Today we learned that Windows Vista has slipped, again, and that the new Microsoft operating system won’t be out till January 2007 — despite long-held promises of a 2006 release.

Every new edition of Windows has been late, so, you know, this is predictable news — on the order of “President Bush Declares He Will Stay The Course In Iraq.”

What I found interesting was the 2006-model way in which I discovered this news today. I first found out on Digg, the new-model tech-news aggregator that is rapidly replacing Slashdot on many geek bookmark lists. When I checked out Digg a little before 5 p.m. Pacific Time, the top story, or close to it, was a link to a trade publication’s short piece on the news. It took a couple more hours for the story to show up on Slashdot, which has its own editors picking stories, unlike Digg, which puts all its users to work.

And now, a couple more hours later, around 9 p.m. in California, we can read the canonical big-media piece in the New York Times. It’s fine, and it provides a broader perspective than the trades, as it should.

But once you’ve got the outline of the event clear, it’s far less interesting to hear the excuses of the Microsoft brass, as recited on conference call to the pros, than to read the breast-beating disgust of the anonymous Microsoft employee who blogs under the sobriquet MiniMicrosoft: “Vista 2007. Fire the leadership now!” (I don’t even read MiniMicrosoft regularly, but Dave Winer pointed to him, so I found him.)

This is just one little sequence relating to one little news event, but it’s illuminating. As tech news goes today, so ultimately will go the rest of the news. It’s not the death of newspapers or pro journalism, but it’s further evidence that the pros face an extremely tough challenge: they’re rarely going to be first, so they’d damn well better be good. But it’s hard to hire enough good people to be good at everything; a newsroom has only so many seats, and the Web’s supply of amateur experts, anonymous insiders and random kibitzers with an occasional insight is limitless. The pros had better prepare to be outgunned.

This competition will force journalists to stop being lazy and to find and reconnect with what is unique about their work, now that so much of what they used to do is being done for free, and often well, by amateurs. The best response, it seems to me, is what we have tried to do over the years at Salon: put more energy and resources and smart people into real investigative journalism, to find stories that just aren’t being covered elsewhere, and that are less likely to be produced by lone bloggers.

The next phase of the game beyond that, which we’re only beginning to figure out — but then so is everyone else — involves connecting that tradition of professional investigative journalism with the new dynamic of distributed information that the Net creates.

Mike Arrington is the lawyer-turned-blogger-and-entrepreneur whose TechCrunch has become the Web site of choice for people attempting to keep up with the cornucopia of startup companies pouring onto the Internet under the Web 2.0 banner.

The amazing thing to me about Arrington is this: He somehow keeps the names of these companies straight.

A post a little while back, for instance, contains this sentence:

“Noam Lovinsky is the founder of Skobee, a new service to help people plan events. They seem to be a direct competitor to Renkoo.”

Skobee? Renkoo? Is Mr. Mxyzptlk in the house?

Joyent, Planzo, Trumba, Rojo,
Meebo, Goowy, Megite, Newroo –
Chuquet, Squidoo, Zingee, Stickam?
Favoor, Zazzle, Kiko, Simpy!

Chant them urgently, and you might find yourself conjuring a Morgul spell. [All names verbatim from the last couple months of TechCrunch.]

I remember when Yahoo launched (yes, I’m becoming a Net codger), thinking, “Boy, that’s an odd name to try to build a company around.” What I saw over the ensuing years was that it doesn’t much matter what you name a company as long as the brand is strong enough — people will just project the qualities they associate with you onto the name.

For that to work, however, you need users — a lot of users — so that you can fill the random syllables with meaning. That’s much harder in today’s overpopulated Web 2.0 scrum, full of hard-to-distinguish competitors featuring similar two-syllable names, curvy cornered designs, and rounded fonts.

I realize that many of these names are chosen out of desperation, since all domain names that actually communicate meaning have been squatted upon by speculators. And if your business is really all about adding a feature or two to the Great Big Web Application In the Sky (or, I guess one should say, Cloud), then your end-game plan is to be acquired by some large company that already has a meaningful brand and intends to toss yours in the garbage anyway — so why waste too much thought on your name?

Still, Web 2.0 sometimes seems in imminent danger of collapsing in a heap of cutesiness, obscurity and alphabetical anarchy.

UPDATE: I had somehow missed this brilliant quiz, “Web 2.0 or Star Wars Character?” [Thanks to Oscar for the tip, in comments]

In this week marking the third anniversary of the start of George Bush’s deceptively justified and incompetently waged war in Iraq, many pundits, commentators and bloggers are looking back. The Web lets us see who said what, when pretty easily. (See, for instance, Daniel Radosh’s devastating review of the remarkable waffling of David Brooks.)

I checked my own archives and found these two posts, which remain, I think, accurate, defensible and consistent with everything that’s happened since. I don’t claim any great clairvoyance; the insight I provided mostly came from a Thomas Powers radio interview. I’d certainly be happier for the U.S., Iraq and the world if my gloom had proven unwarranted.

But it was the president’s job to look ahead and plan for different outcomes. His failures will haunt us and our children in the form of generations-spanning unpaid bills; the physical and psychic scars to hosts of returning American warfighters; festering anger towards the U.S. among throngs of the people we bunglingly liberated; the bright new anti-American banner we have handed our enemies in the war on the 9/11 perpetrators; and of course the graves of thousands of Americans and untold numbers of Iraqis. Even the best-case outcomes from here on in Iraq, unlikely as they are, cannot undo this volume of damage.

I also found this post, a week later:

I note that this attitude — with a slight shift in wording from “helping Saddam” to “helping the insurgents” or “helping the terrorists” — has continued in the three years since, during which anyone who has chosen to offer a sober perspective on the horrors and disasters of a misbegotten war has been accused by the administration and its henchpeople of betraying the troops and comforting the enemy.

It’s that deep engagement with reality — that willingness to confront the world as we find it, not as we wish it — that has provided us with so much success in post-Saddam Iraq. </sarcasm>

Somehow I missed the fact that this humble blog made CNet’s “Top 100″ list some time ago, in the “Tech Business” category. Thanks, CNet! I’ll try to live up to the billing. I’ve generally adopted the “blog is a mirror of the blogger” philosophy here; rather than trying to niche-ify the blog as a product (everything you always wanted to know about ROUTERS!), which is certainly a good business strategy, I’ve allowed the blog to reflect my own interests across tech, politics and culture. I can fairly well guarantee you won’t find much sports or celebrity news here — but beyond that, almost anything goes.

I have some new ideas and approaches to the blog that I intend to start experimenting with when work on my book, Dreaming in Code, is done. The handful of you who have been paying attention may recall that I completed a first draft of my manuscript before the holidays. Well, we’re still in the middle of editing, and making progress. I hope to be done soon, and when we are, I’ll be posting a lot more about the book and related subjects (basically, software development and its discontents). For those of you who’ve inquired in e-mail, wondering as to my health, or the health of the project: sorry for the slowness. Publishing, like software, has its own rhythms.

In other news on the “self” front, I am proud to see this site’s homely name over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation on a short list of blogs that helped that group with a membership drive last November. It’s fine company to be in. (And if you didn’t join back then, you can still join now.)

I attended a very strange panel talk tonight at the Berkeley CyberSalon on the topic of elitism in media and blogging. Veteran New York Times tech reporter John Markoff was on the panel, along with Steve Gillmor; two of the founders of BlogHer, Lisa Stone and Jory Des Jardins; and Joshua Greenbaum, whose introduction I couldn’t make out (but this seems to be him: programmer, tech trade journalist and enterprise-software consultant).

From the opening question to the panelists — “Is big media elitist?” — moderator Andrew Keen made his own agenda clear. Keen is a podcaster and blogger who has made a stir recently by polemicizing against Web 2.0’s participatory ideal; he sees it as a culture-destroying Marxist delusion. And I’m afraid his determination to tar the blogosphere as a force for anarchy and narcissism warped the evening, turning back the clock on the entire conversation about blogging and journalism that so many thoughtful people — including many in the room tonight — have been advancing for years.

Keen had allies, including Greenbaum, who, as far as I could tell, seemed mostly concerned about the way blogs and the Net have begun to undermine the business model of print journalism. Next to Keen and Greenbaum, Markoff’s quiet skepticism about aspects of the blog-triumphalist position seemed respectful and valuable. Meanwhile, Stone and Des Jardins, with the help of many in the audience, took the blogosphere’s side, arguing the value of letting new voices be heard.

To Keen, that sort of talk is part of a “cult of creative self-realization.” “The purpose of our media and culture industries,” he writes, “is to discover, nurture, and reward elite talent”; blogging opens the door to too many mediocre voices. When he tried to apply this critique tonight, Des Jardins shot it down with a single line that exposed its irrelevance to the conversation: “The cream also rises in the blogosphere.”

“What is the value in sharing experiences?” Keen asked at one point, with a touch of disdain in his voice — as if he wanted to say to the entire universe of millions of bloggers, “I grow weary of your scribblings.” My jaw dropped. Isn’t “sharing experiences” the root of literature, the heart of conversation, a primal impulse of our humanity? Who would sneer at it?

At the heart of Keen’s complaint and others like it is an outmoded habit of thought: an assumption that every blogger seeks and might be owed the same mass-scale readership that old-fashioned media have always commanded. But it just doesn’t work that way. Publishing is no longer a scarce resource (as Tim Bishop well put it). The blogger who is telling the story of her final exam or his fraying marriage or her trouble with her two-year old? None of them cares whether Keen reads them, and they certainly don’t expect him to. Their “shared experiences” don’t diminish the opportunities for the kind of “expert journalism” that Keen values. He can keep patronizing the “elite talents.” I will, too — I want to read John Markoff and bloggers.

A year-and-a-half ago I led a discussion at BloggerCon III about blogging and journalism. I started with the assumption that the “War between Bloggers and Journalists” was over; we were are all — however different our delivery mechanisms and business models — in the same boat, searching for information and voices we can trust, trying to inform and entertain and move the people who read our work, whether it is on paper or screen, whether we’re paid or not, whether we’re read by ten or ten million.

At the end of tonight’s event, Mary Hodder, who was sitting in the row in front of me, turned and asked, in a tone of disbelief,
“Did we just sit through another ‘Bloggers vs. Journalists’ panel?” Somehow, we had.

I’d rather have seen the group take up the provocative challenge from Markoff, who started the evening wondering why the same era that has seen the vast increase in online self-expression has also seen such a vast concentration of wealth. “What’s the relation between everyone having a voice in society and the fact that people don’t participate in the society?,” he asked. Could the blogosphere be a gigantic instance of Herbert Marcuse’s “repressive tolerance”?

Me, I doubt it. But it’s a far more intriguing and sophisticated critique of bloggers than just sniffing that they’re amateurish and badly written and beneath our notice — but, whoops!, they’re also driving our culture to hell in a handbasket.

Update:More from Tim Bishop and Steve Gillmor.

Other stuff at ETech that was interesting:

Brian Dear of EVDB and Eventful, a site for posting and finding event information, introduced Eventful Demand, which allows people to band together and ask for “speakers” — musical performers, authors, anyone who might have a fan base or interested crowd — to come make an appearance, put on a show, give a talk in their area. Dear hopes that creating a common space for this sort of demand-side networking will reduce the reliance on middlemen and allow artists and other “speakers” to connect directly with their audiences. For instance, a band that had a good number of people asking for an appearance in their town could then take that info to a club as evidence of ticket-sales draw — or, more ambitiously, the “demanders” could organize the event themselves. You’ve heard of the “wisdom of crowds”; this is more like the “wishlist of crowds.” At the moment, the hottest “Demand” on Eventful is for “The impeachment of George W. Bush - Washington metro area.” Other than that, an awful lot of people seem to want Wil Wheaton to come to their towns.

Derek Powazek provided an update of the principles he expounded five years ago in his book Design for Community. “Web 1.0″-style communities, were, he said “company towns.” As examples, he included Salon’s Table Talk, which I think is reasonable; his own Fray.com similarly qualifies. In the “Web 2.0″ world, he says, we’re more like individual homesteaders, and that gives us potentially much more power and control. He’s right, but I think he may, just a little bit, underplay the downside: once you own the house, you’re stuck dealing with the insurance and taxes, the leaks, the grafitti and the natural disasters. Still, given the choice, most people — at least most Americans — seem to prefer the homeowner model. Derek’s slides are here.

Other interesting talks at Etech about community, much-blogged elsewhere, included Clay Shirky’s chronicle of “patterns” in online moderation, “Shut Up! No, You Shut Up!” (summary here). Shirky has set up a wiki to record these patterns, modeled on Ward Cunningham’s original Pattern Language wiki for software developers.

Meanwhile, Danah Boyd offered a sociological perspective on recent models of successful communities — Craigslist, Flickr and Myspace. My decade at Salon certainly made this passage ring true:

I’ve got some random loose end posts from my time at last week’s ETech conference that I really should post before they get any older. Here’s one…

Seth Goldstein of Root.net introduced his company’s Vaults product, which aims to give individual consumers a place to bank their “attention data.” Today you can open a “vault” for free and stash your Amazon purchase history and your general clickstream data (derived from a browser plug-in); tomorrow, presumably, much more. Goldstein talked about “PPAs” (”promises to pay attention”) and “attention bonds” and drew a comparison with the way the mortgage industry’s adoption of mortgage bonds helped make housing more affordable.

Well, everyone needs a place to live; what problem is Root aiming to solve? The idea seems to be: Companies are already collecting and claiming large amounts of information about our financial lives and online behavior. That’s data that we ought, by rights, to control — and if it’s going to be exploited commercially, we should get our slice.

Fair enough. But the Root Vaults idea applies a Wall Street mentality to the “attention economy” concept, and when Goldstein unveiled the Vault home screen before the ETech crowd, it resembled nothing so much as a sort of Bloomberg screen for the mind. There’s something potentially dismal about this — are we going to convert every last remnant and scrap of our earthly existence into the margin-eking terms of financial markets?

On the one hand, I can imagine Root Vaults as offering a nifty way for us all to do what Howard Rheingold long ago advocated — pay attention to where we’re paying attention. On the other hand, I’m wary of letting the bond-trading worldview colonize my choices of entertainment and edification. I’m not looking to become the CEO of my own mind, fiddling with spreadsheet optimizations of my own personal satisfaction.

I mentioned this reaction to Goldstein, and he readily admitted that clickstream data has its limits: “You gotta start somewhere. Is it an accurate representation of a person? No. You don’t want to reduce people to data on a Bloomberg dashboard. But this is a natural resource that people are already producing.”

Tuesday here at Etech began with Ray Ozzie, once of Groove and now of Microsoft, demoing the prototype for an absurdly simple yet marvelously useful little innovation: the ability to cut and paste events, using the Windows clipboard, such that they move from application to application (and Web app to Web app) with their structure and metadata intact. It’s a little thing, in one sense — but just the sort of little thing that stands in the way of the Web-based information realm being fully useful. That Microsoft is helping lead this change rather than fighting it to the last byte is remarkable. That Ozzie did his demo using Firefox was simply gracious. (He writes in detail about the project on his blog.)

Jeff Han showed his research into “multi-touch interaction” — giant touch-screens that respond to complex commands delivered via more than one point of touch. The interface hardly seemed as intuitive as Han promised (two fingers zooms in — or is it out?), and some of the demo resembled the manipulation of a virtual lava lamp. But when Han turned his interface into a giant light-table and showed how perfectly it was suited for the organization of large numbers of photos — and videos! — the value of the innovation became immediately apparent.

The ostensible theme of the conference this year is “The Attention Economy,” but most speakers barely addressed it. One notable exception was Linda Stone, the former Microsoft and Apple exec who coined the phrase “continuous partial attention” back in 1998 and unpacked the term for us a bit here. (There are good notes from Nat Torkington on a similar talk she gave at Supernova last year.) She distinguished multitasking — where you’re switching between discrete goal-oriented processes — from the more diffuse and corrosive continuous partial attention, in which we are constantly “scanning for opportunities, optimizing for the best opportunity,” paying half a mind to what’s in front of us and keeping our peripheral vision peeled in hope of spotting something better. Stone says we’re driven by CPA out of a “desire to be a live node on the network,” to stay connected and to feel validated that we fit into a social web.

Stone placed CPA in a social-history timeline that falls into 20-year spans: a period from 1965 to 1985 in which we placed highest value on self-expression, creativity and personal productivity; then a period from 1985 to 2005 in which the network became paramount and we valued communication the most. I found this explanation so generalized as to be almost useless — “We played Battleship in the ’70s, we played Diplomacy in the ’90s,” she declared, but wait a minute, I played Diplomacy in the ’70s, and so did all my friends!

Nonetheless, Stone is onto something important here. Her description of our “overwhelmed, overstimulated and underfulfilled” technological existence wasn’t exactly what the technology-besotted ETech crowd wanted to hear, but they needed to hear it. Still, as I looked around at a sea of heads buried in laptops, sucking down the wi-fi, fingers darting to catch the latest email or Technorati result, I wondered how many had given Stone the attention she deserved.

I loved the two Bloggercons I participated in, and I share the enthusiasm expressed by Dave Winer and the BarCamp people and the MashupCamp people for the whole “unconference” idea — the notion that great gatherings can happen when you put great people together in rooms without programming lots of speeches and panels and product demos.

Still, I’m not ready to give up on the occasional old-fashioned lecture, under the right circumstances, and there are some people in whose presence I will gladly say, “I am an audience member — you talk, I’ll shut up.” Bruce Sterling is one of them. He spoke tonight here at Etech.

I haven’t heard Sterling in several years, and I’d forgotten his peculiar cadence — a kind of incantatory precision that you first mistake for superciliousness and then realize, no, wait, those pauses and touches of drawl aren’t affectation, he’s just savoring those words, he loves them, he doesn’t want to say goodbye to them quite yet.

Sterling’s ostensible subject was “The Internet of Things,” and he talked a bit about the stuff he’s been talking about for some time now: spimes, physical objects trackable in space and time, material things that are — like items on today’s Web — linkable, rankable, sortable and searchable. It’s a fascinating topic, even the second or third time around; but the heart of tonight’s talk was a series of observations on language and technology.

“Computer,” Sterling argued, was simply an awful name for these machines that arrived in the middle of last century. “Computer” led us straight to “artificial intelligence,” down the dead-end street that had us thinking the machines could become smart — that they were “thinking machines.” We should have picked a word more like what the French chose, “Ordinateur,” suggesting that the devices, uh, ordinate things. They are card shuffling tools. They do what we see the Google-ized Web doing so well today — link, rank, sort and search. “I think we could have done better words,” Sterling said — and if we had, we might have gotten Google 20 years sooner.

He went on to parse some Web 2.0-speak, first decoding Tim O’Reilly’s definition of the phrase, then dissecting scholar Alan Liu’s critique of the phenomenon, at every turn reminding this crowd of “alpha geeks” that the labels they pick for their innovations really do make a difference.

“You don’t want to freeze your language too early,” Sterling advised — that stops creativity in its tracks. Hype, he suggested, is underrated: “Hype is a system-call on your attention.” Buying into it blindly is a disaster, of course, but “if you soberly track its development, hype is revealing…. In politics, the opposite of hype is the truth, but in technology, the opposite of hype is argot, jargon” — language that has no traction in the real world. And “if no one is dismissing you as hype, you are not being loud enough.”

Sterling cited a recent interview with Adam Greenfield, the author of a new book called Everyware that’s also about a version of “the Internet of Things.” In the interview, Greenfield said he coined the term “Everyware” to describe his take on the concept others have labeled “ubiquitous computing” because “I wanted people relatively new to these ideas to be able to have a rough container for them, so they could be discussed without anyone getting bogged down in internecine definitional struggles.”

But wait, Sterling cried — “getting bogged down in internecine definitional struggles” is exactly where we should be when we’re inventing new things. This is “the wetlands of language”, where we “use words to figure out what things mean.” The struggles count; they help us understand and shape what we’re doing. Choosing a label for a technology, he argued, “really matters — it’s like christening a baby.”

There was much more. If the good folks at ITConversations post the audio, or if Sterling posts a text, I’ll link so you can experience the whole thing — including the full shtick about Alan Turing’s head in a box, which I’m afraid I failed to take good notes on, since I was too busy laughing.

It would take a good video, though, to capture the funniest moment of the evening: Sterling was displaying examples of “receding tech” (”things that do not blog or link”) — a rusty engine block half-buried in desert sand, a mountain of discarded tires — when the projection screen flashed a warning window: YOU ARE NOW RUNNING ON RESERVE POWER. Then the laptop went to sleep. He was wrapping up, anyway.

I’m here in San Diego at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, an event that I had the pleasure of attending in 2003 and 2004 but which I skipped last year while I was trying to get some traction on my book.

In my absence the conference moved from the relatively cozy confines of the Westin Horton Plaza to the vastness of the Manchester Grand Hyatt — two tall towers on the edge of the harbor. This feels like a place not for things that are emerging but rather for things that have conquered.