at a distance. Rather, the biggest hurdle bloggers must overcome is distrust among the Capitol Hill press corps. The House and Senate press galleries take their marching orders from mainstream journalists, who have little incentive to invite enterprising bloggers to their coveted stomping grounds.
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