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Making Mozzarella
Today was mozzarella day. I have a farmhouse cheddar and colby aging in our refrigerator-turned-cheese-cave, and so I really wanted to experiment with a fresh cheese that would provide some instant gratification. And mozzarella is, conveniently, perhaps most delicious just after the moment of creation. So, as for the result, first the bad: the texture was off. The edges of the ball were a tad too firm, giving it the appearance of having been heated too long. I kinda have no idea why that would be the case, since I followed the instructions closely and certainly didn't heat it any longer than indicated. But the good news is that the flavor was actually rather fantastic -- really rich and almost meaty.
Jane and I scarfed down the whole batch in one sitting. My belly hurts, but it was worth it.
Facebook's Appetite for Construction
Within the space of a month, collective action against the Colombian guerrilla group FARC grew from a humble Facebook group to street protests in 130 cities around the world, including this rally in Madrid. I'm exploring Facebook's role in this action, the attention paid to repression in Burma, and activism over the Beijing Olympics and Tibet in an article on AlterNet.
Certainly, there are plenty of very valid concerns about using Facebook as a tool of political activism. I'm usually the first to worry about handing over our personal agency to our corporate overlords. But as I've said elsewhere, you go to revolution with the tools you have, not the tools you want. When and if Facebook fades away, there will still be a great many lessons learned about how we exploit networks to advance our political agendas. You can't discount an online tool that has facilitated the gathering of millions of protesting boots on the ground.
(Photo thx juanpg)
Tag Magazine Soft Launch
I'm a huge fan of magazines, and an even bigger fan of classic efforts like Might and Feed that pushed the edges of the envelope on what magazines can be. For years, I've harbored the dream of seeing what sort of magazine I and my friends and allies might be able to create. So it is with enormous pleasure that I'm announcing that my good friend/partner-in-crime Josh Levy and I have just soft launched Tag Magazine.
With Tag, we're eager to experiment with some ideas of what magazine writing on the web can be, and are counting on tapping into the genius and courage of our networks of friends and associates. We're just getting started, so for now I'll ask you to jump on over to tag-themagazine.com and sign up for the mailing list, follow Tag on Twitter (short cut), or even pitch us a story idea. We fully expect this to be a crazy journey. Hope you'll join us on it.
The Harry Potter Lexicon Case
The ongoing case in U.S. District Court over Pennsylvania librarian Steven Vander Ark's proposed print version of his "Harry Potter Lexicon" is a fascinating look at how out of sync our legal code is with our read/write culture. The Lexicon is an impressively obsessive cataloguing of every aspect of the seven Harry Potter books. This is where you go when you want to know who first discovered the magical properties of gillyweed or you need a refresher on which wand Hermoine used during her escape from the Malfoy mansion ("walnut and dragon heartstring, 12.5 inches," of course.)
The Harry Potter Lexicon is an impressive work by a clearly devoted fan, and you can easily see how useful Vander Ark's site would be invaluable as a sort continuity guide for J.K. Rowling herself. Indeed, she's even talked about using the Lexicon as a reference instead of cracking open her own books when she needs to check a fact. Rowling has publicly been a big fan the site -- until, that is, Vander Ark decided to move it from online to print.
So know Rowling is suing Vander Ark for violating the copyright on her works, and he is arguing that he's protected under the principle of fair use. For those of us interested in new ways of making culture, one of the the more interesting questions that will be taken up in this case has to do with whether something like the Harry Potter Lexicon takes something away from the body of work it spawned from, or if it only serves to increase interest in the books themselves. It would be useful, I think, for a court to affirm the argument that our cultural attention isn't zero sum, and so anything that serves to boost interest in what J.K. Rowling first created is a net benefit. Of course, every man, woman, and child in the world already owns copies of Harry Potter 1-7, so it might be difficult to convince a judge in this particular case that by remixing her work you're doing Rowling much of a favor.
We Need Political Patterning
Sometimes I get jealous about all the fun tech people seem to have, what will their creatin' stuff and problem solvin'. The latest object of my jealousy is a project run by Yahoo called the Design Pattern Library, which houses design patterns intended to "describe[] an optimal solution to a common problem within a specific context." I'm finding myself wondering if it doesn't have some lessons to teach about knowledge sharing in the political world. With the warning that my thoughts on this are still in the formation process, let me suggest why.
The purpose of the Design Pattern Library is simple: to offer up models for good ways of solving user interface challenges on the web. For example, one of the more popular patterns is called Vote to Promote, which is more or less the Digg model. For every pattern in the library, four elements are detailed: title, problem, context, and solutions. When it comes to this voting model, the pattern notes why a developer might want to use the tool and some design considerations, such as the need to build a sizable enough community to make the differences between vote totals meaningful. The pattern also provides notes on how to indicate popularity and to make sure that users have actually read/watched/listened to what they're rating. There's also a discussion of how users might try to game the system, and how to foil those attempts.
Why would Yahoo! give away for free what they've learned about pattern design? To get feedback on their own products from the development community. To improve the web user experience across the board. To establish the company as a great corporate citizen in the online development world. Because working together is more enjoyable than working alone, and the tech world sees value in having fun.
It's not difficult to see that there are "design patterns" when it comes to both campaigns and governing that would be invaluable if shared. But the way things stand now, we're all left to reinvent the wheel time and again. For example, it would help a new candidate a great deal to have access to a pattern on how to approach engaging with the local blogosphere. Every small advocacy group is left to learn on their own how to get access to legislative information. Why don't some of us in the political world take a leadership role in packaging that knowledge for reuse? I think there's arguably no real need for those chunks of know-how to even be restricted along partisan lines. Google developers are free to make use of Yahoo's patterns, and starting to think in terms of shared "design patterns for politics" could raise the level of the game for everyone. (Photo thx xian)
King Corn
Having now actually viewed King Corn, that PBS documentary that I mentioned a few days ago, I can heartily recommend it.
The film tracks Ian and Curt, two recent college graduates, as they farmed one acre of corn for one year. What's amazing that at no point do the guys actually appear to be farming, at least in any recognizable way. It's looks more like wedding planning. They make appointments for the giant planting machine to plant their seeds and arrange times for the herbicide truck to spray their plot. They manage to get through the year without getting a speck of dirt on their buttoned-downs.
If there's one thing that King Corn could have done better is to explain how modern farming has gone whole hog in embracing the division of labor approach to capitalism. There are plenty of sad farmers on displaying, lamenting the end of family farming, but there are only a handful of mentions of the corporate agriculture that has replaced it. (Photo thx JBAT)
Google App Engine
We held a session at RootsCamp DC on Google App Engine in which I was a total fish out of water, and I've been meaning to drop some notes here on why. I walked into the session apprehensive about the seeming trend towards Web 3.0-as-platform, but the programmers, vendors, and advocacy staffers assembled in this meeting were (justifiably) excited about the free, easy, and scalable platform that Google had just offered up. There's no denying that Mountain View is now offering developers something very tempting.
But at the risk of sound alarmist, I'll say that Google App Engine should be approached with a hint of caution, and here's one concrete reason why. If what I learned in that session and from reading up on it afterwards is accurate, one of the trade-offs in building applications using GAE is that you have to write the code that Google wants you to write. It makes sense that Google should have developed a style of programming that both protects their enormous investment and makes use of the distributed nature of their server farms. But it does mean that generations of coders are going to learn how to code for the Google cloud. Creating a whole mess of ready-made employees is a boon to Google, of course. But even if we get less Orwellian with it, we have to see that as Google Apps Engine popularity grows so does Mountain View's already considerable power to shape the industry.
When we did start discussing some of the potential negatives of GAE in that RootsCamp session, one of the participants said something like, "yeah, but Google just makes everything so easy." Well, there was also a reason why that apple in the garden of Eden was so juicy and sweet. ;)
Getting Occasional Email from Me
On the off chance that some people might be interested in hearing from me when a story of mine runs or I do something else of potential note, I've added an email sign-up box over there to the right. (If you're on RSS, jump on over to the home page of nancyscola.com to have a look.) I made use of Aarron Walter's excellent tutorial on how to use Ajax to create a form that updates without refreshing the page. It's pretty slick, I think. If you'd like to try the form without actually signing up to get email updates from me, just enter something like test@test.com and I'll delete it out of the database.
Of course, I'd prefer that you actually enter in your actual address. It's safe with me, I swear. I promise to never abuse it and only use it to send the very occasional note on what I've been up to. And, of course, you have the option to unsubscribe whenever you'd like.
Why Progressive Voices
Back in the winter of 2007, I was asked to join the political blog MyDD as a weekend front-page writer. I was smart enough to know that the blog already had enough people writing great content on polls and electoral politics, which aren't my strong suits anyway. So I set out trying to determine what it was that I might be able to add to the community.
One of the things I settled upon was an idea that probably has something to do with the fact that there were years of my life that I thought I was destined to become a professional anthropologist. I decided that I would use my soapbox at MyDD to conduct in-depth interviews with some of the amazing people doing the tough work of progressive politics -- thinkers, issue activists, and
hands-on organizers. The wonderful added benefit was that I, a curious person by nature, would be able to ask truly excellent people questions about how and why they do what they do.
In a less-than-inspired moment, I named the interview series Hearing Progressive Voices, which brings us to the first point of this post. Since I curtailed writing on MyDD, I've moved the series to its own home -- and now I'm regretting the name. It strikes me as awfully long and awfully clunky. In short, I'm seriously in the market for a new name. So if you have suggestions, by all means please send them my way.
(Please do keep in mind that great branding would convey that (a) the series is rooted in the progressivism and (b) the point of the series is for us all tap into the wisdom and experience of the interview subjects -- though ideally in the form of a very two-way conversation.)
But I have another reason for writing this post, and that's to force me to think through what I think a series like this is good for and what it might achieve, however small. If there's anything that I believe, it's that we can learn a great deal from people who do things differently than we may personally do. To that end, I'd love for the interview series to facilitate someone working on community radio in Philadelphia sharing ideas and experiences with a person working on using technology to make Washington DC more transparent -- and for all of us to learn from both of them. Now that I think of it, I guess the series has a sort of consilient streak running through it, though I never thought of it that way before now.
Getting the series to that point of usefulness is an uphill battle. It's not a project that I can do or want to do alone. The ten interviews we have up there now, no matter how interesting, are probably too long and too dense for the web. I've been torn between thinking that the interviews themselves just contain too much information and the idea that we might be able to format them in a way that might make them more accessible.
Anyway, the point of this post is just to put a flag out there indicating that I do have dreams of getting Hearing Progressive Voices, under one name or another, to the point of making a useful contribution to the critically important discussion of how we're going to save the world and all that jazz.
So I'd love to hear thoughts on how we go about creating something that helps to tie together all the various threads that run through progressivism, a site that's both useful and entertaining. I hope you'll at least consider following along via RSS or following the site's Twitter account. And again, if you have suggestions for some new branding for the site, by all mean please let me know.
Being John Wonderlich
One of my side projects is a series called Progressive Voices, wherein I use the pretense of an interview to ask smart progressives questions about how and what they do that I really want to know the answer to. My latest victim is John Wonderlich, a very clever guy who runs the Sunlight Foundation's Open House Project, the goal of which is to figure out how to use technology to make Congress more transparent and accountable. John's personal story is fascinating. He want from a sales manager at a telemarketing firm in Pennsylvania to giving press conferences on Capitol Hill in a matter of months, and it all started with some diaries and a wiki on Daily Kos. He's now doing the work of angels in trying to drag Congress into the 21st century by easing fears about such scary technologies as XML and RSS and making the case that letting information free will help heal our what ails our democracy. Tough job. Glad John's doing it.
The Recipe for Unsustainable Food Costs
Reading the World Bank's new report on the tremendous increase in food prices we're seeing across the globe, it starts to look like if there were a recipe for driving food prices sky high, we're following it like a scrupulous cook. The WB attributes the fact that, say, the cost of ton of exported Thai rice has risen from $365 in January to $560 last month, to three main factors, each of which we seem to be pursuing with aggression: a dependence on biofuels; high energy costs, and a weak U.S. dollar.
So, in case we needed some reminders of why pandering on ethanol instead of creating sustainable energy policies, entering into unnecessary foreign wars, and destabilizing the global economy with dumb, dumb investments are all bad ideas, there's the fact that folks from Sri Lanka to Burkina Faso to Costa Rica are finding it tough to get enough good food to eat.
Of course, when food prices rise to unsustainable levels, the problem isn't just about food alone: the increase in wheat prices in Yemen, says the WB, is threatening to roll back all the gains in poverty reduction made there since 1998.
Monsanto
Vanity Fair has a multi-thousand word exposé on Monsanto that is a reminder of just how capital-C crazy our food chain is in this country. The article, by the famed investigative duo Donald Barlett and James Steele, goes deep into Monsanto's m.o. This is a company that surveils farmers going in and out of seed stores. It pursues its many patents with a vigor that Microsoft would find unsettling. And we've centralized nearly every step of our very food system -- from seed engineering to food production -- into the hands of companies like this.
Monsanto is sorta like Google of the food world, without the "don't be evil" ethos or the transparency that comes from being an online company. Of course, Google just handles our searches and online advertising and calenders and mapping and... But Monsanto is shaping the very food we eat and the morsels we put in the hungry maws of our kiddies. While it's CNN.com banner news when someone complains that Google Street View has an image peeking into their living room, biotech companies like Monsanto and Dow Agro file patents on seventeen different varieties of corn and thirteen different soybean strains and we don't bat an eye.
It's great to see a major piece in a popular general-interest magazine like Vanity Fair for that reason. I've started to think that one way of thinking about our food system in the U.S. as "black box food," meaning that we don't know what goes into it and don't really understand what comes out of it. Great to see a little light shined into that box.
Facebook's Safety in Numbers
There are news reports aplenty today about how Michigan State students used Facebook to organize an outdoor party that turned chaotic, but one aspect I find interesting is that "Cedar Fest," as the party was known, was actually the revival of an annual event that died out after a 1987 city injunction made it illegal to attend. If Facebook had any real role in amassing so many people this weekend, it might be that the thousands of people signed up online to attend gave these revelers a sense of safety in numbers, making them willing to face a government crackdown.
In the case of a post-Final Four bash, that safety in numbers *might* translate into a mob mentality. But if you're talking about a political protest in, say, a top-down and repressive society like Burma or, say, China during the upcoming Olympics, that sense of safety in numbers might be a very good thing indeed.
Twitter's Coattails
Back when the first rounds of web applications took off in the late '90s and early '00s, I was either in grad school or working in the non-profit/political world. I wasn't following the details of how early online tools like Blogger grew in popularity, so I'm unsure if the tremendous number of third-party tools and applications that are developing around Twitter is normal. But almost every day these days I seem to come across a new way that developers are extending the micropublishing service, either refining the core product or pushing it to do new things. I don't know if that has happened to the same extent with other apps in the past, but it is a demonstration of how at Twitter has some quite long coattails.
Twitter provides an API that opens up their app to some level of granularity. For example, after some initial tweaking, outside developers now have access to direct messaging (accessed by prepending "d [username]" to a tweet). That move created all sorts of ways for inviting Twitter users to engage with people who want to provide them with information or other services. The openness of the Twitter API have been a giant "welcome" banner for anyone wanting to make use of their platform. And made use of it, folks have -- Twitter's Biz Stone has said that the Twitter API gets at least *10 times* the traffic of Twitter.com.
Maybe the key is that Twitter is so simple: just 140 text characters zapped to a centralized server and
relayed to whomever users want to receive them. They don't bring so much to the party that no one else thinks they need to bring a thing. The innovation that has been built out of it has been neat -- and instructive -- to watch.
Input Tools. When it comes to the fairly straightforward task of managing input into Twitter, any number of third-party gizmos have popped up. Desktop-based tools like Twitterrific, Twhirl, and Snitter are all engineered to the same end -- conveying your short post to the Twitter service. Where these applications are different is the options that users have to customize the fine details on how they post. Each has a unique look, layout, and feel.
Output Managers. More interesting than input tools are those that help managing Twitter's sometimes overwhelming output. TweetScan, for example, allows you to search Twitter streams and set up something similar to Google Alerts, where you get an email notification when your keywords are mentioned. Quotably sprouted up to correct what seems to be a flaw in Twitter -- responses to posts routinely get lost in the stream of messages, by organizing conversations in threads like how blogging tools like Scoop were built to accomplish. As Twitter doesn't (yet) provide users with traffic stats on their posts, Tweetburner boosts the usefulness of the service by creating custom URLs that can be embedded in tweets and then tracked. And then there's something like TweetPeek, which bundles together feeds to make the service more group friendly.
Extensions. A bevy of third-party tools exist to not just help better manage Twitter, but to grow it into something more than it is right out of the box. Twitsig, for example, takes your Tweet stream and converts it into images that can be used as signature files in forums and email. Foamee is both a protocol for indicating that you owe someone a beer or coffee and a tool for tracking who owes who drinks. But most intriguing to me is something like Qwitter, a program developed by Tobacco Free Florida. Tweet the number of cigarettes you've had in a day to the Qwitter Twitter account, and the service will keep a progress chart of how often you're lighting up. Or you can tweet in a note on your quitting campaign -- "realized tonight that it's hard to not smoke while grilling" -- and Qwitter will compile your thoughts into a journal for future reference. As a public advocacy and policy use of Twitter, that's a useful model to watch.
The powers-that-be at Twitter made the decision to create a robust API, a choice that is providing the oxygen for a thousand flowers to bloom in software development land. And it's not only plug-ins that are being developed; some of these new tools are standing in a partnership relationship to Twitter. The potential is there for many more symbiotic apps to be created, standing separate but dependent -- kinda like the many bail bondsmen who set up shop outside jails. Now the question is whether there is a business model that supports keeping the party going...
Update: We've Achieved Waxing
I had gone into it a bit apprehensive this morning, but waxing my 2-pound cheddar wheel proved to be the easiest part of the cheese-making process. After melting the wax in a make-shift double boiler, it was no difficult task to paint on a few coats, using a boars-hair bristle brush that I picked up at the cooking store. Now it's into the fridge for at least a month to let the aging process ripen its flavor to the point of perfect deliciousness. By late spring, there will be cheese!
Foot Soldiers in Cyberspace
In this week's New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh attends Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ, which is, of course, Barack Obama's church and the former pastorate of Reverend Jeremiah Wright:
Near the end of Good Friday's service, [Reverend Otis] Moss ordered that the church's video cameras be shut off. What followed wasn't particularly exciting: he plugged a pro-Trinity blog (truthabouttrinity.blogspot.com) and the church's official YouTube channel, inviting church members to flood both with positive comments. "We want you to be our foot soldiers in cyberspace," he said. Then he said, "You can turn the video back on," and the pews erupted.
Sanneh seems dismissive of Moss's preaching on blogs and YouTube, but I think it's remarkable -- and encouraging for liberals of all stripes. For one thing, Democrats might trump Republicans in online organizing and fundraising, but the religious right has long made better use of the Internet than has the religious left has. For another, Moss's approach makes an end run around one of the longstanding challenges of the civil rights movement: getting sustained media attention. One of the reasons why Martin Luther King was front and center in the movement was that the press proved itself more eager to cover him than it was for other leaders. But that was before less palatable figures could reach millions of Americans directly with a free Blogspot blog and a YouTube channel.
Google's Auction Anxiety
This isn't a huge surprise, but with the veil of secrecy now lifted off the 700 MHz spectrum auction it's been confirmed that Google indeed never had any real interest in winning the bidding for the C block that eventually went to Verizon. Instead, what Google is very keen on was in the FCC implementing openness rules could only be triggered by its $4.6 billion minimum bid. The auction took place online, and there's a pretty comic scene in the linked article of Googlers anxiously refreshing their browsers, hoping and praying that a higher bid popped up on the screen.
Oh, Google, do I know the feeling. A couple weeks back Jane's school held an auction to benefit the public interest student group. I thought the item on the auction block was an 8GB iPhone, and so I raised my paddle and bid on it. Jane turned to me and asked, "whydja just offer $400 for a fajita dinner with my professor?" It was an anxious few seconds waiting for someone to top my bid, I tell you that. (Photo thx sonicbloom.)
Top Chef Predictions
Okay, so after watching last night's episode I'm ready to make some rash predictions about how this season will turn out.
First, let's start with the drama-within-the-drama of Jennifer and Zoi, a.k.a. the couple in the kitchen. I'm going out on a limb here to predict that it's actually Jennifer, the more accomplished cook, who gets booted first. Besides the fact that Zoi has shown some real tenacity when she finds herself in the post-challenge losing groups, both Tom Colicchio and Padma seem to particularly appreciate her restrained style of cooking.
Now let's turn to finalists. There's no doubt that Richard is a serious contender. He obviously has, as the kids say, mad skillz. But I think his "you pull back the plastic and steam comes out!" routine is going to get real old, real quick. Molecular gastronomy might be all the rage in the culinary world. But Chef Tom seems like more of straightforward, ingredients-focused kinda guy who appears to be, at most, mildly amused by tricks like making tapioca that looks like caviar.
And so I'm declaring right here and now that the final three are: Dale, Stephanie, and, my dark horse pick, Ryan. Ryan might look the doofus. But beneath that look of near constant befuddlement seems to lay a heck of a good cook. I mean, riffing off of "A Christmas Story" to do an amazing looking Asian duck dish? A stroke of near genius. Dale and Stephanie seem evenly matched when it comes to technique; both seem to pull inventive plates of food off with little effort. But Top Chef seems to come down to killer instinct. For the glint of steely reserve in her eyes, I'm picking Stephanie to go all the way. (Photo thx nickweeleroz.)
Google's Big Idea on White Space, in Drawing Form
After two friends expressed confusion over what exactly Google has newly proposed that the FCC do with the radio spectrum, I thought, "I know, I'll draw a picture!" Let's get it over with right off the bat -- I know I have little to no artistic ability. But I do have a dream of someday doing a comic book series that explains complex technology policy stuff with drawings and whimsy.
Anyho, should you need a more complete explanation of Google's white space proposal, check out GigaOm.
Cheese Update: The Drying Stage
Here's my cheddar on day two of a three to five day drying process. I intentionally took the photo from above because it's not *exactly* even on top, but that's noticeable only when you look at it from the side. I'm hoping that I'll be able to cover up some of the less-than-perfect parts when I paint on the wax this weekend.
Net Neutrality and the Collective Political Might of Gamers
You might find this statistic surprising, but there's something like one billion active gamers living in the U.S. today. Okay, that might not be the exact number, but there certainly are a great many people in this country who regularly play digital games of some sort, from World of Warcraft to Super Smash Bros. Brawl. In my past life as a political hack, I spent some time trying to crack the nut of how to reap some sort of political benefit from such a large segment of the population. You're talking about tech-savvy people who can devote hours of attention to their interests and have at least enough disposable income to afford a PS3 or Xbox and new games now and again. That's an attractive constituency.
But a challenge here is that there is, I think it's safe to say, a strain of disdain for politics in the world of gaming. I had settled on the thought that the best approach to tapping into the power of gamers was to forget about leveraging any sort of ideological consensus. Instead, the way to make inroads was to (a) take sensible stands on such meat-and-potatoes issues as video game ratings and then (b) focus on a few relevant political problems that -- and this part is important, I think -- have tangible solutions. Gamers, like many tech people, enjoy and are very good at solving things.
All that is why I was particularly interested to hear that the Entertainment Consumers Association has launched a Gamers for Net Neutrality campaign, to fight for "the principle," says ECA "that ensures that gamers are free to go where they want, do what they like, and connect with whom they choose online." The effort is still fairly barebones. But it's a solid step in starting to start harnessing the political power of a distributed class of people, power that's now laying largely latent. (Alliteration unintentional, I swear.)
It's kinda neat, when you think about it, to be using digital technology to connect people with similar digital interests in the hopes of solving a digital problem. (Photo thx kelly-s)
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