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Archives for July 2003

Connect those stories, number two

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It’s time to play “connect the story” — the game where we show the relationship between seemingly disconnected news stories — again, as we recently did regarding the California energy and budget crises.

There isn’t much more to say about the flap over President Bush’s State of the Union use of fraudulent evidence regarding Iraq’s nuclear program. We know that an administration desperate to make a case for war seized upon material that it had been repeatedly warned was suspect or (as is actually the case) outright forged and presented it to the American public. That impeachment hearings aren’t already being held is just another sign of the deep dysfunctionality of our political system — in which partisan operatives in Congress can drum up an impeachment vote when a president lies about his sex life, but when a president lies about the gravest matters of war and peace, it’s not even considered worth an investigation.

What is interesting here is that this story is playing out at precisely the same time the nation may be slowly coming to the belated realization that things really aren’t going so well in the president’s open-ended, no-clearly-defined-goals “war on terrorism.” Our principal foe, Osama bin Laden, remains on the loose, and his organization continues to operate in a region sandwiched between one nation that we conquered and one that is nominally our ally. His principal ally, Mullah Omar, is also on the loose. The leader of the other nation we’ve recently invaded, Saddam Hussein, is also on the loose. Is there a pattern here? Why can’t we find these guys?

This is, of course, an intelligence failure — and that’s where these two stories intersect. At the very same time that the Bush administration was corrupting our intelligence agencies by demanding that they produce the evidence for an already decided-upon war, it needed to rely upon them to locate its foes. I’m not an intelligence insider and I don’t know whether U.S. intelligence’s failure to locate Osama et al. is a function of incompetence, demoralization, structural weakness (reliance on technical means rather than people who speak the language, for example) or other factors.

But it’s obvious that the bogus Iraq/Niger nuclear connection story is a sign of just how derailed, corrupted and ineffectual the U.S.intelligence effort has become. If you’re busy squabbling over whether to offer fabricated evidence for a trumped-up war, you have that much less time to do your real job.

Matters of public record

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There’s a fascinating dispute in the blogosphere right now that is worth talking about beyond the emotions of the personalities involved, because it touches on a substantive issue: What is the public record of the Web and of blogs?

Dave Winer writes Scripting News, has developed some key blogging software tools (including Radio Userland, which I use for this blog and which Salon Blogs uses), and is now a fellow at Harvard Law’s Berkman Center. Scripting News is a widely read and influential blog — partly because Dave’s been at it a really long time, partly because he updates it a lot, but mostly, I think, because he is adept at letting the full span of his professional and personal worlds spill out into his blogging. Dave’s life really is an open book, and in demonstrating how to do that he has contributed enormously to all of our understanding of what we do here on the Web.

Dave and a number of other high-profile software developers have recently been engaged in a very public and (to outsiders) arcane dispute over the future of RSS, the protocol most blogs use to syndicate their content. I’m not going to weigh in on that issue, partly because I have neither the expertise nor the time to figure out exactly what I think but mostly because I don’t wish to add to the noise.

Meanwhile, however — whether as a result of that dispute or for other reasons, I don’t know — Mark Pilgrim, who has a highly regarded site that focuses on Web design issues, has begun a site called “Winer Watcher,” subtitled, “What did Dave edit today?” He’s written a script that grabs Scripting News every five minutes, and he’s posting the revisions that Dave makes to his blogs, so that you can see successive versions of Dave’s posts. Dave has asked Mark to stop, and as far as I can see, as I write this, Mark has refused.

The whole thing is now turning to the question of whether Mark is using too much of Dave’s bandwidth, and whether Mark’s republishing of Dave’s writing is fair use or not, but neither of these questions is what interests me here.

To me, this disagreement highlights one of the continuing, unresolved questions about Web publishing. We know that a Web page is simply a file on a server, and that files are totally mutable. The only thing that keeps something “published” on the Web once it is first published is the publisher’s continued choice to leave the file, unchanged, on his server. Some people view their sites as the bits-and-pixels equivalent to paper publishing, and try to keep as fixed a record as they can of how pages looked and read at the moment they were first published (at Salon we maintain an archive server that allows you to find the original, often creative designs of our earlier issues). Other people view their sites as the Webly equivalent of live improv — the site is an everchanging thing; you can’t step in the same river twice (yes Google has a cache, but it expires; and yes, there’s the Internet Archive, but it doesn’t scrape any site every five minutes!).

As a journalistic enterprise, at Salon we’ve always understood that there is a temptation to futz with what you’ve published, particularly to cover your tracks if you’ve goofed. We’ve tried to resist this temptation; if we make a tiny error that does not bear on the substance of an article (misspell a word or a name) we will simply correct it; but if we fix a substantive error after a story has been published, we will post a correction notice, note that the story has been corrected on the story itself, and link the story to the correction notice.

But Salon is a newsroom: we edit everything we publish and we behave like a journalistic organization. A personal blog is another kind of beast. There is no editor. There is — at least as blogging is most widely practiced today — mostly opinion, not fact. Corrections are less of an issue.

As I understand the way Dave Winer blogs, he posts constantly through the day and revises quite a bit; by the end of the day he’s finished the product, it gets sent out to those who receive it by e-mail, and that’s that. So he’s exposing his editing process to his readers, by choice. I don’t begrudge him this method of working.

In traditional journalism, we produce a piece of writing, get it edited, assure ourselves that it’s ready to be published, and then we release it to the world. Part of what makes blogging different is that it’s more impulsive, less polished, less filtered. This is fundamentally a good thing. But as a result it’s only natural that some bloggers may feel a desire to keep re-editing their stuff even after it’s live.

In my blog, I prefer to post and then, if I need to fix something, fix it by posting a new item making reference to the old one, rather than by outright revisions. But my style of working has been shaped by 20 years in newsrooms. Dave has a different modus operandi; he’s open about it, and it seems to work for him.

I’m not sure why we’re supposed to be upset by the revisions that the “Winer Watcher” exposes. So what if Winer sometimes makes a statement that he later chooses to retract? This isn’t presidential diplomacy. Yes, blogs are creating a public record, but they are also highly personal records. And we’re each going to approach the recording process in our own way.

If a blogger made a practice of going back deep into his archives and messing around with old posts, I’d consider that a shame — not because he’d somehow betrayed his public but because he was in a sense betraying himself. But if Dave Winer wants to view each day’s Weblog posts as works-in-progress for the day, it seems like a reasonable practice, and one that doesn’t deserve to be pursued with an obsessive eye.

Unbrand me, you cad!

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As a consumer who hates the commercialization of public space, the creeping of logos onto our clothing, the placement of products in our entertainment and the corporatization of our imaginations, I assume I am just the sort of person whom “Unbrand America” is aimed at. This campaign — which emanates from Adbusters — seems to involve the placing of a big black blotch on ads and logos everywhere (there’s a gallery of examples here).

The Web site offers this explanatory text:

  In the coming months a black spot will pop up everywhere . . . on store windows and newspaper boxes, on gas pumps and supermarket shelves. Open a magazine or newspaper – it’s there. It’s on TV. It stains the logos and smears the nerve centers of the world’s biggest, dirtiest corporations. This is the mark of the people who don’t approve of Bush’s plan to control the world, who don’t want countries “liberated” without UN backing, who can’t stand anymore neo-con bravado shoved down their throats.

But there’s a problem here. The idea is to oppose mindless Pavlovian responses to ultrasimplified graphical logo representations of objects of consumerist desire, right? So why is the campaign based around … an ultrasimplified graphical logo representation of opposition to consumerism? Does Adbusters really think the answer to the logo-fication of the world is to introduce a logo for the anti-logo-ites? Why would one want to protest the omnipresence of advertising campaigns by, in essence, creating a new advertising campaign? Why should we “unbrand America” by creating a new anti-brand brand?

If you oppose mindless Pavlovian responses, you manifest that opposition by thinking, and perhaps acting on that thinking — not by trying to counter mindlessness of a corporate species with mindlessness of a leftist species.

Some friends

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I met Scott “Understanding Comics” McCloud eight years ago (at the first Digital Storytelling Fest in 1995) and have been following his work with enthusiasm from a distance ever since. The concept of “micropayments” (small-amount payments directly from readers to content creators) was very much in the air then. McCloud now has a real-live micropayment-supported product out there: It’s a comic called “The Right Number,” which he’s publishing in three installments. Each installment costs 25 cents to read; you have to put a minimum of $3 into a Paypal-like account run by BitPass to get started.

I just paid my two bits and read the comic — a noirish (or, given its palette and ever-so-slightly adult nature, I should say “bleuish”) tale about “math, sex, obsession and phone numbers.” I found it more than engaging enough to bring me back for parts II and III, which is more than I can say about most Hollywood products that demand macropayments.

Meanwhile, if you’re here in the Bay Area and haven’t already heard the buzz, Josh Kornbluth has a great new solo show called “Love & Taxes” at the Magic Theatre, and it’s just been extended to early August. The show uses a comic saga of Josh’s deepening debts stemming from a failure to file his tax returns to make some deeper points about the purpose and value of the tax system — points that are hugely important at this moment in history, when the very notion of using public levies to support public goods is under assault by the president himself. At 4:30 on Sundays, after the matinee performance, Josh is also hosting free public forums called “Tax Talkbacks” with experts (this coming Sunday, New York Times tax-beat reporter David Cay Johnston is the guest).

If you don’t trust my enthusiasm — yes, Josh and I are old pals — you can check out the enthusiasm of other critics who aren’t friends with him.

Of mouse and men

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Definitely, the highlight of my day at ILaw (last Wednesday — I could only get out of the office one day!) was Lawrence Lessig’s talk on public domain vs. copyright. I’d heard or read bits and pieces of this before, but here, presented in one piece and delivered with considerable passion in roving-law-professor style, it acquired weight and power — and made we want to spread the word. So here are some impressionistic notes and comments on his talk.

The good and the broken

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Last night I gave my digital storytelling talk at BayCHI and had a great time.

I shared the bill with Mark Hurst of Creative Good and Good Experience, and enjoyed hearing his spiel about the importance of thinking strategically about design and user experience — stepping back from the details of button placement and link colors and so forth and asking basic questions about what your goals are, what your relationship with the user is, and whether your design helps or hurts. The message was very pertinent to the issues we wrestle with every day here at Salon, as we try to keep our “buy a subscription or get a free day pass” model clear and easy to understand.

Mark runs a mailing list, a conference, and — most recently — has started a Web site called thisisbroken.com, for which he’s asking people to send in photos of things they think are broken. It’s interesting, sometimes funny stuff.

I’m tempted to send in a picture of the White House, but I think he’s hoping to keep it a forum for thinking about design, not making satirical points about politics…

Semi snooties

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My kids love a book called “Big Truck and Little Truck,” in which a little pickup tries to make his way through the big world. On one page, plucky Little Truck encounters what the book describes as “snooty semis.”

Matthew and Jack often have near-total recall of the phrases in their bedtime books, but they somehow transposed “snooty semis” into “semi snooties.” The word was too wonderful to correct at first, and over time I have come to find it of some use.

“Semi-snooty,” for instance, is now the word that pops into my brain when the word “semiotic” is uttered within my earshot. Many are the crimes against common sense that have been committed in this word’s name. But last week at the Stanford/Harvard ILaw seminar Terry Fisher used it in a context that actually made sense to me.

The phrase he used was “semiotic democracy,” a term that apparently has been kicking around academe for some time but that I have not encountered before. Fisher described a “concentration of the power of meaning making” as a corollary to the concentration of media ownership and the prevalence of broadcast media technology. So if “political democracy” describes a system in which everyone gets to participate in the exercise of political power, “semiotic democracy” describes a system in which everyone gets to participate in the creation of cultural meaning.

Which sounds like a pretty great ideal to me. However far we may be from ever achieving it, it’s a useful yardstick, something new to weigh in the equation of social value. And it is exactly what has attracted me over the years to the phenomenon of digital storytelling. Which leads me to…

On the vine

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I’m opening the doors today on a new project — something I’m doing on the side, not affiliated with Salon — called Storyvine. It’s a themed blog, focusing on digital storytelling — the description is “the digital storytelling grapevine.” Here’s the mission statement: “I’ve got two goals for this blog: First, by providing timely news and links I hope to provide a useful service to the existing community that has formed around the idea of digital storytelling over the last decade or so, since the first Digital Storytelling Festival in Crested Butte, Colorado, in 1995. Second, I hope to help people who are curious about this phenomenon get a clearer handle on what it is, and where to find out more.”

I intend to update it as regularly as there’s news, information, links or thoughts that are of interest to the people who are interested in this subject. Come visit.

Raise money, buy TV ads, repeat

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The latest trend in political coverage seems to be ranking the candidates based on how much money they’ve raised.

Now, I will not pretend for a second that this information isn’t vitally important to the outcome of a campaign. It is a story, no question. But more and more it seems to be treated as the story: The candidate with a lot of money is the candidate best positioned to get even more money. The candidate with even more money is in the best position to pay for the kind of advertising that will win votes. The ability to raise money is the ability to get elected. Fundraising becomes a proxy for political skill, positions on issues, get-out-the-vote passion.

Horse-race handicapping has always been the curse of political reporting, but this is a new meta-level of horse-race reporting that makes the head spin. It’s similar to what’s happened in movie coverage, where the old-fashioned opening-day question of “how good is it?” has long since been eclipsed by the meta-question of “how much did it gross on opening weekend?”

It’s bad enough that this focus crowds out coverage of the actual distinctions among the candidates as leaders, legislators and thinkers. It’s worse when you force yourself to face squarely the grotesque fact that nearly all the money that’s raised goes to TV advertising; in other words, it gets put directly in the pockets of the media corporations who pay for coverage of presidential elections — and whose coverage, more and more, is dominated by fundraising tallies.

The next time you hear a TV newsperson start telling you something like “such-and-such a candidate has raised nearly $8 million this quarter…” you can finish his sentence for him: “so that next quarter the candidate can hand it over to my bosses and help us meet our profit forecast!”

There is no conspiracy here, just the iron logic of a simple marketplace that has locked in most of the participants. There may be no way out, says the pessimist in me. But if there is, then the hope lies with unorthodox efforts like those the Dean campaign is making in its online organizing.

For now, ironically, the main value in such organizing is to enable an outsider underdog like Dean to tap some new sources of money so he can pay for the same old TV advertising everyone else is going to use. But maybe, just maybe, in the long run, the ability to build a grassroots campaign via the Net will help birth a candidate who is completely unbeholden to the existing cash/media nexus — and who can help move us forward toward a democracy where dollars don’t trump votes.

Chair-ity

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I had the pleasure of spending yesterday ensconced at Stanford Law School at the Internet Law seminar sponsored by Harvard Law’s Berkman Center and Stanford’s Center for Internet Law. The day was devoted to enlightening, challenging discussions of the issues around digital content, and particularly, digital music, and I’ll say something about that in a second.

But first, the chairs. The entire lecture hall at Stanford was equipped with Aeron chairs! Aeron — meshy, black, cool. Comfortable. Expensive.

Back in the dotcom boom days, more than one careless reporter referred, Jayson-Blair-like, to Salon’s luxurious Aeron-bedecked offices. The trouble was, Salon has never ever had a single Aeron chair. So I’m a little sensitive on the subject. And floored to find them in a university lecture hall. But then I guess Stanford isn’t any old university. And there are a lot of liquidated Aeron chairs kicking around the Valley these days.

[I was going to post some substantive comments next, but unfortunately, I left my notes from the day on my laptop, and I left my laptop home today… So I’ll have to post my thoughts over the weekend.]