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Twitter: Like High School, But in a Good Way
I had some thoughts about Twitter's appeal yesterday that are entirely rough but that still might be worth sharing. The gist is this: what Twitter reminds me of is nothing so much as the constant stream of chatter that my high school friends and I kept up during the course of a day -- either in person, via note, over the telephone, or through word of mouth from friend to friend to friend. My high school friends (and by that I mean not only my close circle of six or some "best friends" but our extended network that included other close circles of friends) were extremely clever, bright, and funny, which conspired to make that period extraordinarily enjoyable. And through that constant contact, I felt alive, connected, loved, and tied in to something bigger than myself.
Now, back at that age of 17 or 18 it seemed to me that one of the sad things about getting older was that people of a certain age didn't seem to keep up those sorts of close associations. I looked to me that once you got married or otherwise partnered up you most likely lost that sort of free-wheeling friendships that made my life so rich. Become a thirty-something, and it was you, your spouse, a kid or two, and that one single friend that came over for dinner on occasion. I know there are probably troves of sociological research on how our social connections shift over different life stages, but, anecdotally, I'm not sure I was that far off.
Let me get to the point: it seems to me that some of the appeal of Twitter is that it can bring you back (or, if that wasn't your experience, introduce to you for a first time) to a time of constant chatter with a circle of friends and friends of friends in a way that's hugely fun, reaffirming, and relaxing. There's something kid like about gossiping and sharing and living life as a member of a social group or groups, rather than as a single atom bumping its way through the universe. In that way, Twitter reminds me a lot of high school: constant contact that makes me feel part of something bigger than myself and is a whole lot of fun too.
Facing a Future of Hook Journalism
Fast Company is running a truly great several-thousand-word epic article by Richard Behar called simply "China in Africa." The gist is that China is going about establishing an enormous footprint on the African continent to fuel its more ever more modern lifestyle while the rest of the world ignores Africa altogether. Here's a key paragraph:
Influence of that magnitude threatens to wipe out a decade's worth of efforts by global institutions to push African governments to improve human rights and government transparency. As Sahr Johnny, the Sierra Leonean ambassador in Beijing, once said about China's projects in Africa: "They just come and do it. We don't hold meetings about environmental-impact assessment, human rights, bad governance and good governance. I'm not saying that's right. I'm just saying Chinese investment is succeeding because they don't set high benchmarks."
It's a great piece in and of itself, but what got me thinking was the editor's note Robert Safian on the article. (I read the piece in print and it was the editor's note that pointed me to the article in the first place.):
It's eye-opening, remarkably entertaining, and -- brace yourself -- really long. In fact, it's the longest article Fast Company has ever published. But it is worth the investment of your time. I promise.
...
I can't do justice to Behar's special report, masterfully edited by executive editor Will Bourne, in this small space, but I hope you'll settle in and read this saga. It's the kind of article that people like me go into this business to help create.
The editorial team at Fast Company clearly have their chest puffed out over this work, as they should. The hired a talented reporter, assigned to the story a strong editor, and produced something that adds to the world's understanding of itself.
And that excellence leads me to two points. The first is that IMHO and from my narrow perspective "China in Africa" is immensely valuable journalism. There's no breaking news here, but there is reporting and perspective that equips me better understand this crazy madcap world. I remember very clearly a time when Jane and I were backpacking through Ghana in the summer of 2001 and found ourselves sitting in the gorgeous National Theater in the capital city of Accra that was designed, financed, and built by the Chinese and thinking, "hmm, now just what the heck is going on here." Seven years on, I understand that experience better because of the work of Behar and his editors.
But the second point is more on my mind these days as I make a go of it as a writer. Is "China in Africa" is the last gasp of a dying era? Let's be frank -- an article of this length and topic makes no sense on the web. I'm genuinely curious of whether if all journalism moves online, which frankly looks entirely likely, is there any hope for keeping many-thousand-word pieces like this viable?
First off, it's ridiculously, absurdly long. I counted 38 different browser screens of text to click through. If you want to check out the infographics than ran side-by-side the article in print, that's 7 more screens. It's clearly a print piece ported, however awkwardly, to the publication's website.
It is indeed a awkward fit. I've mentioned here before that I've been reading some of Jakob Nielsen's stuff (about 10 years after every other geek, I know) and what's perfectly clear is that we read differently online. Jakob has some eye tracking research that shows how people "read" websites. For one thing, we scan the top section and then quickly whip down the left side of the screen looking for whatever might jump out. It's only natural that what works best on line is what we might as well call hook journalism -- grab your reader or your out o' luck. Of course, all journalistic writing has always need a hook. But in the past, hasn't the hook been more of the plating and less of the entree?
And then there's the cost factor. Something like "China in Africa" is incredibly resource sucking. I was just reading earlier this week the latest news about how newspaper ad revenue is on track to have its worst year ever and that some publications are even considering dropping a day or two of their print editions. Without some sort of sustainable revenue model, how exactly do you support a reporter out in the field in four different sub-Saharan countries? It's not cheap to pay for a reporter to spend more than a month jumping from Congo to Equatorial Guinea to Mozambique to Zambia. Who is going to pay for that for a reporter to simply come back with a hell of a story?
So, let me cut to the chase -- do we have a plan for making stories like "China in Africa" possible in the future? Is there even a hint of a model for journalism like that on the horizon? I'm hopeful, because that's my nature, but I haven't seen much to justify that hope. Of course, there are some interesting new journalism projects bubbling up, in particular Pro Publica and The Huffington Post's OffTheBus. The thing is, it looks like to me a lot like as the world gets increasingly complex, we're focused on building journalistic tools that are narrowly tailored to finding bad guys. For example, this is Pro Publica's self description:
Our work will focus exclusively on truly important stories, stories with "moral force." We will do this by producing journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them.
And OffTheBus is solely geared towards the '08 presidential election, and its most notably accomplishment thus far is Mayhill Fowler, who without making a judgment either way, has made her name in gotcha journalism. We're scandal obsessed, on the hunt for the flip flop, and I'd argue that while that might be a good plan for one kind of a journalism it can't be a replacement for the whole endeavor.
So, I'll ask it again: should be resign ourselves to the idea that "China in Africa" is the last gasp of a dying era? I'd really like to know the answer to that question. Maybe I'm not looking in the right places, but I haven't found any good answers yet. I really do want to learn here, so if you have thoughts please share them.
"It's still a better reason than whether he wears a flag lapel pin"
Heh. An online strategist named Rob Cottingham and I had a little back and forth over on TechPresident when I mentioned McCain's typography choices, and he says that exchanged inspired this cartoon.
Social is a How, Not a What
Todd Zeigler has some useful thoughts on the new TimesPeople feature that I talked about yesterday. I'll build on his thinking with one additonial note on the topic. What I like about TimesPeople is that it seems to embrace the perfectly reasonable idea that "social" is a how, not a what. We can engage in the news socially without having the need to take it to the level of full blown social networking. To take one example, Netflix isn't a social network by any stretch of the imagination but yet it has a great deal of social goodness mixed in. I might not form any more meaningful relationships with my Netflix friends, but who cares -- I sure get better movie recommendations than I would otherwise. That's the benefit of thinking of what we would otherwise do as something that might be made more communal in and of itself.
California Dead Set Against Direct-to-Consumer Genetics
So, apparently I'm a complete and total sadomasochist who likes listen to health officials discourse on compliance issues with phlebotomy programs and CLS (what is that, even?) certification. I've been sitting here listening to the conference call of California health department conference call that Alexis Madrigal mentioned in his Wired post on the state's stance against direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies like 23andMe. I was after some sense of the thinking behind the position. My takeaway: California's health officials firmly believe that consumers just aren't capable of handling knowledge of their DNA unless it's mediated by a medical professional. Here's the flavor of the call from some notes I jotted down. The speaker is Dr. Karen Nickel, the head of California's laboratory field services program:
Genetic tests cannot be self ordered. [Direct-to-consumer genetic testing] puts us between a rock and a hard place...We're concerned about genetic businesses ordering tests from licensed labs without a physicians order...We've been dealing with this for six months now. We have investigated and this week sent cease-and-desist orders to thirteen of them for violating state law. This is very serious. We have consulted with legal and have full department support for this...We started this week no longer tolerating direct-to-consumer genetic testing in California.
The public demand for access has created the 'worried well.'
We need to clarify diagnostic vs. predictive reports. Many of these businesses will give 67% chance of colon cancer, 27% chance of this or that. Once they get the results they don't know what to do about it. So that's the state perspective. [Emphasis added.]
What I think makes this fascinating is that direct-to-consumer genetic testing is a clear case of what technology makes possible running smack up against the government's ideas of what should be possible. Sure, these are California officials, but think of it as the east coast mindset confronting the west coast one. So is this a minor setback for genetic-testing companies like 23andMe or a major hurdle?
The Mobile Data Muddle
As promised, I've been digging into the mini poo storm over the Barabási study that tracked the movement patterns of several thousand unsuspecting Europeans, and it's looking very much to me like Barabási and his team are unfortunate victims of our current cultural and legal confusion over just how we're supposed to think of the location information our personal mobile devices are constantly beaming out into the ether. A story on the controversy in the school newspaper at Northeastern, the home university for the study, makes a good point: MIT recently used the AT&T call and IP records of New Yorkers to generate maps that were considered beautiful enough to be hung in the Museum of Modern Art. No one seems to have bat an eye over that use of location data. But something about the Barabási's study rubbed people the wrong way, and he and his team are finding their work caught in the thicket of consumer uncomfortability with the idea that where we happen to be on the planet at any one moment is anything other than our own damn business.
TimesPeople
I'm having some fun trying out the New York Times' just-launched TimesPeople, an extremely light-weight social-networking app that rides above nytimes.com, storing the story recommendations, blog comments, and ratings for things like restaurants that I might make on the site, and showing me those of others I consent to having in my network to have in my network. TimesPeople isn't meant to be overly social -- the FAQs snarks "you won't have Times friends, and it won't get you Times dates" -- but it will replace the "Most Emailed" top ten list that generally only serves to make me depressed about what my fellow humans find most interesting.
Interesting contrast between how the Times is actively trying to engage its readers in new ways and how the AP seems eager to make sure it never gets linked to again.
I'm "nancyscola" if you want to make me one of your co-readers.
Introducing trooantroo, a Brooklyn Photo Blog
I was sitting around thinking "You know what my life needs? More blog." So I'm happy to introduce trooantroo, my new Brooklyn photo blog. The name comes from the epigraph to Thomas Wolfe's 1935 article in the New Yorker "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn":
Dere's no guy livin' dat knows Brooklyn t'roo an' t'roo, because it'd take a guy a lifetime just to find his way aroun' duh f_____ town.
It's ugly as sin right now, I know, but I wanted to get it out the door without obsessing over design. One thing I'm excited about is that I'm adding geo-tagging to each photo, in the form of Google Map links tied to a # sign on each post, that will make it easier for services like Outside.in to share the photos with those who might be into them.
Barabasi Study and the Privacy of Mobile Location Data in the U.S.
I've just stumbled across a fascinating case: a group of researchers affiliated with Northeastern -- including Albert-László Barabási, the author of the network science book Linked -- have just published in Nature on a study where they partnered with a European cell phone service provider to get six months worth of data on the call and text message records of 100,000 customers. Getting insight into human behavior through non-consensual access to personal technologies like cell phones is groundbreaking research approach, in part because your research subjects can't adjust their behavior if they don't know they're involved in a study in the first place.
The Barabási study was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research (though it's unclear what their interest is), but Barabási et al conducted the research outside the U.S. because it would be illegal to use call records the way they did here. Researchers didn't go through the university research ethics review process because the Navy had decided that it was a physics study didn't actually involve human subjects and, it seems, because the way the experiment was run it was anonymous. Even so, plenty of people are up in arms about what the study means for privacy, and both the school and the journal have tried to defend the study.
But let's get to the question I'm really interested in. What was tracked in the Barabási study were calls and text messages, which enjoy a certain level of protection in the U.S. But in the U.S. every mobile phone is required under e-911 legislation to be capable of sending back to the mothership a fairly accurate location read, within 150 yards most of the time. And now comes the next generation iPhone, equipped with assisted-GPS that pinpoints location using a powerful combination of true GPS (which alone is accurate, I think, within something like 30 feet), cell tower triangulation, and wifi location data. An expert I recently grilled on the topic tells me that the law on location records in the U.S. -- separate and apart from call records -- is a matter of some controversy and is still fuzzy. If a U.S. company, either carrier or location-aware app provider like Loopt or BrightKite, wanted to work with researchers on a study like this that used location data, would that be illegal here? Will keep digging...
(Photo thx Vagamundos)
Otlet's Radiated Library, Televised Book
Alex Wright, the author of the book Glut on information through the ages, has a great piece in today's New York Times science section that makes clear that we humans have hungered for a world wide web decades, at least, before we had the technology to bring it into existence. Wright visits the Mundaneum, a building in Mons, Belgium, that Paul Otlet intended to use to house all the world's information. Otlet's 1934 vision for his interlinked multimedia web of information predates Vannevar Bush's proposal for a memex "memory extender" -- what's often credited as the intellectual genesis of the web -- by about a decade:
Historians typically trace the origins of the World Wide Web through a lineage of Anglo-American inventors like Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson. But more than half a century before Tim Berners-Lee released the first Web browser in 1991, Otlet (pronounced ot-LAY) described a networked world where "anyone in his armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation."
Read the whole thing to get a sense of how comprehensive Otlet's vision was. But one thing to note is that unlike the dumb-link web we've got going today, where the relationship between two hyperlinked items is never more than "A links to B," Otlet's vision included clever links that described the nature of the connection between nodes -- something like the semantic web that Berners-Lee has been push to evolve the web to for some time now.
Otlet's overall prescience makes me wonder if maybe both he and Berners-Lee are on to something. One ding against the idea of a semantic web has been that nobody is going to put the kind of time in that would be necessary to tag, classify, and intelligently link all the web's information. Huh. Maybe all the energy that we're sinking a la Clay Shirky into YouTube and Twitter and MySpace Facebook and so on suggests that in 2008 we're very willing to put that kind of time into creating a smarter web?
Wright has some great photos of the Mundaneum up on his personal site, one of which he kindly said was okay for me to use above. Also, there is a film about Otlet called "The Man Who Wanted to Classify the World," and Kevin Kelly has the details on that over in his extensive library on documentaries.
Digging My Carrotmob Piece
A few (and by "few" I mean count-on-one-hand few) are digging that Carrotmob piece on WorldChanging. If you're so inclined...
Green Shopping Goes Social
 Over on the excellent WorldChanging I have a short piece up on Carrotmob, a concept recently launched out in San Francisco where a group of green-minded buyers coordinate their shopping to incentivize a certain business into making concrete earth-friendly changes. The mob shopping concept is about you and your friends playing along with capitalism to move the market in a direction of your liking.
What ran on WorldChanging was a shortened version of my take on the topic, so I'm taking the liberty of running some of the omitted sections -- on the "carrots" that might make businesses participate in such a scheme -- below. It probably makes sense to read the post over there first and then hop on back here if you're still interested.
The natural question becomes whether the success of the Carrotmob targeted-consumption approach at K&D can be replicated and grown. The answer might lay in the answer to a different question: what's in it for business? What carrots might really make them to go green(er)?
Looking at the Carrotmob experiment from the spring, the most obvious answer is cash. When Brent says with a smirk in a video on carrotmob.org that "corporations will do anything for money," he means that in a good way. With their interests on the table, what remains is aligning them with those of the green-minded buyer. What's so important about Carrotmob is the coordination, because it reduces an inefficiency in other, uncoordinated socially-conscious shopping: "mobbing" lets a business know exactly why the gods of good fortune have smiled upon it.
A second, less obvious carrot came up in the Carrotmob planning process -- reputation, and in particular the growing power we all have to use the social Internet to shape the reputations of businesses we like. One of the downsides to the "stick" approach to collectively addressing (like, say, me prodding my social circle into boycotting Shell over its poor environmental record in Nigeria) is that going negative (a) takes sustained effort and (b) isn't that much fun. But buying a six pack of Brooklyn Lager on a Carrotmob-appointed day, and then blogging about how much I looove my energy-efficient corner bodega on a social site like Outside.in? That's easy. And fun. It's casual, occasional, proactive activism.
Using online social cred as a carrot took something of a backseat to cold hard cash as Carrotmob rushed to launch. That's something of a shame, because those combined carrots can be powerful. K&D Market's participation in Carrotmob was rewarded with a sharp jump in business, at least for a day, but visit K&D's page on the hyperlocal review hub Yelp and you quickly see the opportunity for more. (The page is easy to find -- Google "K&D Market" and it's the first result.) Among the nicest reviews about K&D is one calling the market "the museum of expired cereal. (Many reviews complain about poor service.) For some businesses, a boost in their online rep that going green might provide might be even more valuable than a few hours of targeted sales. (Photo thx meganpru)
23andMe's Sly Eugenics Joke
23andMe is a Google-backed web-based genetic mapping start-up. In doing some research for a story pitch I was just watching a cartoony Genetics 101 video they have up on their site. Something caught my eye. Check out the first line of "gibberish" on the sheet supposed to represent the genetic code being passed from one generation to the next. It's a little joke on those of us might be a little wary of the idea of gene mapping:
Heh. "Gattac(c)a" -- the Ethan Hawke movie about a society based on genetic determinism. Clever.
UPDATE: I should be clearer. The letters in the DNA sheet aren't completely random -- they represent the DNA bases Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine, and Thymine. It's the arrangement here that's funny.
Not to Brag, But...
From my predictions registered on April 3rd:
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.
As we used to say back in the day, booyah.
Top Chef Prediction
Eek, I'm late! But it's Stephanie, Stephanie, Stephanie all the way! Her dishes are routinely delicious and creative (looking, at least), and with the gap between the regular season in Chicago and the finale in Puerto Rico the judges were able to watch the episodes along with us and develop an appreciate for the full measure of Steph's steely determination and kitchen decency and full calf tattoo. Okay, I may have a little bit of a crush...
Tomato Trouble is No Surprise
I feel like I should probably offer a comment on the giant salmonella'd tomato recall going on given that I just recently wrote a piece for the Center for American Progress on the inability of the fractured federal food safety system to actually ensure the safety of the food supply. Um, told ya? But it seems to me that as I spent a good deal of time talking to the former head of the FDA about this very sort of thing happening, I'll leave it to him:
"When we had the spinach episode, everyone acted like it was a great surprise," former FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford, a Bush-appointee and long-time federal food safety official, told Science Progress. "But the likelihood of something bad happening [with the food supply] is always quite high."
Listen to the man. He spent decades working at the highest levels of food safety. The every-now-and-then food outbreak isn't really more of a feature than a bug, isn't it, when we have more than a dozen (!) federal agencies with a finger in the oversight of which, one of which (USDA) has the food industry in its driver's seat and another (FDA) that screams up and down the halls of the Capitol Building that they don't have enough money to do their job. The only element of surprise here is that we're shocked each and every time our 'matoes make us sick. (Photo thx Ian S)
Copyright and Limits
Rasmus Fleischer, writing for Cato Unbound, makes the argument that the atavistic way we think about copyright is a poor fit for the digital age:
Creative practices, with some exceptions, thrive in economies where digital abundance is connected to scarce qualities in space and time. But there can never be a question of finding one universal business model for a world without copyright. The more urgent question regards what price we will have to pay for upholding the phantasm of universal copyright.
The glorious advent of the digital bit freed us from so many of the limits of the analog age, but those limits still drive the way we still think about copyright. The simplest example is one that Rasmus uses, where we draw distinctions without difference between and streaming (kinda okay) and downloading (terrifying) because we want to retrofit our ideas to the old z100 vs. Tower Records model. It's certainly tricky to draw bright lines when the one between our personal consumption of content and the distribution over our social networks is incredibly fuzzy; that's what makes Muxtape -- where you can create and share mixtapes with all your millions of online friends -- so head scratching. But rather than Washington and industry trying to draw the largest bounty from the end of scarcity, when it comes to legislating copyright we seem to be quite dedicated to constantly finding new ways to recreate the old chains that limited what we were able to do. (via Ezra Klein)
The Black Magic of iPhone Integration
Having just finished watching the Steve Jobs keynote from WWDC on the new iPhone, I'm now packing a bag for the next month I'll be waiting outside the Apple store to buy one. I waited and waited and waited, but it's time. Sure, you'll hear people grumbling about how you can't activate it at the iTunes store anymore, it still only (officially) runs on the AT&T network, and the data plan is 10 bucks more than it is currently. Yeah, those things might suck. But they're more than offset by the fact that the things that this palm-held device can now do are, simply put, amazing.
What sold me isn't any one thing that the iPhone can now do. It's how beautifully it integrates so many different kinds of things -- things are are more than a sum of its parts. Those parts are indeed neat -- the GPS, the accelerometer, the camera, the SDK -- but it's the integration where the magic happens. The iPhone now supports:
- enhanced GPS location awareness tied to social tools,
- mobile blogging with built in photo editing,
- full-featured gaming that reacts to tilting,
- medical imaging linked to Wikipedia's entries on particular body parts,
- and the list goes on.
It's not even computing anymore. It's integrated digital living. It's a two hundred dollar machine that carries significant potential to actually make the experience of living our day to day lives better. It's the future. Lemme at it.
Writing for the Web
May I recommend to you a fine article? Is Google Making Us Stupid? by Nick Carr in the Atlantic is quite good, particularly the parts on how the web is shaping the craft of writing. (Thx Carlo) To borrow a phrase I heard someone use this morning, "as I said on Twitter":
Well, for one thing, in a pre-web world the title wouldn't have led with a brand name and ended with "stupid."
I've actually been thinking quite a bit lately about the qualitative differences between writing pre-web/offline and writing for the web today. In fact, just before lunch I was pouring over some of Jakob Neilsen's research that used a heat-sensing device to track how people reading online. (In short, we tend to read in an "F" pattern online -- the first few lines and then quickly down the left side.) My interest is mostly just self interest, as someone aiming to make a living putting words together and seeing the writing on the wall when it comes to print. In a way, it's troubling to me. On the one hand, the way I think is perfectly matched to the way the web works. I'm always searching for links between different fields of study, time periods, people, networks. Connections are just the way I attempt to make sense of the world, and always have. Studying cultural anthropology in both undergrad and grad school only served to strengthen those muscles. But on the other hand, the suspect way I'm inclined to write is better suited for print. Stringing together words for the web, though, rewards punch and finality, but it's much more comfortable for me to slowly unpack an argument and leave lots of loose ends laying about. In acclimating myself to our digital future, one of the precepts that I'm coming to accept is that it's okay to have "strong opinions weakly held" online that are even stronger and even more weakly held than the ones I would express in the ink-and-paper world. What's on the digital page doesn't have to be an exact representation of what's in the ol' analog head.Tricky stuff. And then there's the Kindle! I haven't even begun to ponder what it means for print writing to be styled to fit an Internet-based technology that is itself designed to look like an old-fashioned book...
GPS on the new 3G iPhone
Ever since the social-tracking tool Dodgeball came and, for the most part, went, I've been both completely intrigued by and completely horrified by the idea that one day our social lives might really be mapped against where we happen to physically be at any one moment in time. The cultural anthropologist in me finds it breathtaking to think about that the level of control that gives us humans over our social existences. But the borderline agoraphobe in me starts to hyperventilate at the thought that someone I went to junior high school with might want to come by and say "hey" while I'm sunning myself at Riis Beach.
Dodgeball indeed flamed out, but with the announcement of what can fairly be called the third-generation iPhone's extreme GPS, I'd better find some way of handling those fears quick. Today's keynote makes clear that Steve Jobs is taking a see-what-sticks approach to location. The iPhone network will pinpoint your location using wifi network data, cell tower triangulation and true GPS. And Loopt, which seems a lot like a reincarnation of Dodgeball, will be one of the signature applications included in the launch of the new apps directory. Spend about 3 1/2 seconds playing with Google Maps on a second generation iPhone and you know that Apple just plain knows how to handle location -- it's as intuitive as you want it to be already, and beautifully integrated with the web via Safari. Add in multi-layered location tracking baked right in, it's probably a good bet that were on the cusp of some pretty serious advances in the world of geo-social tech. Gulp!
My First Cheddar Debuts and It's...
My first cheddar came of age tonight and so we opened it up for a taste. It was good enough to eat, but I think if we're being honest with one another I have to admit that I've left myself some room for improvement. The taste was decent -- just a nice, mild cheddar. The mouth feel, however, wasn't quite right. I don't know how to describe it other than to say that it was kinda chalky. Though I haven't had one in ages, something tells me that I might be close to what it would be like to eat a cheese-flavored Necco wafer.
I suspect that I may have erred by overheating the curds. (That's not altogether surprising. We joke that you know I'm cooking when you hear the smoke detector beeping.) I'm going to do some poking around the Internet's many cheesemaking sites for tips and give it another go soon.
Digestin' on TechPres
Four days into it, I'm having a good time chewing over all things digital and political in the Daily Digest over on TechPresident. They let me play pretty loose with it, which is fun. Why today alone I touched on everything from Obama's messianic language to IT Conversations to Jon "The Future of the Internet" Zittrain to Trebuchet MS (that's a font), and I got a dig in at the Wall Street Journal firewall. Stop on by sometime and see what you think.
B Corporations
I mentioned a few days that I'm on the hunt for stories involving these new ways popping up for organizing business efforts with a more social goodness than we're accustomed to. I talked a little bit about the U.K.'s community interest companies (CICs) that I've been studying, where the government has created a new category under the law for businesses that might benefit from being a little bit non-profit and a little bit for-profit. It's exciting stuff, and I'm still very much trying to wrap my mind around re-imagining a capitalism that doesn't have winning the money race so centrally at its core.
With that in mind, I came across another way being experimented with to give socially-minded businesses some unique standing. B Corporations work a lot like the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED environmental standard program, with companies qualifying for certification based on their commitment to their communities, employees, planet, yadda. We're in the weeds here, but note the difference: CICs have benefiting society in some way at the very heart of what they do, but the B Corp designation can be awarded to the manufacturers of anything from dish soap to sports cars if they prove themselves to top a minimum bar of social responsibility.
Both B Corps and CICs point a hunger out there for new models for doing business that don't hew so closely to our old for-profit/not-for-profit way of thinking.
I'm Writing the TechPresident Daily Digest
I should probably mention that as of today I've taken over writing and editing the Daily Digest from TechPresident, a site that covers how technology is shaping politics and vice versa where I've long been a contributing editor. With the TP associate editor and my good friend Josh Levy heading over to become the managing editor at Change.org, I'll be doing the digest for a couple/few months as the Personal Democracy Forum team focuses on preparing for the upcoming PdF '08 conference and figures out how to live with Josh. It's going to be fun. My inaugural digest is up now, and you can always sign up to get it sent right to your inbox.
Photos from Around BKLYN: Grass and Parachute with a Flag
In Prospect Park this weekend a giant group of both kids and adults were playing parachute with a giant American flag. You know, parachute, right? It's where you pull a big piece of fabric into the air, move underneath it, and then sit on the edge, forming something of a bubble. We used to play parachute about once a year in grade school, which was one of the more exciting days of the year.
This photo was an accident. I was in the process of focusing when I slipped and took a picture, but there's something I like about how the sharpness of the grass contrasts against what almost seems like a mirage in the background.
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