The Olympics press official who has had to explain to the world why China reneged on its promise to open the Internet for the games is feeling like a "fall guy" for the International Olympic Committee. Higher ups, he says, probably knew of Beijing's plans before journos arrived in country.
Ethan Zuckerman points to the staggeringly high prices that are being charged to the press for Internet hookup (we're talking $1130 for a 512 pipe) and does a round-up of all the nose-thumbing stuff going around, i.e. ways to circumvent China's restrictions during the summer games.
And Reporters without Borders has set up a one-stop shop for all your news on Beijing's Internet restrictions, hotel wiretapping, journalist imprisoning, and more.
The China Debate was put together by Amnesty International to host the discussion about China and human rights during the Olympic games. I can't recall another site that takes the approach that it does -- limiting debate to a few core issues and then building out discussion boards around them. It's a little clunky in this case, but I kinda like it. I suspect actually limiting what people are invited to talk about might paradoxically foster discussion.
I've been thinking a lot lately about how you usefully architect public participation, so that you don't get people all worked up into a froth of excitement until they realize they've just been given busy work or a place to vent, which then ultimately depresses participation. Along those lines, I've been looking into the Obama listening sessions, Get FISA Right, Peer-to-Patent, etc. Anyway, The China Debate is worth checking out -- especially given the news that China has already broken one pre-Olympic promise. (Thx Matt BH)
We're going down the road of creating a bandwidth cartel in much the same way we have an oil cartel, writes Tim Wu:
Like energy, bandwidth is an essential economic input. You can’t run an engine without gas, or a cellphone without bandwidth. Both are also resources controlled by a tight group of producers, whether oil companies and Middle Eastern nations or communications companies like AT&T, Comcast and Vodafone. That’s why, as with energy, we need to develop alternative sources of bandwidth.
Wired connections to the home — cable and telephone lines — are the major way that Americans move information. In the United States and in most of the world, a monopoly or duopoly controls the pipes that supply homes with information. These companies, primarily phone and cable companies, have a natural interest in controlling supply to maintain price levels and extract maximum profit from their investments — similar to how OPEC sets production quotas to guarantee high prices.
I like this new way that Tim's framing the issue, especially with the price of gas today setting new, ever higher records. It works well: wireline Internet is to oil as wireless Internet is to solar/wind/etc. (Is that right? I can never get that A is to B as C is D thing right. Anyway, I trust you get the drift.) But the point is that having just a few hands on just one nozzle is a bad thing whether it comes to oil or Internet, an argument that seems to particulary hit home when gas is topping $4 a gallon.
Journalists covering the Beijing Olympic Games will not have completely uncensored access to the internet, Chinese and Olympic officials say.
Sites related to spiritual group Falun Gong would be blocked, officials said. Journalists also found they could not see some news or human rights websites.
China enforces tough internet controls, but said when it bid for the Games that journalists would be free to report.
A senior IOC official apologised for misleading journalists on the issue.
"I'm not backing off what I said," International Olympic Committee press commission chairman Kevan Gosper told the South China Morning Post.
"There will be full, open and free internet access during Games time to allow journalists to report on the Olympics," he added.
"But I have also been advised that some of the IOC officials had negotiated with the Chinese that some sensitive sites would be blocked."
An "open Internet" with "some sensitive sites...blocked" is somewhat like "a little bit pregnant."
Is it just me, or was an open Internet one of the very requirements that China agreed to abide by when it was awarded the games, a plum prize from the world community? Yep, pretty sure I'm right about that. And now when push comes to shove, they say, "when we said 'open,' we meant everything except for anything having to do with our political enemies or a free press or..."
UPDATE: Former Berkman center fellow and University of Hong Kong professor Rebecca McKinnon has some tips for journalists on how to do their jobs well in Beijing.
There's this great photo accompanying the story in which the Sims family (great name!) of Old Greenwich, Connecticut, is gathered in their living room. Mom is clutching a newspaper, Dad a book, and their two teenage kids are staring at laptops. Son Zachary, it turns out, consumes something like 200 RSS feeds a day, an amount of content that Mom finds "mind boggling," but not particularly distressing. But more concerning to the parents is the great deal of time daughter Emma's spends online playing games and connecting up with friends.
Thing is, both kids appear to be doing the very same thing. But they're clearly engaged in different pursuits. And that's basically the Steven Johnson argument -- that we're using a bunk definition of "reading" if we're limiting it to ink-and-paper books and newspapers, and not taking into account all the text we take in online. There was this great story from the British Library's main reading room a few months back where old-timers complained that the new batch of researchers just didn't look like they're working, because they're click-click-clicking away at computers instead of being hunched over tomes. That definition of "working" is fairly dated. Our definition of reading is also pretty archaic.
Now me, I like books, like 'em a lot. Ever since I was a wee one, I've loved putting the effort into seeing through one person's vision for a few hundred pages of commitment. I do struggle a bit to find time for them now. Time spent consuming all the wonderful stuff online -- whether it's Boing Boing or nytimes.com -- is time not spent reading full books. Whether or not that's a loss for the universe is the big question, but I do personally find myself wishing I spent more time on actual books.
Of course, the boring but probably pretty spot-on answer to this is, ho-hum, balance. Maybe we all are gorging a bit on digital content right now, what with it being all free and delicious! So maybe something useful the National Endowment for the Arts -- a big participant in these reading debates -- could do is to mock up a reading pyramid like the one we have for food. Give us a useful guide to balancing our textual consumption.
My new post over on Worldchanging was actually inspired by the above Anil Dash tweet that showed up in my Twitter feed on July 11th, aka launch day. It kinda snapped me out of my gadget-induced trance. Don't get the wrong idea -- I still waited in line for 2.5 hours to get me my 3G. And I loves her. But it did make me curious about the environmental impact of my new phone.
So I did some digging. The second-generation iPhone actually turns out to have made some solid improvements on the green front over its first iteration. Earbuds are now PVC free and the circuit board is produced sans bromine. Probably most importantly, the 3G's battery is no longer soldered in, which makes it easier to both keep the phone in working order and break it down when it comes time to recycle. Part of what I talk about at Worldchanging is why we don't hear Apple using these green good points as selling points for their stuff.
Just noticed a neat new little security feature that popped up in Gmail. Down at the very bottom of your mail screen you'll now find a line that says "Last account activity: 0 minutes ago at IP xx.xxx.xxx.xxx." Click that link and you'll get all the details on from what IP address your account and for how long your account has been accessed, so you can keep track of any funny business. But perhaps even more useful for those of us not involved in messy domestic spying situations, there's also a one-click button that remotely signs you out of every Gmail acccount other than the one you current have open. No more running back to your work desk to make sure you logged off and the cleaning crew's not reading your email.
Slow Food Nation will take place Labor Day weekend in San Francisco. Here's a another chance to answer the question of whether sustainable, localized, in-season eating is a luxury, available only to the froo-frooiest among us. It's interesting. The slow food movement in Europe, despite being seen as a high-brow food dilettantism and a shallow cultural choice, is still quite popular. But it's been slow to take root in the U.S., even though it has the awesomest of snail logos.
How do we get over that hurdle stateside? It seems like it might require those of us who believe in slow food principles to articulate some clearer thinking about the politics of said food: who deserves to eat what, when, why, and how. Seems to me one answer is to infiltrate American culture through school cafeterias -- brainwash 'em when they're young and can't put up a fight!
(I just realized that you can blog your book reviews right from Goodreads, so I'm giving it a go here. It's a little weird because I reference my blog in the review, but whatever.)
rating: 5 of 5 stars I'm wrote a line about this book on my blog that I think is so good I'm just going to crib. ;) "Barbara Kingsolver writes so well that I'd pay good money to read her account of mopping her kitchen floor." 'Tis true. But here Kingsolver has lovingly recorded the year she and her family raised and grew a good portion of their own food. What they couldn't grow, they bought local. It's an inspiration to try to devote the time and attention to our food that it deserves; on a more practical level, I'm already learning to think, "hmm, now, asparagus -- is that in season?" A big thanks to Jeannette (http://www.goodreads.com/user/... for the recommendation.
Again and again, Al Gore plays right into the idea that he was completely full of malarky when he talked about his role in bringing the Internet into being. He did it again at Netroots Nation, so I wrote up a little post over on Huffington Post offering him the friendly advice that he quit doing it.
Oh, the things you can find to do to kill time while your loved one is dutifully studying for the bar exam. While I wait out this final week and a half of suffering, my camera and I went on a morning jaunt down to Bensonhurst, heretofore only really known to me as neighborhood where "Welcome Back, Kotter" took place. (For those of you familiar with northern Brooklyn, Bensonhurst looked to me a lot like an Italian Ditmas Park.) New Utrecht Reformed Church is best know for being the site of the only remaining Liberty Pole, which was apparently a mast of some sort stuck in the ground during the American Revolution to fly the U.S. flag. I didn't get a shot of the that because, frankly, it just looks like an old flag pole. But here's one of the front entrance:
A handful of other shots from today's Bensonhurst adventure, as well as a trip to Red Hook yesterday, are newly up at my photo blog Trooantroo.
Food is becoming increasingly important to me as I try to be more mindful about planet Earth and my place on it. I was intrigued by Ezra Klein's pointer to a grilled bread salad from Marc Bittman because it seemed like I could get all of the ingredients besides olive oil at our farmer's market up at Grand Army Plaza. I struck out with one thing -- lemons, which give the dish a nice citrusy kick. (Perhaps a bit too much of a kick. If you try out the recipe, I might recommend cutting the lemon juice by about a quarter.) Lemon trees just don't grown in Brooklyn, it seems, nor its environs. I was, though, able to pick up some organic ones at the local natural food store, and with the leftover juice I made what I have to say was a tremendously delicious simple-syrup lemonade.
I'm a big eater, and a bread salad alone seemed like it might be a bit insubstantial, so I made up a batch of my mozzarella to kick in some milk proteins. Nice pairing, I think. Jane's studying for her upcoming bar exam, but she carved out a little time to have this meal out on our stoop. She said it made her belly happy, and fueled her up for the tough task ahead.
Sean Tevis is an information architect running for state house in northeastern Kansas. He released this xkcd-style web comic (of which the above is just one panel) in an attempt to break the record set for number of contributors to a state house race in that state -- 644 -- and raise enough cash to fund his campaign. I've put together a little recap over on TechPresident. But in short, after a link from Boing Boing, he's at 4,000 contributors and counting. First we had Darcy Burner fundraising off of a </war> t-shirt, and now geeks are heeding the siren song of a comic strip. It's the kind of engagement I've been eager for; I went down to SXSW two years ago and called for technologists to cast off their faux-libertarian mantle and finally get political. Yep, that's right, I'm crediting myself for this new development. Anyway, check out that post if you get a chance: "Geeks Answer Kansas Candidate's Call for Backup."
So, Matt Yglesias has decided to leaveThe Atlantic to take up a post with the content-creating wing of the Center for American Progress. Super interesting stuff. Matt was the very first political blogger I ever read -- whiling away those long recess hours in the Rayburn H.O.B., circa 2002 or so. He introduced me to the possibility that blogging could be a factor in the swirl of D.C. political life. Memorieeees... Anyway, it seems Matt's hungry to be more of an activist and an advocate than a journalist, but what's particularly intriguing to me is this line in his announcement post: "From a reader's point of view, this probably won't make a huge difference." As a writer/blogger with a big following, having the ability to pack up and move to a new URL is probably tremendously thrilling in a "f___ you money" sort of way. But there is a trade-off. First of all, you're probably not in as great a position to tap into institutional resources that way. And secondly, there's not as much tying you to your colleagues -- which is, in fact, one of the very reasons Matt cited for leaving The Atlantic for CAP.
I'm taking a crack at liveblogging an event tonight at NYU featuring Arun Chaudhary, director of video field production for the Obama campaign, in conversation with Ellen McGirt, senior writer at Fast Company and author of magazine's April 2008 cover story "The Brand Called Obama."Arun left his job as an adjunct film professor at NYU to produce video that pulls from public events, behind the scenes, and one-on-ones -- unique creative content that populates BarackObama.com and a YouTube channel. Let's get started.
Asked about the new media team, Arun describes at least 50 people crammed into one corner of an office building floor with with "pictures of JFK and graph paper tacked up on the wall." Arun says the new media team spends a fair amount of money, but they're buying fishing poles rather than fish; the broadcast quality footage they capture, for example, can be used for advertising in addition to online video. Asked about past campaigns he tried working with, Arun says they saw media as "too precious" to take creative risks with.
Arun explains his hire by the campaign by saying 'you can learn the politics. You can learn how to navigate these worlds. But you can't really learn the trades very quickly.' The campaign has been attracting successful people that way, he says, naming Facebook's Chris Hughes, who came on to handle social-networking. Arun then screens a well-crafted mock movie trailer calling people to a rally in New York's Washington Square Park that features Obama in slightly goofy situations. Ellen: "We've never seen anything like this before":
Ellen asks if the technology was in place three years ago to make video like this. "The technology was there three years ago, but I don't think the right audience was," says Arun. Back then, he jokes, there were just six hundred of the same people commenting on political blogs and that's it; online participation today spans a wider segment of the population.* Ellen ask how he managed to get approval for the trailer video from the campaign and the candidate. Arun laughs a bit nervously, "I don't know if the candidate saw it," but says that it made its way, he believes, to the level of campaign manager.
The next video was crafted to call people to the pre-Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Iowa, as, Arun says, showing organizational strength was the key to getting attention and momentum in that state. Ellen asks if there was a concern that Obama and guest attendee John Legend were the only African-Americans seen in the clip. Arun pointed to the Internet Archive's Prelinger Archivesas the source of the overly white footage. (At the actual event, the video team had five cameras and five videographers in place capturing footage.):
Next video. An Iowa call-to-caucus piece, says Arun, is a campaign classic. It both asks Iowans to caucus for their particular candidate and educates voters on how to actually go through the confusing caucusing process. Both the Obama campaign and the Edwards campaign went the route of a dated instructional-style video, he says. (Arun praises the Hillary Clinton campaign's call-to-caucus video which featured Bill Clinton eating a cheeseburger and saying something along the lines of "exercising is hard, but caucusing is easy."):
It was the campaign's "traditional media" team, says Arun, that whipped together a quick response to the Clinton campaign's 3 a.m. phone call ad. But the new media team tracked down the young girl in the stock footage, Casey Knowles, an Obama precinct captain in Washington State. In the one-minute video, Casey deconstructs the techniques in the Clinton ad -- the blue tint to the footage, the "scratchy voice" -- and slams the "politics of fear." An ad like that, says Arun, would never make on air, but works well online:
The candidate was in Terre Haute, Arun says, when the news broke that Obama had earlier made remarks in California concerning "bitter" Americans. Obama inserted a response to the incident in his Indiana speech. The new media team, says Arun, edited, packaged, and released the candidate's own words within 19 minutes of the speech's delivery. A lesson learned, says Arun, is that people are actually interested in the "sound blast," and will watch long clips in their entirety:
He also cites Obama's speech at their Chicago headquarters.The 14 minute clip shows the candidate addressing his staff, both in person and through a conference call (which creates a few minutes of less-than-thrilling footage when the call goes dead and Obama has to stall while it's reconnected). It wasn't deliberately shot low-fi for an extra dose of authenticity, Arun says, as some people suggested. There was no intention to create some sort of "Tanner 88" moment. It was just, he says, that there was an intern manning the camera:
Asked by Emily about what an Obama administration might bring, Arun says that the role of video in an administration would be even more powerful than in a campaign. He mentions the broadcasting of health care meetings -- creating a broader base of people who are able to keep an eye on the proceedings. The idea, Arun says, is not 'telling people who tell people to tell people,' but to use video to tell people directly. The role of video in governing, he says, is to achieve the goal of "cutting out the middleman."
Q&A
Question: There's a discontinuity in your work with high video quality and no sound mixing. Why?
Arun: We shoot as high quality as we can because it might be used for broadcast, but get used to it -- a lot of the networks are going so broke that they're getting rid of their "sound guys."
Question: What role with user-generated content play in presidential campaigns? Arun: Using voter-generated content while probably remain "an unrealized ideal." Much of the content that gets sent to them is "a little strange."
Question: Why is new media going to make young people come out and vote?
Arun: It isn't. Barack Obama is what is going to make people come out and vote.
Question: If you embrace an interactive politics 2.0, how do you avoid politicizing governing? Arun: I think we're ready for 1.5. We'll [ed. -- a clarification: "we" here is a reference to political campaigns in general, and to the tools that might come into common use -- not a reference to the Obama campaign in particular] have virtual townhalls, for sure.
* Updated to correct: The original line referenced political blogs; in making the joke, Arun was referencing hard-core blog commenters.
Waaaaaay back on June 26, I wrote a post on what I called "hook journalism," about the future of multi-thousand word investigative writing in the digital age. The article I was riffing off of was a rather extraordinary piece in Fast Company by Richard Behar on China's dominance in Africa. Behar had spent a month reporting the piece in four sub-Saharan countries. I issued a plaintive wail about the future prospects of such spectactular works of journalism. To my great pleasure, that post attracted two very smart responses. I'd meant to respond to them both in the comments at the time, but somehow I lost track of them. So I'd like to pull them out now and offer some thoughts.
The first was from David Colarusso, on funding journalism that requires travel:
I remembered how valuable I found it when a good contingent of NPR's news staff was in China during the earthquake, serendipitous as it may have been. Being on location is invaluable. Then I wondered why a local couldn't have done the work. Of course, the answer is one of perspective, often an outside view is what's needed to bring clarity. However, the web's distributed intelligence may one day allow for such a piece to come about via careful coordination at a distance and for a reasonable cost.
Just after I finished up a master's program at B.U. in anthropology, I went down to Yale to study Kiswahili. And my professor there, a sassy Kenyan linguist, liked to give me a hard time. What could you possibly know about Kenya, he'd say, that I don't? My answer? Some, at least. First of all, I had usefully studied my research topic (namely, slavery on the Swahili Coast of East Africa) from a multicultural, academic perspective. He hadn't. Secondly, as a blank slate, I could let the story tell itself rather than imposing my own experiences. I still believe both to be true. Insert "journalist" for "anthropologist" and you have my thinking on why in some contexts non-local journos might still be the way to go.
The second was this from Carlo Scannella about the future of really, really long stories:
[W]hile I'm convinced there's no market for 38-screen stories on the web (I don't know about you, but if it's more than a couple pages long, I print it. Sorry, trees...), a technology like the Kindle points us to a future where we have the mobility of the wireless web with the physicality of paper-based books.
I like Carlo's point a lot. But the question I have here is about timing. Are we indulging in wishful thinking to believe the day will soon come when a critical mass of us are toting around dedicated book readers? Long-form journalism is collapsing quickly. Just about everyday there's a new story on the sorry state of the newspaper business. And our paperless future has been off in the distance for some time now. The worry is that if we our existing journalism models crumble, we're going to find it quite a challenge to build something up in their place. While a Kindle in every pocket is an appealing goal, right now they're $359 and still very much a niche product.
Both great contributions, and it thrills me to no end that David and Carlo came here to make them. (Photo thx nikkorsnapper. Photo is of dancers outside the National Theatre in Accra, Ghana, which was designed, financed, and built by China.)
After about two and three-quarter hours of waiting at the Soho Apple store on Sunday, I got my hands on a new iPhone. I went 16 gig and black. The black was to assuage my guilt at getting the 16 gig, as getting a white phone is an immediate indicator that you laid down the $299 for the bigger model. I'm not sure I really needed the storage. But I do know that I don't need to broadcast to the world that I coughed up the money for it.
Anyway, I digress. At some point I'll write up a review post of the new phone. Jane has a first generation model, which we upgraded to 2.0 on Thursday, so some of the bloom was off the rose by the time I got my phone in my grubby little hands. But here is a random collection of some of the neat things that I really like about it so far:
1) Shazam! This iPhone app, free in the apps store, is simply amazing. Hold up the phone to a song playing on the radio or television. It identifies the title and artist and with a click, you can buy the song on iTunes. The first time Jane and I tried it our jaws dropped and we just stared at each other for like 30 seconds. It's magic, plain and simple.
2) Screen shots. It's the sort of thing that I wouldn't have every imagined my old Blackberry 8700 could do. Hold down the home key and tap the sleep button (up on top) once, and it files a screen cap into your photo album. From there you can email it right to your inbox.
3) The magnifier bubble. After some frustrating experiences fat-fingering my typing, I discovered a trick. Press down for a moment on the text at hand, and a magnifying bubble pops up, allowing you to micro-navigate your typing. It's a brilliant use of some tiny real estate.
All right, now here are the things I want:
1) Flickr integration. How insane is it that there's not an official Flickr app for uploading photos right from the iPhone? I've got a camera, an Internet hook-up, and a Flickr account. Is it that hard to put the three together?
2) More battery! It seems to be draining away quite quickly. I'm willing to believe that there's some users error here, as I don't quite know exactly which settings draw power and when. I'm going to give these suggestions a try.
Loopt is a the location-aware social-working tool that was demonstrated alongside the launch of the iPhone 3G at WWDC '08, and it's now available for download from the Apple apps store via iTunes. Let Loopt get a fix on your location using the iPhone's a-GPS, and it will tell you where in your area your friends are. It will even, I think, allow you to send them short notes. (I say think because I don't actually have any contacts on Loopt yet, so it's difficult to try out some of the apps more social features.)
I got a chance while at the recent Focus on Locus conference at Columbia to talk with Brian Knapp, Loopt's chief privacy officer. The main takeway from both that discussion and Brian's formal presentation is that Loopt is eager to set themselves up as brave protectors of their users' privacy, even as the law around location records remains extremely fuzzy. Brian: "When the government comes knocking -- even if they have their hats on backwards and look tough -- we're going ask for a warrant." Huzzah.
But I refer to Loopt's "users" in the paragraph about on purpose. You're not paying anything for Loopt. Your contract is with your service provider, which is likely AT&T. There's a deal implicit here. You get a neat service that lets you know your friends are knocking back Negro Modelos at Burrito Bar, but Loopt has to find a way to keep the lights on in their Mountain View offices.
Brian was asked at the conference about Facebook's Beacon, a feature that broadcast off-site behavior to a user's social network. Advertisers loved it. It made privacy advocates cry themselves to sleep. Brian conceded that Beacon raised all kinds of privacy concerns but offered a defense, saying "Facebook is free and an amazing service. In some ways, there are tradeoffs here..." In other words, nifty online tools carry a price, even if they're free. Given the wealth of information Loopt and other location-aware apps will have on us, it's worth asking what that cost is.
I took some behind-the-scenes heat from progressive friends for tying the Twitter Dome Scandal -- the fight over House rules on web tools -- to the broader and decades long effort by conservatives to paint liberals as anti-free speech cowards. There's a risk, I argued, in jumping on the John Culberson bandwagon, because it only goes to further the meme that congressional Democrats lust after one nation under the Fairness Doctrine, where speech is regulated and unpleasant talk banned. But Republican Policy chair Thad McCotter makes that point far better than I can.
Today was busy! I'm just settling in to play with my new gadget a bit. Is there a chance that I can actually blog from this thing? We shall see soon enough.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know Twitter is just a silly web app. And man, is it down an awful lot! But, I tell ya, it's going to have to try harder than that to drive me away. I just found out from my network that the line at the Apple store on 5th Ave is 200 people deep and the wait at the Soho store five hours long The first tweet was a result to a question I posed; the second was just the right bit of info bubbling up at the right time. Both are bits of news that potentially saves me hours of my life -- if I wasn't such a fool that I'm probably going to go try anyway.
Yeah, I'm going. I'll probably Twitter my progress, if it's not doing its Fail Whale thing... (Photo thx workinpana)
UPDATE: The second tweet concerned the wait at the Apple store in the meatpacking district, not Soho. My bad.
Another tidbit from the conference on location-aware tech I'm at today. But first, let me point you to an intriguing post my good friend Josh Levy has over on HuffPo. Josh suggests that some of us -- and you know who you are -- are making too big a deal about the iPhone's ability to change the world. As neat as the 3G is, it's not going to end world hunger, make the janjaweed stop their murderous rampage, so on and so forth.
Josh's note of caution is wise and healthy. I will suggest, though, focusing on a slightly different point. I think it's fair to say that, given the events of the past decade or so, the Internet has proven the ability to change the world in ways both large and small. And why the iPhone is as exciting as it is is because it presents the possibility of changing the Internet.
Let me try to explain what I'm thinking by using the one feature I'm most excited about when it comes to the new iPhone: GPS. Location-awareness is, in my humble opinion, one of the greatest undertapped resources we have going on the tech front -- with the possibility of revolutionizing distribution, emergency services, defense, and even how we interact with our communities.
What makes the iPhone exciting on that front? My new favorite smart guy, Ted Morgan of Skyhook, just made this point here at the conference. Location-based services (LBS) have long lagged behind where everyone working in the field expected them to be by now. But with the new iPhone apps store, people can try and toss any number of new free and low-cost LBS apps, and that high-churn rate can refine location-aware tools in a way that just wasn't possible before.
I'm telling you, there are a number of very excited business types here who are pretty psyched about what the next few years are going to bring on the location front, and there all talking about the iPhone and its clones. GPS is one way that the iPhone might actually shape how we engage with the global network. Josh is right -- this shiny gadget alone won't change the world. But it does raise the possibility of shaping the future of something -- the Internet -- that has demonstrated a pretty remarkable ability to do just that.
I'm at Columbia Business School for Focus on Locus, a conference on location-aware gizmos and gadgets, and I've got a hot tip for you on this, iPhone Day. Tom Ted Morgan is CEO of Skyhook Wireless, and he says that turning the new 3G sideways, like you might do to use the new scientific calculator feature, hugely decreases the accuracy of the iPhone's GPS. So if you're using your unit to find your way around, keep it oriented straight up to the sky. So now you know.
So, in brief, a Republican congressman from Texas by the name of John Culberson is up in arms about a letter on how members of the House of Representatives use the Internet, and I took to the Huffington Post to push back a bit on the conventional wisdom that Democrats in Congress are intent upon cracking down on Twitter, Qik, YouTube, so on and so forth. I'm posting it in full below, and then I'm off to do something, anything, that has nothing to do whatsoever with Twitter:
The Politics of the Twitter Dome Scandal
Those of us obsessed with both politics and technology have a juicy new piece of red meat to sink our teeth into this week. Republican Congressman John Culberson of Texas, is leading the charge against a three-week old letter (in pdf) written by Democratic Congressman Mike Capuano of Massachusetts, in which Capuano proposed how members of the House of Representatives be guided in their use of online video. Also in the fight: House Minority Leader John Boehner, who has sounded this alarm over what Capuano, the head of the House Commission on Mailing Standards, has proposed: "I'm writing to alert you to an attack on free speech that is making its way through Congress."
I found that statement from Boehner on Culberson's blog, in a blog post titled "Democrats Seek to Quell Free Speech" -- which should give you a quick sense of some of the political contours of this debate, but more on that in a minute. Rep. Culberson is probably best known to anyone who doesn't live in the Houston area as the Twittering Congressman. Culberson is an active tweeter, posting to his micro-blogging account his first-hand reporting from the steps of the Capitol and his congressional office. He's also an early adopter of Qik technology, which allows streaming video right from a cell phone. It really is rather amazing to have an elected official offering such unmediated access to what happens in the halls of government.
Culberson responded to the Capuano letter by decrying it as an attempt by anti-free speech Democrats to change House rules to nip his Twittering and Qiking in the bud. Them Dems are trying to shut me up, growled Culberson.
But there's a small problem with Culberson's analysis of the situation. I've read the letter on the proposed rules standing up and sitting down. I read it with my glasses on and my glasses off. Ever which way the conclusion is the same: what the Massachusetts' congressman is proposing (though granted, in the gobbledygook that they teach congressional staffers to write in) is a loosening of existing rules. No where does it suggest prohibiting Twitter. No where does it ban Qik. No where does it, as Culberson is claiming, require that disclaimers be posted every time a congressperson wants to type out a thought on the Interweb. What Culberson is raising a hue and cry about is simply not within the four corners of that document.
Now this being DC (and me being an only semi-reconstructed political hack), I can't help but recall who exactly wrote the rules we're debating in the first place? Let's see. Teddy Kennedy was the first member of Congress to have a website, and that was in 1994 -- the year of the Republican Revolution. Republicans controlled the House for the next decade, covering just about all of the time Congress was coming to terms with the Internet.
A wide swath of political geeks have answered Culberson's call. The Sunlight Foundation, a transparency-minded group that has done amazing work innovating in the open government space, quickly got his back. The Congressman first sounded the alarm two days ago, and Sunlight's Let Congress Tweet campaign is already ramped up and getting a good amount of attention. I can't count the number of times my friends, associates, and allies on Twitter have retweeted the movement's call to action.
But let's for a minute hop back to the blog post that Culberson put up to share Boehner's statement, the one titled "Democrats Seek to Quell Free Speech."
If that title looks familiar, it might be because "Democrats Seek to Quell Free Speech" is pretty much how Republicans in Congress have described the things that Democrats do for decades now. When the topic at hand is campaign finance, the Republican line is that reformers are anti-free speech. When it comes to the critically important topic of diversity of voices in the American media, which I've written about for HuffPo in the past, the Republican tactic is to (1) raise the ghost of the Fairness Doctrine and then (2) sound the bell over how Democrats are up to their old speech-shackling tricks again. A similar and familiar trope is branding liberals as language police. 'Dems hate free speech' is one of the most well-worn phrases in the Republican repertoire.
Congress is a slow-moving body that lags a few years behind the greater U.S. But they're catching up. Back when I left the Hill in 2005, getting a member to post on Daily Kos required a day's worth of meetings. Now, in Nancy Pelosi, we have a speaker with a blog that regularly integrates YouTube videos, all manned by a team of online specialists. She's been interviewed by Big Think. She's working with the Digg-ish Ask the Speaker to put together the crowd-sourced questions that she'll be asked at next weeks Netroots Nation (nee Yearly Kos). All perhaps an indication that House Democratic leadership isn't cowering in a corner somewhere in fear of our digital future?
Still, "slow-moving" is the nature of the beast. Congress isn't a start-up. It's meant to mostly keep the status-quo going, with slow and methodical adjustments that keep the country moving in the right direction. Everyone agrees that when it comes to the Internet, the House has work to do. And that's what Capuano and others have been attempting to do, in Congress's own plodding way.
Juan Cole linked this weekend to a story I wrote for AlterNet last fall about Order 81, Paul Bremer's directive that established a seed patenting regime for the "new Iraq," and a commenter with boot-on-the-ground experience in Iraq wrote in critique Juan's link:
The small report about Bremer dictating that Iraqi farmers cannot use their seed from year to year is utter nonsense. It is not true. Iraqi farmers save seed for planting in the next year as they have done for many millenia and as farmers in other countries do.
Indeed. As I wrote:
Order 81 generated very little press attention when it was issued. And what coverage it did spark tended to get the details wrong. Reports claimed that what the United States' man in Iraq had done was no less than tell each and every Iraqi farmer -- growers who had been tilling the soil of Mesopotamia for thousands of years -- that from here on out they could not reuse seeds from their fields or trade seeds with their neighbors, but instead they would be required to purchase all of their seeds from the likes of U.S. agriculture conglomerates like Monsanto.
That's not quite right. Order 81 wasn't that draconian, and it was not so clearly a colonial mandate. In fact, the edict was more or less a legal tweak.
It's hot and sticky in New York City, making me more blunt than normal: we gotta stop doing this -- upping the crazy on stories that are already bad enough when taken at face value. No, Bremer didn't tell Iraqi farmers that they can only use patented seeds -- the world community probably would have mustered a little indignation over that.
What Bremer et al did was to create a pro-agribusiness environment in Iraq that, as is the main point of that AlterNet piece, has caused a fair amount of havoc in India. Juan's commenter offers an interesting defense of way Iraq's no India when it comes to ag:
The good news in Iraq is that the ag authorities are much more engaged with farmers and are more likely to tamp down Monsanto's or any other agribusiness' aggressive tactics. There is nothing wrong with using a patented seed provided the user is completely aware of what s/he is getting into. The other good news is that the crops most common in Iraq, wheat, barley, and rice are open pollinated crops and not subject to patent protection. These are saved from year to year, though it is customary to purchase new seed every five years or so. Hybrid maize is common in Iraq. The seed of hybrid maize cannot be grown in the following season, and all farmers are aware of that. And if an Iraqi farmer wants open pollinated maize, no problem, it is easy to find.
Fair enough -- but the argument stands that post-invasion Iraq was really not the time or place to be upending the agricultural system that had gotten the country as far as it had, and given what we know about seed creep when it comes to GMOs, Iraq farmers might not always have a choice about whether to go the genetically-modified route. That's bad enough, no? That's problem enough, caused by the U.S. through the mess we made of Iraq. There's no need to make it worse than it is.
A few weeks back I profiled a new effort called Carrotmob for WorldChanging, the gist of which was here was a new effort to rework capitalism to reward businesses for taking positive environmental steps -- the idea being that the best way to motivate a profit-seeking business is to make there be significant monetary rewards for the behavior we'd like to see. Some commenters, though, have suggested that there's some amount of cognitive dissonance involved when you're helping out a corner bodega with installing more energy-efficient lights by stocking up on bourbon and Lucky Charms. If that's your feeling, then you'll be interested in Buycott for Change. A buycott works by rewarding businesses who are already "doing something positive for their employees, their community, and/or the environment" -- in the hopes that they might serve as a model for other businesses to start doing some good. Their first target was Brooklyn's own Habana Outpost -- home of the margarita bike -- and I'm hearing that it went well.
I think about things like Carrotmob and Buycott for Change when I read something like Sally Kohn's recent piece in the Christian Science Monitor on the need for millennials to embrace face-to-face activism. It scares me to think that we're going to find ourselves stuck in this culture war driven by the '60s that isn't hippie vs. conservative or whatever, but liberal/progressive who still sees the world through a 1960s lens rooted in conflict and younger folks who embrace the more non-zero world view that Robert Wright writes about. There's a distinct possibility that there are younger people (in both age and spirit) who are going about changing the world in a way that just doesn't look much more than buying a fruity beverage. Of course, whether you can indeed change the world through non-adversarial actions like this is very much an open question, but it's certainly worth a try.
...having been replaced by "social networking cards," now available at Staples for $4.99 for 50. It cracked me up to see in-store advertising for a tool meant to assist your family and friends in keeping track of the myriad places you're active online -- but it's a sign of the times, I guess.
(There might be some spoilers in this post about "Wall-E," so if you absolutely don't want to know anything about the movie before having seen it, look away now!)
So, every since we saw "Wall-E" on Saturday night, I've been trying to puzzle out just what the politics of this little animated wonder are. Now, don't going trying to tell me that this ain't a political movie. It plum hits you over the head with politics, but it's chaotic enough that you can't really make out where the blows are coming from. Now, some conservatives, thus confused have lashed out against the movie -- see, for example, the remarks from National Review Online's Greg Pollowitz and Shannen Coffin. But let's take a pause and review what happened in the film. The earth is more or less uninhabitable, and while I'm a little unclear on the details because we got to the drive-in late, Wikipedia seems to indicate that the the destruction is the result of the exploitation of the planet's natural resources. Humans, shunted on to giant cruise-ship like spaceships, grow so fat and blobish from mindless consumption that the are unable to form meaningful interpersonal relationships. Eventually a battle arises over whether humans should reclaim and reseed the earth they once knew.
Now darn it all if that doesn't sound like this great blog I've been reading -- Zack Exley's Revolution in Jesusland. Zack's been reporting on the growing evangelical movement in the U.S. that's rooted in some fairly rabid anti-consumerism and pro-environmentalism. So I think I've cracked it -- Wall-E is an evangelical Christian film. Consider yourself warned. (Photo thx themarina)
UPDATE: Umm, I was pretty much kidding with this post, about how "Wall-E" has Christian connotations, but gadzooks -- I just stumbled across a mention of how the two human characters who put down their super-sized sodas and form a human connection are named "Mary" and "John." Like, in the Bible? I'm starting to think I might actually be on to something.
I can't take credit for this one. My s.o. Jane took snapped it on her iPhone on her way to class this morning. We've since looked it up and it's indeed true -- people are still getting home deliveries of seltzer in these parts. (See the first story at that link, "Shlepping Seltzer.") I'm guessing that it's just that with so many New Yorkers, there are niche markets for quite a few things that might not have survived elsewhere. As I wrote over on trooantroo, my newish Brooklyn photo blog, it's stuff like a soda-seltzer-beer home delivery truck or the knife-sharpening truck that also rolls through the neighborhood that makes me love living here. As I put it over there, it's "the frequency with which you walk down the street and say to yourself, 'now, what in the the hell is that?'" Makes even walking to the subway a trip. (Photo credit Jane Andersen)
[A] seminal paper from the New England Journal of Medicine in 1991 said that if a study was covered by The New York Times it was significantly more likely to be cited by other academic papers.
I'm going to go off on a bit of a tangent on reputation here, inspired by the idea that sober-minded scientists are attaching status to what they read in the paper. (I'm curious though, about how they proved that the more cited papers weren't just more useful studies. But I digress...) Let me start by saying this: one of the many life lessons I should have learned at 20 that I'm finally coming around to at 30ish is that validation from external sources really does drive one's reputation, and that seeing someone's work or name referenced gives a certain reassurance that this here is a person that one can safely cite/quote/namedrop-in-conversation without exposing oneself to too much risk.
Now, it's no big surprise that a mention in the Gray Lady is going to give your credibility a boost. Having the New York Times calls you a "well-regarded Democratic strategist" goes a long way towards making you a well-regarded Democratic strategist. From that point forward, it's like the old saying about safe choices: nobody gets fired for buying IBM. If you've been mentioned in the New York Times, then more many intents and purposes, you're IBM in the minds of many.
Again, none of what I've said if particularly mind-blowing, but what I think might be surprising, if we stop to look at it, is how today this model for the creation of reputation extends so far beyond major publications like the Times, and how validation comes from all sorts of places and all sorts of ways online. I know that just for my own part, seeing a mention of someone -- on blogs I read, whether big or small; on Twitter streams of people I know or admire -- can serve as a tremendous validator of reputation and standing of that person in my own mind.
While I'm not sure it's fair to characterize it as a major failing, I know I'm guilty of taking this idea of validation too far. If a friend has mentioned or blogged about or Twittered with a particular person I don't know all that well, and I'm writing up something quickly for a blog post or essay, I'm very likely to rely upon that third-party validation of that person (and even that third-party description of that that person does, which often, I think it's fair to say, some's straight from the horse's own mouth.)
To take it one step further, if you're career-minded, that reputation gets crafted in this way might makes networking maybe even more important than it has been in the past. If my network has validated you, then me relying upon you to link to or mention or cite is a reduced-risk proposition. I'm probably not going to be humiliated by that decision. But if my network has never heard of you, then it requires more discipline on my part to vet you and come to my own, potentially risky, conclusion. As a fair-minded grown-up (and especially someone engaging in acts of journalism), I have a responsibility to make the effort. But there's no doubt that when time is tight it's easy to fall back on buying IBM.
