Miasma: Favorite Links

Thanks Adam for finding this indelible image

Fri, 21 Mar 2003 07:41:51 GMT

war comment #1. Today's comment on the war in Irak: [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

Is the Baghdad Blogger for real? Paul Boutin says 'probably'

Fri, 21 Mar 2003 07:39:09 GMT

"fact-checked the Iraqi blogger" [Daypop Top 40] A: Probably. Speculation continues that Dear Raed, the weblog of a young man in Baghdad who posts under the name Salam Pax, is a hoax, perhaps even a disinformation campaign by the CIA or Mossad. A month after Computerworld published a story quoting a "terrorist" who turned out to be a one of their former writers pranking them, it would be foolish not to wonder. [...] A traceroute on Salam's most recent originating address got as far as Transtrum, a unit of the Lebanon-based ISP TerraNet. Requests for further routing info from Transtrum went unanswered, but senior network engineers who looked at the headers for me in the US think they're legitimately from Iraq. Details on Iraq's network can be found in this Salon story by Brian McWilliams, the same hacker/journalist who duped Computerworld and cracked the "send email to Saddam" mailbox on Uruklink. - Salam's blog is hosted in Santa Clara, California, at a high speed co-location facility along with the rest of blogspot.com. This seems obvious to Net veterans, but an MSNBC article's wording misled some readers into believing the site is served from Iraq. Salam posts his blog remotely using Blogger's editing software on a PC. That means blogspot.com (aka Pyra, now a division of Google) has IP records of his previous posts in their log files. No luck getting them yet. - Yes, blogspot.com was one of the domains blocked by Iraqi network administrators in January, possibly in response to Slammer. But Salam and other Iraqis know how to use Web proxies and other tricks to get around the blocks. - Salam Pax is a pseudonym composed of the Arabic and Latin words for peace. But he has signed what may be his real name in personal correspondence to another blogger. - At least one American has received a package from Salam, apparently mailed from Jordan where the titular Raed (a friend for whom Salam says he originally created his weblog) lives. - Salam posted this morning to say BBC reports that state radio had been taken over were false. He was right about that. In the end, it's still a matter of faith. Yes, I think he's really in Baghdad. And so far, he's still alive and well.

Josh in Kurdistan's hilarious & true observations of US media on the ground

Fri, 21 Mar 2003 06:09:50 GMT

The Media. So Syria threatened to kill the official who had given them permission to cross the border, and that got CNN to move. [The Other Side] [...] There a lot of serious, professional journalists here, several of whom were here (or other parts of Iraq) for the first Gulf War and a few of whom are real experts on the region. There are also a lot of clowns. The worst offenders, naturally, are American TV. A sample of what they[base ']ve done: Last fall, CNN came to Kurdistan through Syria, which used to be the easiest way to get here. Syria gives you a two week visa, and you have to be in and out of Kurdistan in that time. CNN, however, apparently decided it wanted to stay longer. Syria wants to keep decent relations with Iraq and Iraq didn't like CNN being in Kurdistan, so it asked Syria to kick them out, and Syria did, but CNN refused to go. So Syria threatened to kill the official who had given them permission to cross the border, and that got CNN to move. Then Syria closed the border to all journalists. And, this is according to a local who worked with CNN, president of the Kurdistan Democratic Party Massoud Barzani personally appealed to the president of Syria to let CNN [^] but no one else! [^] cross the border again. This made the rest of us unloved hacks have to go through a much more difficult procedure to get in through Iran. Now CNN, and several other American TV networks, have hired government press officials at salaries much higher than their government pay to work exclusively for them. These are the people that everyone has to use to get an interview with government officials, and now you have to hope they have enough time to pity you and help you out while they[base ']re taking a break from carrying ABC[base ']s tripod. I[base ']m told this is somewhat of a standard practice in these situations, but that doesn[base ']t make it any less distasteful (not to mention a violation of the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act). One night a couple of weeks ago I couldn[base ']t get to sleep because of the sound of a truck idling loudly in the street below my window. It was unloading sandbags into the breakfast room of the hotel. The next day, following the trail of sand, I saw that it led to the fourth floor of the nine-floor hotel, the one rented by FOX. They have covered every window with sandbags, and a reliable source tells me they paid $5000 for this. Unless they[base ']re expecting Erbil to become another Sarajevo or Beirut (a scenario very far from likely) it[base ']s not clear what exactly they[base ']re protecting themselves against. And I can[base ']t imagine what the people below must think, having survived several wars in the past decades. Now FOX has spearheaded an effort to militarize the whole hotel, shutting off the surrounding streets and, they tell us, when the coalition troops come we will have American and British military guards in the hotel. Why doesn[base ']t this make me feel safer? While there are some assorted anti-American elements here, journalists are not at the top of their list. But soldiers sure will be! And now that there will be some here, right smack in the middle of the city rather than on the base far out in the country, the hotel will be a much juicier target. Thanks, FOX!

I'm addicted to this Kurdistan journalist's blog

Fri, 21 Mar 2003 06:04:30 GMT

This is Josh Kucera's weblog, called The Other Side. It is the first thing I've seen of the so-called "warblogs" that actually IS a warblog, meaning real reporting from a person ON THE GROUND in a dangerous place. More dangerous than I would like to think, as I watched on CNN tonight as air raid sirens went off about 40 km from Erbil. What Josh is doing is even more sobering to me when I hear that CNN has more than 600 journalists working in the Mideast, covering the Iraq war, but only DOZENS in Kurdistan. Most of the CNN folks are sitting tight in safe places, or places marked safe inside dangerous zones. I will have to quote in here the great post Josh did on the presence of the TV media in Erbil too. It is very funny. When I think of what the blog idealists promise with grassroots journalism in this social movement, I mostly hear talk talk talk. They say they scoop traditional media. They say they can blog things live. They show it by blogging their favorite tech conference. Whoo hoo. Here's a clue: it is a very small cadre of journos who actually spend all of their time covering tech conferences. Most of them are busy beating out their stories the hard way. Oh, and this post of Josh's below, about the exodus from Erbil? I read it on his blog several HOURS before CNN and other sources started filing their stories. I sat down at work that day, read Josh's blog, and then started in on my daily tasks with the tv monitor on near my desk as always. I didn't see this story cross until much later that afternoon. Not that traditional stories are what Josh's focus is on. He has to file those for money. In this blog, his accounts are personal, immediate. And I just think that is so fucking cool... Miasma

War Panic in Erbil. Today is the first official day of war panic in Erbil. Yesterday everything looked much like it has since I got here. Today many shops are closed, there are fewer cars in the street and people tell me their neighbors are fleeing the city for towns further towards the Iranian border. My translator's family all left for their hometown of Koy Sanjak, which is closer to the Iraqi lines but which they feel is less of a target. Shopowners are emptying their stores, putting their stuff in more secure locations in case there is looting during the war. Most people... [The Other Side]

Press button, increase power?

Sat, 15 Mar 2003 07:26:01 GMT

If the audience had developed enough rhetorical sophistication for critical thinking (the way the Bush adm uses rhetoric, you would think they were selling swampland in Florida and American people are all marks), maybe words would not function as power buttons for speakers. On the other hand, I don't doubt that "Hasty Generalization" was the most common logic error I marked on freshman comp papers simply because that was what my students HEARD around them most the time: a baldfaced statement without support or evidence, backed simply by the assumption that saying something makes it so. Aha! We have not been transported to the pre-Enlightenment days of the Inquisition. Oh no, we are actually in the mystical Kabbalah days, where to name something is to control it, and words are magic, literally, magic words. Umberto Eco in Foucault's Pendulum would be proud. Miasma A clinical description of moral aphasia.

"Flag conservatives" like Bush paid lip service to some conservative values, but at bottom they didn't give a damn. If they still used some of the terms, it was in order not to narrow their political base. They used the flag. They loved words like "evil." One of Bush's worst faults in rhetoric (to dip into that cornucopia) was to use the word as if it were a button he could push to increase his power. When people have an IV tube put in them to feed a narcotic painkiller on demand, a few keep pressing that button. Bush uses evil as a narcotic for that part of the American public which feels most distressed. Norman Mailer at the Commonwealth Club, Feb. 20, 2003.

[Tom Matrullo's Stuff]

About time someone brings in hypertext theory

Sat, 15 Mar 2003 07:17:08 GMT

Thank you Anne Galloway. Sometimes I think the blog universe thinks they invented the idea of the link, when hypertext pushed on what can be connected associationally far better than some blog software that seems unnecessarily hierarchical and based on outline-driven structures. True, blog technology helps the WEB become more hypertextual in a two-way, dialogic fashion, but it still ain't the Akashic. Miasma Can blog trackers step into the same river twice?.

Anne Galloway is thinking about tracking and representing ever-changing meanings among blogs:

...we're looking at constantly shifting contexts, shifting uses, shifting practices, shifting meanings, shifting understandings. To represent that, to nail it down, with only quantities of points of connections suggests that our social experiences of blogging can be effectively, and adequately, defined in terms of linear and causal relationships based on the transmission of data quantities. We always talk of networks and nodes, but didn't hypertext originally offer us more flexible, more rhizomatic possibilities? It seems to me that blog and blog-related software (like aggregators) seek to control - if only by filtering and structuring - the flow. And that's not very sociable if you appreciate serendipity.

This is an important insight. It will be posted on Stir when servers allow. Meanwhile, we might do well to consider how our notions of "content" and "memes" serve to constrict how the possible relations among blogs and the speech within blogs is represented by current tracking products. More to come... Your thoughts welcome.

[Tom Matrullo's Stuff]

Now I know what to do in an emergency

Sat, 15 Mar 2003 07:12:15 GMT

Like a boy scout, one should be always prepared. Thanks Tom, for showing the way to the helpful tips! For your own protection, click here now [Tom Matrullo's Stuff]

Taking one for the team?

Sat, 15 Mar 2003 07:00:30 GMT

" The White House Press Corps politely grabs its ankles" [Daypop Top 40]

[...]
The Bush press conference to me was like a mini-Alamo for American journalism, a final announcement that the press no longer performs anything akin to a real function. Particularly revolting was the spectacle of the cream of the national press corps submitting politely to the indignity of obviously pre-approved questions, with Bush not even bothering to conceal that the affair was scripted.

Abandoning the time-honored pretense of spontaneity, Bush chose the order of questioners not by scanning the room and picking out raised hands, but by looking down and reading from a predetermined list. Reporters, nonetheless, raised their hands in between questions–as though hoping to suddenly catch the president’s attention.

In other words, not only were reporters going out of their way to make sure their softballs were pre-approved, but they even went so far as to act on Bush’s behalf, raising their hands and jockeying in their seats in order to better give the appearance of a spontaneous news conference.

Even Bush couldn’t ignore the absurdity of it all. In a remarkable exchange that somehow managed to avoid being commented upon in news accounts the next day, Bush chided CNN political correspondent John King when the latter overacted his part, too enthusiastically waving his hand when it apparently was, according to the script, his turn anyway.

KING: "Mr. President."

BUSH: "We’ll be there in a minute. King, John King. This is a scripted..."
[...] This was just Bush[base ']s eighth press conference since taking office, and each one of them has been a travesty. In his first presser, on Feb. 22, 2001, a month after his controversial inauguration, he was not asked a single question about the election, Al Gore or the Supreme Court. On the other hand, he was asked five questions about Bill Clinton[base ']s pardons. Reporters argue that they have no choice. They[base ']ll say they can[base ']t protest or boycott the staged format, because they risk being stripped of their seat in the press pool. For the same reason, they say they can[base ']t write anything too negative. They can[base ']t write, for instance, "President Bush, looking like a demented retard on the eve of war[sigma]" That leaves them with the sole option of "working within the system" and, as they like to say, "trying to take our shots when we can." But the White House press corps[base '] idea of "taking a shot" is David Sanger asking Bush what he thinks of British foreign minister Jack Straw saying that regime change was not necessarily a war goal. And then meekly sitting his ass back down when Bush ignores the question. They can[base ']t write what they think, and can[base ']t ask real questions. What the hell are they doing there? If the answer is "their jobs," it[base ']s about time we started wondering what that means. Volume 16, Issue 11 - 3/12/2003

Privacy Activist Takes on Delta

Thu, 06 Mar 2003 04:55:34 GMT

Privacy News from Wired News - Privacy Activist Takes on Delta.

A boycott of Delta Airlines is being mounted in response to the airline's decision to test a controversial program that requires airline passengers to undergo background checks.

[ ... ]

Advocates of CAPPS II insist the system will identify terrorists while allowing law-abiding citizens to avoid the airport security shakedown. But privacy advocates like Scannell believe CAPPS II is highly intrusive and ineffective in identifying terrorists.

Delta will be trying out CAPPS II at three as-yet undisclosed airports during the month of March. It's a first step prior to potentially deploying CAPPS II screening throughout the country over the next year.

[ ... ]

Scannell first heard that Delta would be testing the CAPPS II program last Friday. He immediately registered BoycottDelta.org and worked all weekend to get the site up.

It went live late on Monday, and Scannell sent information about it to several security and privacy mailing lists. He said the site received about 25 e-mails an hour on Tuesday, all but one in complete support of the boycott.

Scannell argues that CAPPS II is ineffective in spotting would-be terrorists, as the system can easily be defeated by watching to see what sort of passengers it targets for special attention.

"CAPPS II threatens our liberty, but its security benefits are far from clear," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Program. "It will leave security screeners at sea in an ocean of private data; some of that data will be fraudulent, and much of it just plain wrong."

[ ... ]

Information from files about those individuals could also be shared with other government agencies at the federal, state and local levels, as well as with intelligence agencies such as the CIA and with foreign governments and international agencies -- all of which could use those designations for many purposes, including employment decisions and the granting of government benefits, according to the ACLU.

Undersecretary of Transportation for Security James M. Loy said in a statement that CAPPS II will respect citizens' privacy.

[Privacy Digest]

Push me, Pull you: Poynter Institute & Tom Matrullo on information exchange vs information hoarding

Tue, 04 Mar 2003 05:38:15 GMT

I wrote about this same principle in the story on this blog, called Response to Clay Shirky: 2 Systems for Creating Value. In short, information, knowledge, is like money, it only really gains value if it circulates, a democratizing principle. On the other hand, for those who want short term gain, hoarding seems to consolidate power, that is, if the money or information already has value. The reason this works through an elitist principle is that the hoarder or society protecting various "holy of holies," whether that be technical arcana, religious insight, kung fu, or a big vault at a big fucking bank, is that it seems to confer power to the gatekeeper position. In a democratized or distributed system for creating value, the rising tide floats all boats. But introduce widespread hoarding into the equation, and elitists construct borders and gates and gatekeepers. Values diminish as people do without the thing being hoarded, and you have to distribute some of it or let more inside the gate for value to again accrue. The professional longevity of Alan Greenspan I think in some ways depends on the fact that he has deeply internalized this principle. The utter stupidity of the Bush adm, which is rumored to be not going to reappoint Greenspan due to has non-party line comments on the tax cut (and because maybe Bush assumes the HW Bush recession was actually a Greenspan "attack" on his daddy), is revealed by just how deeply this administration slept through Economics 101. Miasma

Poynter sees the point.
What is the trade-off when a newspaper (or other institutionalized journalistic entity) offers a blog, but requires people coming because of a major story to register to see it?
I'd suggest to news sites that require registration and find themselves in a similar situation that they turn off user registration temporarily -- or at least turn it off for stories about the big breaking story...
That's Steve Outing, a very bright journalist long involved with the Net, on Poynter Online. He points to Sheila Lennon's site, Projo.com, which moved its newspaper blog about the Station fire outside the registration barrier because the news need was greater than the, uh, whatever the need is (death wish?) that causes news entities to require people to register to see news. This is the news blog I described yesterday (scroll down to A community's journal).
[Tom Matrullo's Stuff]

And I'm telling you now I am refusing to give airlines my money just on principle

Tue, 04 Mar 2003 05:17:53 GMT

Bad credit? No credit? Then you might just be an airline security risk. CNN news story on yet another level of security checks for airline passengers. According to the Transportation Department Agency, CAPPS II will be rolled out within 90 days. CAPPS II (Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System) will check such things as credit report and bank account activity to determine the security level risk that each and every individual passenger poses. [kuro5hin.org]

Logical Fallacies and The Rush To War

Tue, 04 Mar 2003 05:13:43 GMT

Logical Fallacies and The Rush To War. Dave Koehler of PhillyBurbs.com has written an outstanding summary of the logical fallacies used by the Bush administration to try to convince the world at large of the necessity of invading Iraq in the absence of any sort of compelling evidence. If you think Bush is full of it, but couldn't put your finger on how, exactly, read the article. If you think Bush is making a good case for invading Iraq, read the article anyway. [kuro5hin.org

Let's review them, shall we?

One of the favorite methods of the current administration is a false dilemma. This is when only two choices are given when, in reality, there are more options. Right after 9/11 you heard, [base "]You are either with us or against us,[per thou] in the fight against terrorism. Actually, countries can be both against terrorism and not an ally of the U.S. More recently, many countries are showing that they are both against a pre-emptive war and against the current Iraqi regime. [...] Another arguing device is the argument from ignorance. This involves claiming that what hasn[base ']t been disproven must be true. We hear Iraq hasn[base ']t shown that they do not have WMD, therefore they do. The real burden of proof is on the party making the claim. The U.S. and/or U.N. must prove that Iraq has WMD. It is impossible for Iraq to prove that they don[base ']t. An argument portraying a series of increasingly bad events is called a slippery slope. This is used effectively by gun-control opponents who suggest handgun registration will eventually lead to government confiscation of all guns. On Iraq, we hear how Saddam will develop WMDs and give them to terrorists who will then use them on America. While this is one possible chain of events, it hardly justifies a pre-emptive attack on a sovereign nation. [...] Criticizing a person or group instead of an issue is called an ad hominem attack. The current talk about France by many Americans is a perfect example. It is not only childish, it distracts from the real issues. France is not obligated to go along with every American idea because we saved them from Nazi Germany 60 years ago. [...] Another common device we are seeing is a fallacy of exclusion. Colin Powell and President Bush have both talked about aluminum tubes being used for uranium enrichment for use in nuclear weapons. They always fail to mention that according to U.N. nuclear inspectors the tubes were actually conventional rocket artillery casings. They also mention Iraq[base ']s use of chemical weapons against Iran in the 1980[base ']s. They again leave out that we supported Iraq at that time in their war against Iran, and basically ignored the use of WMDs at that time. [...] Arguing a claim is true based on someone being an expert on the subject is known as an appeal to authority. In our case, the experts are defectors from Iraq. Powell claimed defectors reported there were 18 mobile biological weapons labs cruising around Iraq. First, these defector[base ']s stories are suspect due to their obvious dislike of Iraq. I[base ']m sure they would be happy to tell the U.S. what they wanted to hear if it hastened the destruction of the Iraqi regime and they could return to their homeland. More to the point, chief weapons inspector Hans Blix said his men had examined some of the trucks and found them to be food-testing labs. [...] Why is the Bush Administration using these deceptive techniques to rush us into a war with Iraq? Is there any solid evidence that Iraq still processes weapons of mass destruction and has ties with terrorist groups? A few audio tapes and fuzzy satellite photos are not proof. All we hear is the same anecdotal evidence repeated over and over again. President Bush has said that if Saddam and his generals [base "]take innocent life, if they destroy infrastructure, they will be held accountable as war criminals.[per thou] Isn[base ']t the United States about to take innocent life and destroy infrastructure?

What I've found in all the listservs I've been on since 9/11 is that there are TWO things Americans need most in this world. I've hollered and yelled, "Oh my kingdom for just these two little things!" They are: 1. For everyone to retake 8th grade civics class, with particular focus on the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. 2. A university-level course in rhetoric and argumentation, Logical Fallacies 101, if you will. If we just had these two things, fewer people would be DUPED by stupid and poorly constructed arguments. I swear, it is if the Enlightenment never happened, and all those poor postmodernists NEED the Enlightenment to rebel and rail against. Would you take such a precious thing away from them?! Miasma

I google. You google. He-she-it googles. We have googled. We will google. And we will give the trademark police the finger. Tito, give me a kleenix. My legs have turned to jello.

Wed, 26 Feb 2003 04:50:31 GMT

Verbing Weirds Google [Slashdot] And this, from the American Dialect Society Mailing List, documents an interesting part of this most curious postmodern phenomena. For what is next, the trademarking of words like "stuff," or "dog" or "cheese?" Miasma [TM][R]

Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2003 06:44:02 -0500 Reply-To: abatefr@earthlink.net Sender: American Dialect Society Mailing List Comments: To: "DSNA list," From: Frank Abate Subject: FW: Google trademark concerns Comments: To: ADS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Dear lexos and others: Paul McFedries gives us (see below) a classic instance of what happens when the growth of the language cuts across someone's proprietary interest. Of course google is used as a verb. And why not? It only makes sense, it is short, it is fun, it works. And what the Google (TM) lawyer knows, but does not say, is that the company he represents cannot do anything about its use as a verb, legally. They cannot sue, as one cannot claim proprietary rights to a verb. Jesse Sheidlower recently pointed this out to me; apparently it is an explicit part of US law re trademarks. So the lawyer is really merely trying to get Paul McF to do something that he need not do, but hopes he will be scared into it by having received a letter from a corporate attorney -- enough to get anyone's attention. I'll bet it was sent certified mail with a return receipt requested -- that always impresses (and scares) people. The bottom line on this is the following: 1. The English language has a verb, google. It is new, but it is in widespread use, and this can be documented. 2. It is perfectly right and legal for dictionaries to cover this new verb, or any new usage for that matter. 3. The company Google apparently has a trademark interest in the use of the term "Google" (whether capital or not), but legally, by statute, can only protect that use as anything other than a verb. So, if someone were to come along and set up a similar service to what Google does and use the word google on that service, then Google could sue to stop that. They could even, conceivably, get a cease-and-desist order from a judge to stop that use instantly, during the waiting period for a trial on the matter. This is within their legal rights as trademark holder, assuming that they have filed for a trademark for the exclusive use of the word commercially. 4. Paul McF -- or any lexicographer or dictionary publisher -- can and should cover the language as they see fit. They should not feel restricted by trademark issues, as regards whether they report on actual, documentable usage. That sort of reporting is the same as what journalists do, and so, in a sense, if not in actual, legal fact, is protected by the First Amendment as a matter of free speech. Reporting on usage is not a violation of another's commercial interests, at least not unless the circumstances are VERY unusual. 5. The best policy to follow in cases like this, as regards how a dictionary should handle these sorts of things, is to report on the usage and have the evidence ready to back up what the entry says. If a term is a trademark item or may be a trademark item, it is good practice to acknowledge this explicitly in the entry, in a note or in the etymology. Having done that, the entry should report on the usage. 6. Finally, it is good practice to put a general note in the front matter of a dictionary (or equivalent place for an e-dict) saying that the mention of "trademark" (or similar words) in any of the entries does not affect the actual legal status of the term, but is merely an acknowledgment that the lexicographers have found in their research that there may be a trademark (or similar) claim with regard to certain terms in the dictionary. In short, Usage trumps Legality, in this instance, at least. Frank Abate

ACLU Targets Attorney General's Insatiable Appetite for New Powers With New Full-Page Ads in Washington Times and New York Times

Wed, 26 Feb 2003 04:24:02 GMT

American Civil Liberties Union : ACLU Targets Attorney General's Insatiable Appetite for New Powers With New Full-Page Ads in Washington Times and New York Times .

The American Civil Liberties Union today targeted Attorney General John Ashcroft's continuing push for expanded surveillance and intelligence gathering powers with a new full-page newspaper advertisement in this morning's Washington Times and New York Times.

"Americans of all ideological stripes - right, center and left - are up in arms about the unnecessary and intrusive powers being pushed for by John Ashcroft's Justice Department," said Anthony Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU. "This new advertisement highlights the serious concerns shared by an unlikely alliance that includes groups and individuals as ideologically disparate as the ACLU and well-known conservative Bob Barr."

The ad describes examples of the slew of new intelligence gathering and law enforcement powers either asserted unilaterally by the Administration or granted to the President by Congress since September 11, 2001. It also warns against the proposed Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, the Department of Justice's follow-up wish list of expanded powers not granted in the original USA PATRIOT Act.

[Privacy Digest]

What it means to be starved

Tue, 25 Feb 2003 07:57:20 GMT

Just throwing some emphases below. Tom Matrullo brings an interesting perception to most things.

to our senses.
"lp2"
I posted this in one of Shelley Powers' comments, amid a discussion of Google/Pyra, and intended to elaborate it a bit:
...we keep thinking in terms of news reportage and commentary as having greater or lesser authority as it has more or less power to represent some external reality. Big Media has decided it can also represent "our" internal reality, as when it mourns for us. I doubt this can remain viable, especially now that we do have a means of sharing what we experience, as opposed to having Tom Brokaw read it to us. The pointillistic representational realm of blogs, especially when coupled with the semantic potentialities of Google, could lead to a richer, more vibrant realm that does not replace journalism, but provides a more resonant context in which news reports can be contemplated.

I like that reference, "pontillistic representation" pulls in feelings of movements in art.

The basic idea is simple: In the 18th century, as cafes and salons brought people together, public conversational spaces opened up, connections between persons, ideas, and disciplines were forged, things began to happen. Things we still live inside of, like democracy by revolution, historiography, etc.

Like an Awakening of those who have been asleep, or at least rendered sonambulistic by one-way Old Media force feeding and mind-fuck.

The U.S. has been derelict in keeping up a certain level of public conversation. Quite some time ago, any semblance of it was replaced by corporate messages artfully tricked out to seem like a mirthful bouquet of harmless, because mindless, bits of disjointed information, guided by no intellect, curiosity, imagination, or passsion.

Derelict? The US has often been mocked for anti-intellectualism, and while Mark Twain-style frontier-speak and plain-talking is to be valued, stupidity and ignorance are not, and these are things Americans, for all their ingenuity, have not perceived how much to the world we appear dupes, lacking full critical facilities--too easily conned by an authoritarian appeal. The only culture that fares worse are the Germans, who spawned a great university system, yet still love to march.

Meanwhile, people starved for these attributes of intellect keep finding that some of the time, they may be found on the Net, on blogs like Shelley's, for example. Oddly, this very exhibition of spirited dialogue is pooh-poohed, occasionally by the very bright folks who take the trouble to share their intelligence.

These "bright folks" are a euphemism for Old Media journalists, no? And while they share their intellect, they also share the heady sense that the 4th Estate is entitled to its accoutrements of power, and jealously guards its gatekeeper position because it feels threatened, as threatened as the 1st and 2nd Estates felt with the rise of the merchant & guild class in the waning years of the Middle Ages (or Dark Ages, if you will, for it took such a revolutionary overthrow to emerge from the imposed hardened arteries of darkness, and so it will take now.

Sharing what we apprehend, filtered through several minds capable of informing and disproving each other, offers glimpses of possibilities of larger representational richness than what we've grown used to. Reflex dismissal of the possibilities inherent in this new public space for speech - before they've been explored - is not uncommon in the wake of the blogger/google hook-up. It seems premature. A few short years ago, no one saw Google coming.
[Tom Matrullo's Stuff]

I've found reflexive dismissal is simply the arrogance of power, and when corporate journalists wear this cloak, it betrays something worse, a reluctance to ask hard questions, the questions journalists are supposed to ask, because they could disturb the status quo. Miasma

Mercola.com: Petabyte Disk Drives in Seven Years--What Does That Mean for You?

Tue, 25 Feb 2003 07:29:21 GMT

It drives me utterly mad with lust. It makes me think about Marshall McLuhan and how the media shapes not only messages but also cultures that spring up, facilitated by such media. More on that below. Miasma, the pistachio-eater

Petabyte Disk Drives in Seven Years--What Does That Mean for You?

"So just how big is a petabyte drive and what could you put on it?

One certainty is that you will not fill the space with personal jottings or reading matter. In round numbers, a book is a megabyte. If you read one book a day for every day of your life for 80 years, your personal library will amount to less than 30 gigabytes. Remember a petabyte is 1 million gigabytes so you will still have 999,970 gigabytes left over.

To fill any appreciable fraction of the drive with text you[base ']ll need to acquire a major research library. The Library of Congress would be a good candidate; it is said to hold 24 million volumes, which would take up one-fiftieth of your disk. So you could fit 50 Library of Congresses on your petabyte drive.

OK, I'd accept that as a good start! But soon I'd need more space. [G]

Other kinds of information are bulkier than text. A picture, for example, is worth much more than a thousand words; for high-resolution images a round-number allocation might be 10 megabytes each.

And this is being generous. Most images from a digital camera are one to four megabytes, not 10. How many such pictures can a person look at in a lifetime? I can only guess, but 100 images a day certainly ought to be enough for a family album. After 80 years, that collection of snapshots would add up to 30 terabytes. So your petabyte disk will have 970,000 gigabytes left after a lifetime of high quality photos.

Again, I'd need more time. I'd have plasma screens rotating images on poster-sized screens in every room. By then we would be using wall-sized screens, so eventually I'd want more bandwidth too. I am ever the bandwidth pig, but even more so, for I become a digitally-driven Ansel Adams with an 8x10 view camera if you give me world enough and time.

What about music? MP3 audio files run a megabyte a minute, more or less. At that rate, a lifetime of listening--24 hours a day, 7 days a week for 80 years--would consume 42 terabytes of disk space. So with all your music and pictures for a lifetime you will have 928,000 gigabytes free on your disk.

Surely the revolution in musical tastes, less overdetermined by playlists and rotations and scarcity and monopolies and more by choice will give us all great evolving and self-selected jukeboxes and the entire Library of Congress Library in audio books too. Great works of literature shall be our room wallpaper, as now I am listening to poetry collections from Audible. To each house a closet rack of servers, and to each house a good night! Not to mention peer-to-peer satellite-fed Net Radio from whatever house may choose to share with the peers it designates, or perhaps those peers who subscribe?

The one kind of content that might possibly overflow a petabyte disk is video. In the format used on DVDs, the data rate is about two gigabytes per hour. Thus the petabyte disk will hold some 500,000 hours worth of movies; if you want to watch them all day and all night without a break for popcorn, they will actually fill up your petabyte drive if you have a lifetime of video on it as it will give you 57 years of video....

Ooh, the bandwidth I could suck with wall-size video. I will soon run out!

Still another nagging question is how anyone will be able to organize and make sense of a personal archive amounting to 1 million gigabytes. Computer file systems and the human interface to them are already creaking under the strain of managing a few gigabytes; using the same tools to index the Library of Congress is unthinkable.

Hardly. We will have advanced home searching systems on par with Google. We will have new interfaces, new GUIs, new navigational metaphors. We will swim in VR and use the multi-layered approach of the software I saw demonstrated once called "Cloud." Oh for the infinite layering!

Perhaps this is the other side of the economic equation: information itself becomes free (or do I mean worthless?), but metadata--the means of organizing information--is priceless.

The notion that we may soon have a surplus of disk capacity is profoundly counterintuitive. A well-known corollary of Parkinson[base ']s Law says that data, like everything else, always expands to fill the volume allotted to it. Shortage of storage space has been a constant of human history; I have never met anyone who had a hard time filling up closets or bookshelves or file cabinets.

But closets and bookshelves and file cabinets don[base ']t double in size every year. Now it seems we face a curious Malthusian catastrophe of the information economy: the products of human creativity grow only arithmetically, whereas the capacity to store and distribute them increases geometrically. The human imagination can[base ']t keep up." [Mercola.com, via LibraryPlanet.com]

[The Shifted Librarian] I think she means our brains will explode. Frankly, I can't wait. "Thus, if we cannot make our sun stand still, then we will make him run." Andrew Marvel, To His Coy Mistress Miasma

Sitting on the moral high ground

Tue, 25 Feb 2003 05:47:09 GMT

Salon.com | Raise Limbaugh's blood pressure! Keep Salon in business [Daypop Top 40] [chest tumping alert!] Yup, I am a Salon subscriber, premium service. I resisted for a long time, but eventually admitted that I was powerless over my addiction, and I had to turn it over to a higher power along with doing a searching and fearless moral inventory... Wait, wrong meeting. Sorry. What I mean is that I sucked it up and bit the bullet after long resisting, because I don't believe in the subscription model on the web, and figuring I'd resent it even as I resent having registered for the NYTimes site and having been a long time hater of the Time Warner Pathfinder site in the mid-90s asking me to sign over rights to my first born child before I could even log on... As in, this STUNK of OLD MEDIA. But then I did it. I wanted an article dammit! And since I know how to get around the NYTimes archive fee charge (not gonna tell how...), this is the ONLY one I did cough up for. Funny thing happened on the way to being co-opted. I started really using the premium service and liking it. Liked the little music compilation thingie too. Not to mention the Mother Jones and Utne Reader subscriptions. Good will. Then they added blogs, and I'm still happy even tho my blog isn't in that club. Worse, I would be sad if Salon went away in a way that I would not be sad if Slate went away (has it gone away?). Obviously I subscribe to it in my news feed reader and Radio aggregator. I like its righteous ballsy streak. I miss Suck.com, and that sucks. There are a lot of things we could and do miss because VC interpreted the dot.com bomb as an excuse to take leave of what little imagination and vision the pathetic souls had in the first place. So they say Salon spends too much money and lives too high in its offices. That these periodic death throes are con jobs to get more money and get propped up a bit longer. To that, I say, "What the fuck? It is a hell of a lot better than those far more periodic beg-fests on public radio and television, and I cough up for those every 5 years or so when I am flush and when the guilt hits me." Salon is like a less serious and more mouthy version of NPR, and for that I love it. And if you need more reasons, here's their version of a beg-fest. Come on, y'all. Cough it up. It isn't as bad as you might think. Miasma

Did you ever get the feeling that some people want you dead? Last week's flurry of news stories about Salon's imminent demise produced another wave of hate mail from those eager to dance on our grave. (The fact that Salon never seems to actually die -- despite the tone of absolute certainty in these perennial press obits that this time, yes, it MUST be going under! -- never diminishes these letter writers' bloodlust.) [...] Stan Willock offers these words of consolation to Salon readers: "[They] will still have PBS, where hundreds are misinformed and entertained at taxpayer expense, as well as CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC. All are losing viewers to the fair and balanced Fox News Channel and to conservative talk radio. Best of luck looking for a new job. Hopefully you qualify as a member of a preferred group (person of color, female, gay, lesbian, etc)." [...] Salon -- and I -- take all these attacks in stride. As Ishmael Reed observed, "writin' is fightin'." When you publish a rambunctiously independent daily in a time marked by conservative backlash and martial fever, you're bound to make some enemies. And we're proud of those we've made over the years, from Ken Starr to John Ashcroft and, of course, the right-wing guidance counselors at the Wall Street Journal's editorial pages. [...] Chris Broderick wrote, "As a subscriber, I don't really know what I can do, but damn, there's got to be a way. With the way things are now in the world, I really rely on you people to give the news that I perceive to be the truth. I am so goddam frustrated with the mainstream media and their neglect of truthful reporting. It's going to be like a death in the family if you guys go down." Mark E. Michael e-mailed: "I stumbled on you a few years back and then told my wife and her sister about this great e-zine (as it was once called). You have given us some wonderful memories, but we don't want them to end. And we cannot let right-wing voices be the only ones heard. There are elements in the government that wish to silence dissent and do it permanently. There will be no marketplace of ideas, only the authorized, approved one ... How can Salon be saved?" [...] If every one of our 53,000 subscribers brings in just ONE additional subscription, Salon will finally break even this year. In the current economic climate, advertising cannot be counted on to secure Salon's future. But YOU can help do that by buying at least one gift subscription. The enemies of a free and critical press -- like the ministers of information at the Wall Street Journal -- want to write off Salon as dead. With our voice silent, there will be one less bullhorn to question the wisdom of our country's current direction. The world is becoming increasingly dangerous. As reader Mark E. Michael warned, don't let the "authorized" version become the only one you read. Help us fight the good fight. Thank you. -- David Talbot Editor, salon.com

BBC NEWS | Technology | Is Google too powerful?

Sun, 23 Feb 2003 07:12:05 GMT

BBC NEWS | Technology | Is Google too powerful? [Daypop Top 40] Tracking users Google is a privately-owned US company that has a policy of collecting as much information as possible about everyone who uses its search tool. It will store your computer's IP address, the time/date, your browser details and the item you search for. It sets a tracking cookie on your computer that does not expire until 2038. This means that Google builds up a detailed profile of your search terms over many years. Google probably knew when you last thought you were pregnant, what diseases your children have had, and who your divorce lawyer is. It refuses to say why it wants this information or to admit whether it makes it available to the US Government for tracking purposes. And the much-loved Google toolbar tells Google about every web page you look at. Yet it so dominates the search engine market that no website can afford to ignore it, and it indexes so much of the web that few users think of using another. The way it ranks pages is a commercial secret, outside any external supervision or control. If Google decides it does not like you then you can be dropped from the index.

Brits to roll up their pants legs

Sun, 23 Feb 2003 06:10:13 GMT

At least somebody is looking at what is happening to the world. Flowers blooming in Alaska, indeed! Golfing in Anchorage in February?! But no, Bushie says we must go to war to get more oil. Must not be hot and tempestuous enough for the mofo. Miasma

Farewell Cool Britannia. Floods, tornadoes - and bags of sun. Blair to warn of drastic changes to our climate. [Guardian Unlimited] London will be like Naples. Mediterranean temperatures will be the norm from Brighton to Bristol. Freak weather events will dominate the news as tornadoes and hurricanes crash across the country. Winter - what's left of it - will be no more than a few days in the middle of January. Snow will be rare, even in the mountains of Scotland. Thousands of square miles of Britain will be at threat from disappearing into the sea as floods wreak havoc. Tomorrow the Government will release its bleakest assessment yet of the state of the world's environment. In the first review of Britain's seemingly insatiable desire to consume more and more energy, an official report by the Department of Trade and Industry will say that the Earth's temperature will rise by up to 6 C by the end of the century. Compared to a rise of just 0.6 C during the whole of the twentieth century, it would be the most rapid rise in the Earth's temperature for 10,000 years. The blame will be put squarely on the rise in polluting carbon dioxide emissions, a direct effect of ever-increasing demand for fossil-fuel based energy.

Wired: Why Did Google Want Blogger?

Sun, 23 Feb 2003 05:50:34 GMT

Why Did Google Want Blogger?. Google's recent purchase of Pyra Labs, maker of a weblogging tool called Blogger, has generated much speculation about why the popular search engine did the deal. One man who worked closely with Pyra thinks he knows the answer. By Leander Kahney. [Wired News] [...] Meanwhile, thousands of weblogs and weblog indexes like Daypop and Blogdex have been loaded with debate about what the deal meant for the Web, for searching and for blogging. The acquisition has puzzled some onlookers: what would a search company want with a tool for making weblogs? [...] Cleveland said Google's acquisition of Pyra would, quite simply, help Google create a more accurate search engine by adding rich new sources of data gleaned from weblogs. The secret, Cleveland said, is in the scores of links webloggers create every day to content on the Web. Google became the preeminent search engine by exploiting the structure of hyperlinks that make up the Web. Instead of using a simple keyword search, which is how most early search engines found their results, the company developed a proprietary system, called PageRank, which looks at hyperlinks as well as keywords to determine which pages are most popular on the Web. [...] Cleveland said Google will likely use Blogger to develop sophisticated searches that utilize the rich metadata inherent in the RSS feeds from weblogs: who wrote what and when, what it linked to, what linked to it and its level of popularity with Web surfers. [...] "By doing this we were taking a couple of baby steps down the road of what some have called the semantic Web -- a Web ... where computers can understand, at some level, the meaning and context of a Web page or blog post," he explained in an e-mail. Cleveland said in addition to using RSS metadata, the company planned to add ways to factor in Web traffic statistics. "We would look not only at what was written, but what was viewed and how people got there," he said. Cleveland said the technology could allow Web surfers to find not just breaking news stories, but those highly ranked by the weblogging community. In addition, those stories could be accompanied by the best comments made by popular webloggers, or those writing in a certain language or from a particular country. "You could search for 'U.S. invades Iraq' and get instant worldwide reaction," Cleveland said. "And then you could search, sort, filter or group (those posts) using metadata. Here's what people in France are saying."

I Just Don't Get the Appeal of Outlines...

Sat, 22 Feb 2003 07:42:29 GMT

Like, what is this shit anyway? Outlines are HIERARCHICAL . They are Old Media and Old News. Hypertext and hypermedia subvert hierarchies. So why would we want to reinscribe hierarchy after having just broken free of them with this hyperlinked version of old Vannevar Bush's Memex machine? Old Vannevar had no truck with hierarchies. Well, in his Memex machine, at least. He found they inhibited the exchange of scientific information that should be associationally linked instead. Then you can take a look at Alvin Toffler in PowerShift. Not exactly a guy I think that highly of, but that book popularized a lot of anti-hierarchical ideas, such as the idea of a Flexfirm that undermines the hierarchy of the org chart and bypasses what he calls "smokestack era" gatekeepers and turf guardians. Nah, I just don't figure where all this love affair with outlines is going, but that the folks at Radio/Manila made a toy for outlining, and all the good little bandwagon folks piled on without thinking about the relationship of outlines to hierarchical structures, structures that are oppressive and most definitely do not fit the interactive associational linking structures of New Media. Miasma living with outlines. Like Russ, I too live in a world of outlines.

The built-in outliner in Radio UserLand has a lot to offer, including timestamps and weblog integration.

Weblogs are rendered outlines from how I look at 'em.

[Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

Hmm, ideaForest. Manila site on Apple Servers

Sat, 22 Feb 2003 07:28:42 GMT

ideaForest only costs $6 a month for a hosted Manila site. Note: this is also an ISP that uses OSX on their servers, so if you want end to end Apple, and blazingly fast servers, this is the place to go. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

Slashdot: Bookseller Purges Records to Avoid PATRIOT Act

Sat, 22 Feb 2003 06:27:06 GMT

Slashdot | Bookseller Purges Records to Avoid PATRIOT Act.

Skyshadow writes "Vermont Bookseller Bear Pond Books has announced that they will purge their sales records at the request of customers . This would effectively sidestep typically insideous a provision of the PATRIOT Act which allows government agencies to secretly seize sales records. The store's co-owner, Michael Katzenberg, put it this way: 'When the CIA comes and asks what you've read because they're suspicious of you, we can't tell them because we don't have it... That's just a basic right, to be able to read what you want without fear that somebody is looking over your shoulder to see what you're reading.' Now if only certain other booksellers would show that same conscience, we might have something here."

[Privacy Digest]

ROFLMAO! I'm loving this I'm LOVING this!

Sat, 22 Feb 2003 05:51:09 GMT

Homeland Security Alerts now with extra subtext.

Wacky Neighbor interprets Homeland Security Alerts. via Boing Boing via Michael.

[a klog apart propagandart]

[a klog apart]

a klog apart speculates on the need for searching in klogs behind firewalls

Sat, 22 Feb 2003 05:28:54 GMT

One key misstep in this argument, altho I haven't tested it yet. Moveable Type now comes with a search feature. Does it work behind firewalls? Hmmm. I don't know enough about how the MT search utility works. Miasma

Google Pyramaniacs Pry Open Enterprise Sales..
Why did Google buy Pyra Labs?

"Klogging". Watch for their Google Search Appliance to come bundled with a version of the Blogger Pro server.

Search, or the lack of it, holds back intranet blogging. When everyone uses Google to search the universe, you expect blogs inside the firewall to show up too. But they don't.

Unless your Google Appliance crawls them.

This is the Lotus Notes killer. A harsh stab at the next Microsoft Office's collaboration tools. When everyone is writing in to their blog, and content is immediately available, why do you need this other stuff?

What's left to complete the picture? Two things:

RSS push to the Google search crawler.

A converged microcontent client.

Who's going to buy?

The military and security complexes.

Big business, especially those who with a human capital self image.

Civil government: cities, states, public service agencies, larger not-for-profits.

Why buy Pyra? Klogging creates searchable, linked content, and that sells appliances.

Further reading:

Anil Dash's microcontent client: searching, aggregation, and authoring.

Blogging things besides text:

From .blog to converged client: support many types of microcontent.

Multi-payload klogging: a world of content.

What is Mediablog literacy?

Gonzo Marketing in my own words, after a few drinks. Where the intranet bleeds to the extranet.

Management concerns:

Are klogs and klognets adhocracy enablers?

Project Management as Journalism: intranet blogging for project collaboration.

Does blogging get you laid? Judging social effects.

Where klogging meets moblogging - Part 1, Part 2.
[a klog apart]