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Archives for May 2007

Chevron’s big pile

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The current favored information-overload coping mechanism is exemplified by Gmail: Don’t bother sorting or deleting. Storage space is cheap. Life is too short to take out the info-trash. Just let everything accumulate in one big pile and use tags and search tools to get what you need.

The “one big pile” method has the overwhelming appeal of liberating us from the role of digital janitor. (The principle lies at the heart of David Weinberger’s new book Everything is Miscellaneous — more on that soon, since I’m interviewing Weinberger for Salon.) But our opportunities to employ it remain limited. Gmail lets us treat our email as one big pile. Delicious lets us treat our bookmarks that way; Flickr, our photos.

But the biggest piles of all can be found on our hard disks. And they remain nearly impossible to treat in “big pile” mode. Google Desktop gives us an inkling, but its uses are limited. WinFS was supposed to transform the Windows file system into a Web 2.0-compliant, metadata-rich delight, but it’s vaporware. ITunes relieves us of managing our music files, but that’s just one corner of the personal-data universe.

And if it’s this bad for each of us as individuals, it’s way worse for big companies. Yesterday the Wall Street Journal featured a story by Pui-Wing Tam, titled “Cutting Files Down to Size,” about Chevron’s data-overload problem. The company’s store of office data is growing 60 percent a year; it’s got 1,250 terabytes today.

The article paints an alarmingly rich picture of the company’s problem, but is not nearly so convincing about the solution. Chevron is trying to cut back on document overload by deploying Microsoft’s SharePoint, so that instead of multiplying email attachments, all the people who use a particular document can work off a single copy. That’s just fine, but it can’t begin to be enough. With stuff that’s tagged as lower-priority, Chevron will begin deleting after 90 days. Its new plan “will require a team of 250 staffers and nearly two years.”

The Chevron exec in the article concludes by noting that “Half the battle will be changing people’s behavior.” Good luck. Asking people to do the clerical work of organizing their computer files is a losing battle. Better to try to deploy tools that help them do their work more easily — and maybe get the files organized as a side benefit along the way.
[tags]chevron, information overload, information management, data management, wall street journal[/tags]

Ambiguity near and far

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In Dreaming in Code I wrote a lot about the difference between ambiguity in programming, where it is often a source of trouble, and in “natural” languages (i.e., English or French or Mandarin), where it is often a source of value.

Jason Kottke points to this fascinating essay by Perl creator Larry Wall, in which Wall distinguished between “local” and “distant” ambiguities:

People thrive on ambiguity, as long as it is quickly resolved. Generally, within a natural language, ambiguity is resolved rapidly using recently spoken words and topics. Pronouns like “it” refer to things that are close by, syntactically speaking. Perl is full of little ambiguities that people never even notice because they’re resolved so rapidly. For instance, many terms and operators in Perl begin with identical characters. Perl resolves them based on whether it’s expecting to see a term or an operator, just as a person would. If you say 1 & 2, it knows that the & is a bitwise AND, but if you say &foo, it knows that you’re calling subroutine “foo”.

In contrast, many strongly typed languages have “distant” ambiguity. C++ is one of the worst in this respect, because you can look at a + b and have no idea at all what the + is doing, let alone where it’s defined. We send people to graduate school to learn to resolve distant ambiguities.

[tags]larry wall, perl, ambiguity, language, natural language, dreaming in code[/tags]

Liberals yawn as Journal burns?

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Greg Sargent wonders why the liberal blogosphere isn’t squawking about Rupert Murdoch’s bid for the Journal. Obviously most of the liberal blogosphere hears “Journal” and thinks of the Whitewater-crazed loonies who spent most of a decade spinning Vincent Foster conspiracy theories. For anyone inclined to view the world through a partisan lens, the Journal’s editorial page has long overshadowed its higher-quality news coverage. Murdoch buying that gang? It’s “Shelob acquiring Barad-Dur, Inc.” Let them eat one another and spit out the bones!

But there’s also a sense in which the defense of the Journal’s “quality” newsroom is a rearguard action on behalf of a dying tradition. And many people who identify themselves as bloggers, whether on the left or the right, and whether they value the Journal’s great features (as I do) or not, may feel about that tradition the way they feel about the 19th-century novel or the Hollywood comedies of the ’30s. These things are grand, but, like it or not, their time has passed. A newsroom like the Journal’s will not and cannot exist a generation from now unless someone starts figuring out how to pay for it.

John Heilemann’s take in New York is a little contrarian and well worth reading:

Did anybody at Dow Jones ever contemplate purchasing MySpace? Did Arthur Sulzberger or Don Graham? I don’t know, but I’d wager they didn’t even know what MySpace was. The obvious retort is, Why should they have? What does social networking have to do with journalism? And, no doubt, a precise answer is hard to conjure. But if you don’t believe that the intermingling of these spheres will be central to how future generations consume their news, you’ve apparently been sleeping—and clearly don’t have kids.

Not that Murdoch or his people have the future figured out. But they’re groping toward it with purpose and energy—which is more than you can say for Dow Jones. God knows Murdoch’s politics aren’t my brand of vodka. But you have to admire the way he’s been an unrelenting force for change and modernization in the media racket, the way he’s shaped and adapted to epic transformations of platforms and technologies. The problem with America’s newspaper-family dynasties is that, to a greater or lesser degree, they still believe they’re in the same business they were in 30 years ago. Murdoch doesn’t—and he knows, too, that newspapers can’t be any kind of public trust if the public sees them as yesterday’s news.

For those who think that the Bancroft family’s pride-of-ownership will save the Journal from Rupert’s clutches, I say, think again. Murdoch has offered a huge premium on the Dow Jones stock price. The Bancrofts’ control is apparently only a little over 50 percent. All Murdoch needs is one or two heirs or heiresses to say, “Wait a minute, this is good money, what are we thinking?” and the prize is his. I don’t think there are too many other people out there with the resources to pay such an inflated price or the desire to sink that much cash into what market analysts politely call a “sunset industry.”

Every year the Journal’s publisher seizes the op-ed page for a letter to readers, and every year this missive touts the publication’s “faith in the wisdom of markets.” What’s happening here is simple: the market is having its way with the Journal. The result may not be ideal for those of us who love 5000-word features, but it is surely a kind of ironic justice.
[tags]Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch, journalism, dow jones[/tags]

Microhoo… Yacrosoft?

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This time the noises about a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo sound more serious. We’re also in one of the financial markets’ combination-mad moments — these merger frenzies often arrive at a market peak.

Remember January 2000? We woke up one morning shortly after the millennium to discover that Time Warner was buying AOL. I wrote one of the few dissenting columns about this deal, arguing that both companies were acting out of fear, not vision. I got dragged onto CNN that afternoon — I think they had a hard time finding someone to trash the deal — and the hosts treated my skepticism with disdain. Who was this punk from an upstart Web site to be questioning the actions of titans like Gerald Levin and Steve Case?

We know how that one played out. Acquisitions at this scale virtually never lead to useful combinations, strategic synergies, or anything else of use. They are financial engineering. What’s happening with this one is pretty simple: Microsoft and Yahoo have both found themselves at dead ends, but they both have formidable assets, and their leaderships are acting out of desperation. Microsoft can’t build a successful search engine, Yahoo can’t gain traction against Google, and each may think the other can solve its problems. In the event of a deal we will probably hear, as we did with Time Warner/AOL, that it’s a merger, not an acquisition, but don’t be fooled: Microsoft has the extra billions here.

Prediction: If Microsoft acquires Yahoo, the companies’ stock will initially prosper and the media will cheer on a new round of the War on Google. But seven years from now Yahoo will be as much of a shell as AOL is today. The talent will flee, the user base will stagnate, and Yahoo’s ability to innovate will wither under the weight of Microsoft bureaucracy and the pressure to serve Microsoft’s software interests.
[tags]microsoft, yahoo, mergers[/tags]

The surge Catch-22

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The date by which we are supposed to judge whether the “surge” is working keeps getting pushed back, but even slippier than the timeline is the total absence of any administration yardstick for success.

In theory, you’d think that the goal of escalating the war is to reduce the violence. Right there we’re already in topsy-turvyland of the “destroy the village in order to save it” variety. But it only gets more illogical. The administration warned that we should expect a rise in casualties as the surge works its magic, because we’re putting more boots on the ground and in harm’s way, and we’re fighting the bad guys, so there’s likely to be more violence, not less, for some indeterminate time.

Now we’re hearing the next level of this Catch-22: Once we really do start achieving some effective “stabilization” of parts of Baghdad or Anbar or wherever, this will only enrage the insurgents and make them more desperate, so they’re going to attack harder. In other words: we can tell we’re achieving stability because of all the instability our success is provoking!

This may sound insane, but here it is, on Tuesday’s New York Times op-ed page. Owen West, a Marine major and veteran of two tours in Iraq, tells us that the Democratic effort to set a withdrawal date will undermine the progress that’s visible to him on the ground:

The Iraqi battalion I lived with is stationed outside of Habbaniya, a small city in violent Anbar Province. Together with a fledgling police force and a Marine battalion, these Iraqi troops made Habbaniya a relatively secure place: it has a souk where Iraqi soldiers can shop outside their armored Humvees, public generators that don’t mysteriously explode, children who walk to school on their own. The area became so stable, in fact, that it attracted the attention of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. In late February, the Sunni insurgents blew up the mosque, killing 36.

Huh? Look, the bad guys blew up the mosque — that’s how you can tell how stable the area had become!

The value of this mad rhetoric is obvious: Any way things go, the administration wins. If violence decreases, the surge is working, and if violence continues or increases, the surge is working, too. The only losers are the American soldiers and Iraquis who keep dying, abandoned in a game of run-out-the-clock.
[tags]iraq, surge, new york times op-ed[/tags]

Only connect

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Walgreens signThere’s a Walgreens on the corner I pass every morning between BART and the office. (There’s a Walgreens on most corners that haven’t already been occupied by a Starbucks.) And recently, every morning I have seen this sign, and every morning I experience a little twinge of awe.

All Walgreens are connected!

Are they like the Indian restaurants clustered on 6th street in New York’s East Village, long rumored to be connected via underground tunnel to one central kitchen?

Or is this connection more metaphysical — do the stores experience that oceanic feeling of connectedness that tells them, yes, they belong here, they are at home in the world?

I knew Walgreens was a chain. I didn’t know it was a great chain of being.

Murdoch’s Journal: Markets rule, indeed

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News that Rupert Murdoch has made a credible bid to acquire Dow Jones, which publishes the Wall Street Journal, has evoked two reactions: In newsrooms, among pro journalists and among devotees of investigative journalism, there is much rending of garments. The Journal is one of the world’s best news organizations. Its front-page features are often models of in-depth reporting. Dow Jones has maintained a reasonably good record of separating its news operation from its editorial page’s lunacy. Would a Murdoch-owned Journal let its editorial barbarians cross the great wall?

Outside of the journalistic fraternity, the prospect of a union between Murdoch and the Journal’s cartoon-conservative editorial page instead has many left-leaning readers either shrugging with indifference or indulging in a bit of schadenfreude. As one wag put it over on Andrew Leonard’s How the World Works blog, “Oy, it’s as if Shelob desired to acquire Barad-dur Industries, Inc.”

I count myself in both these groups. I would hate to see the Journal’s reasonably independent and often irreplaceable news coverage deteriorate; it is a central part of my daily information diet. But if the Journal’s grand newsroom tradition falls victim to a corporate acquisition, I can’t help feeling, also, that the fate is fitting. The Journal — its news pages as well as its editorial pages — is the daily bible of global capitalism, encompassing all of that term’s positives and negatives. It is a chronicle of the power of markets to reshape institutions. How could it expect to be exempt itself?

As for the rest of us, whether we embrace markets wholeheartedly or think they benefit from some fair rules and healthy counterweights, the prospect of a Murdoch-owned Journal — like the ongoing struggle for the New York Times’ corporate soul — is another reminder that, in the business world, good journalism has no uniquely protected status. It will flourish or perish as we find creative ways to support it. The old models are eroding. That’s not going to stop. The question is, how quickly can we find new ways to make sure that, whatever happens to the Wall Street Journal itself, someone somewhere is still able to provide Wall Street Journal-style coverage?
[tags]journalism, wall street journal, rupert murdoch[/tags]

Howard Rheingold — call for questions

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I’ve been doing some advising to Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.Net “citizen journalism” lab and its Assignment Zero project — an experiment in harnessing the work of a distributed group of volunteers to explore the complex questions surrounding harnessing the work of a distributed group of volunteers.

Recursive? You bet. But interesting enough for me to want to participate in — which I’m doing by taking on one modest assignment for the project.

Next week I’ll be interviewing Howard Rheingold as my contribution to Assignment Zero. I interviewed Howard way back in January of 1994, about his then-recent book The Virtual Community. In those days people were using the phrase “information superhighway” without (too much) irony. The Virtual Community described a looming decision point in the development of the online world. From my piece:

In particular, what’s up to us is whether the network turns out to be an open public space, like a town square or a civic forum, or a commercial enclosure, like a mall. To analogize, and doubtless oversimplify, the question is whether the network emerges as something like a souped-up telephone that we can all communicate with (known as the “many-to-many” model) or something like a jazzed-up cable TV (“one-to-many”) that provides us with more choices but not more power.

And Rheingold emphasizes that it’s up to us right now — during a brief window of opportunity, as the government bargains with the telephone companies, cable TV networks and other corporations to lay down new rules for the new roads.

We know how that turned out — then: the Internet trounced its “walled garden” rivals and became the global standard for electronic communication. Is that conflict a closed issue, or will we keep facing it in new forms? I’ll be following up with Howard about this and more.

NewAssignment.Net aims to channel “many-to-many” energies in its own way, so if you have topics you think we should explore, questions you want me to pose to Howard, or information you think is relevant to our talk, please post over at Assignment Zero (or right here, if you like!).
[tags]newassignment.net, howard rheingold, assignment zero, crowdsourcing[/tags]