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The way the Gates mind works

July 31, 2007 by Scott Rosenberg 2 Comments

Bill Gates took a kind of victory lap in the press on Monday, with dueling big pieces in the Times and the Journal marking his steadily advancing separation from the company he started three decades ago. While the Journal concentrated on the role that Craig Mundie will take over from Gates — as Microsoft’s long-term software thinker — John Markoff’s Times piece featured some choice quotes from the soon-to-retire founder himself.

First, there was Gates the Google-baiter, adopting a role he has played a lot in recent years:

“How many products, of all the Google products that have been introduced, how many of them are profit-making products?” he asked. “They’ve introduced about 30 different products; they have one profit-making product. So, you’re now making a prediction without ever seeing the software that they’re going to have the world’s best phone and it’s going to be free?”

Then there was Gates the true believer in software:

The center of gravity in the computer industry has dramatically shifted toward software, he said. “Why do you like your iPod, your iPhone, your Xbox 360, your Google Search?” he said. “The real magic sauce is not the parts that we buy for the Xbox, or the parts that Apple buys for iPhones, it’s the software that goes into it.”

Finally, there was Gates the slightly tongue-tied global debugger:

Mr. Gates insists that his new world of philanthropy will be just as compelling as software has been. “I’ll have also malaria vaccine or tuberculosis vaccine or curriculum in American high schools, which are also things that, at least the way my mind works, I sit there and say, ‘Oh, God! This is so important; this is so solvable,’ ” he said, “You’ve just got to get the guy who understands this, and this new technology will bring these things together.”

If that’s the spirit that has inspired Gates to use his fortune for good causes, then one should probably not complain. But there is something so very naive about this richest-man-in-the-world’s can-do engineering spirit.

Problems? You’ve just got to get the “guy who understands”! Give him the right technology! And all will be well.
[tags]microsoft, google, bill gates, philanthropy, new york times, john markoff[/tags]

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Defacing online memorials: plus ca change…

July 31, 2007 by Scott Rosenberg 1 Comment

Salon has a piece today on “The New American Way of Death” about MyDeathSpace, a site that points to the MySpace profiles of recently deceased members, highlights the untimely deaths of young people and offers a discussion space for visitors to post notes — often rude — about the departed. It’s a good, well-researched article that raises questions about the site without taking a crotchety “ban the bums” line. (One of the pleasures of my new status is that I get to read the Salon daily lineup as a surprising cornucopia of reading material rather than the end-product of an inevitably messy editorial process in which I’ve been immersed.)

The thing is, there’s very little that’s “new” about MyDeathSpace. In 1996 I wrote a piece for Salon (we took that summer to publish a special “Death Issue”) titled “Ashes to Ashes, Bits to Bits.” The piece covered a number of topics, including the Well community’s response to Tom Mandel’s death and Timothy Leary’s vision of digital eternity. It also recounted an early instance of the MyDeathSpace phenomenon of flaming the dearly departed: the City of Berkeley’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial site hosted discussion boards, and they became a flashpoint for old political arguments. (The page, remarkably, is still there.)

As I wrote back in 1996: “If we are going to build our memorials on the Net, we have to expect that its boisterousness and its disrespect will spill over into their precincts.” As in the Web of “home pages” and discussion boards a decade ago, so on today’s sometimes anti-social “social Web.”
[tags]death, myspace, online memorials, salon[/tags]

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Those darn irrational voters

July 30, 2007 by Scott Rosenberg 5 Comments

Nick Kristof’s New York Times column today (behind the pay wall, alas) summarizes the findings of a book by Bryan Caplan titled “The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.” Kristof quotes this summary of the book’s thesis, in Caplan’s words: “This book develops an alternative story of how democracy fails. The central idea is that voters are worse than ignorant; they are, in a word, irrational — and vote accordingly.”

What are the ways in which voters are “worse than ignorant”? Kristof summarizes Caplan’s complaints of “systematic error” in voter rationality: Voters share “a suspicion of market outcomes and a desire to control markets.” They have “an anti-foreign bias,” evidenced by an unwillingness to embrace free trade wholeheartedly. They share “a neo-Luddite bias against productivity gains that come from downsizing or “creative destruction.’” And they have a “pessimistic bias, a tendency to exaggerate economic problems.”

Gee, it sounds like the real problem Caplan has with the voting public is that they don’t agree with the program of conservative economists!

There are a couple of ironies here.

There’s something hilarious about a market-oriented economist complaining about “irrational” behavior. Free-market theory depends on the notion that market participants are rational actors; if they’re irrational, then the whole theory collapses — the market doesn’t behave predictably. For classical economics to work, we need to trade in the populace and get us a better one. The whole thing reminds me of Brecht’s sarcastic suggestion that “the government dissolve the people and elect another.”

But let’s not knock the rabble so fast. Those voters may not be so irrational after all. Free-market economists wish that voters whose jobs are threatened by foreign competition would somehow become farseeing altruists, and trust that the general benefit that free trade provides might eventually lift their boats sometime after the same tide put them out of work. But these “ignorant,” “irrational” voters insist on trying to protect their jobs. The nerve! Why should they think it’s all right to act in their own short-term self-interest? Oh, right, it’s only CEOs and hedge-fund investors who have the economists’ blessing for short-term, self-centered thinking.

Personally, I’m reasonably comfortable with the pro-free-trade argument. But you won’t find me sneering at those who sense that the dynamic of the global economy is not doing them or their families any good.

Caplan is an economist at George Mason University, which (among many other things) is a center for conservative libertarian thinking. His Web site includes a “Libertarian purity test” and his “intellectual autobiography” is replete with references to Ayn Rand — so his perspective, while blinkered, is hardly surprising. But I wonder why Kristof presented the economist’s ideas so uncritically.
[tags]globalization, economics, bryan caplan, libertarians[/tags]

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A new chapter

July 30, 2007 by Scott Rosenberg 8 Comments

We’re back from our travels-with-children — in Monterey, marveling at jellyfish and otters at the aquarium and frolicking at the remarkable “Dennis the Menace” playground (who knew?), and then in Napa, camping at Bothe Napa park.

Now that I’m back at my desk, here’s my news: I’ve left Salon. The day before our vacation was my last day at the company I helped start up back in 1995.

There’s no Big Reason for the move, rather an aggregation of many smaller motivations.

We’d made considerable progress on the project that I was leading for Salon, but we were still a good way from being able to open it up to users, and that was disappointing. Meanwhile, I came up with what I think is an exciting idea for a new book project, and found myself increasingly drawn in that direction.

I still love Salon, and will be cheering it on from the outside. I remain, modestly, a shareholder, and I remain friends with my former colleagues. I hope to continue to write for the site occasionally. But I’ve worked at Salon for over ten years (roughly the length of time I spent at the Examiner). I’ve seen it from a tiny startup through bubble mania and bust woes and into maturity. It’s time for something new. Shaking things up at least once every decade seems like a reasonable schedule!

For you loyal Wordyard readers, I hope to provide a greater volume of posting. My energies are now going to be deployed in three directions:

(1) The new book. I’ll be writing much more here about it as the idea, and work on it, jells.

(2) This blog, which I’ve tended for six years. In addition to a more regular schedule for Code Reads, I’ve also got a couple of other ideas for more in-depth reporting and writing projects here that I expect to be unveiling.

(3) Freelance writing and speaking engagements. (If you’re interested in having me come talk — either about the themes of Dreaming in Code or other trends and issues in Web publishing, drop me a note at speaking /at/ wordyard.com.)

That should keep me plenty busy!

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Travel week

July 23, 2007 by Scott Rosenberg 1 Comment

This is family week here — we’re off with the kids for a few days on a couple of short trips. Blogging will be light. Next week I’ll be back with some news about some personal changes and new projects.

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Dave Winer: we need an open identity system

July 23, 2007 by Scott Rosenberg 4 Comments

On Sunday at Wordcamp, Dave Winer chatted entertainingly about “The past, present and future of Web publishing,” and pointed toward a handful of areas where the Web needs some hard work.

One is “future-proofing” our blogs and other content. If, as several speakers at Wordcamp argued, the stuff we’re writing today –even the most ephemeral stuff — is going to provide a window onto our era for future generations, what can we do to insure that it will survive, in a world where file formats and physical media have a short shelf-life? No answers here, but it’s a criticial question.

The other need Winer pointed to was an open identity system — a repository for simple account information that different Web services can rely on so you don’t have to leave your identity scattered across a billion different sites. A lot of people are talking about Facebook in these terms, but that seems hugely premature, since today Facebook’s idea of “openness” is strictly one-way (it’s the roach-motel approach — data can check into the Facebook world but it can’t leave very easily). There have been lots of long-simmering discussions and slowly bootstrapping formats in this area, including OpenID, but none has yet achieved critical mass.

Winer suggested that Twitter’s open API offers a potential path toward such a system, one that he’s already experimented with via his Twittergram project. On the one hand, he said, it would help if some company that already had a vast pool of registered users would open up their service; on the other hand, he noted, the big companies — Yahoo, Microsoft, Google — best positioned to do this are the least likely to make such a move.

I wonder, though, whether we might ultimately end up with the long-dreamed-of identity system as a by-product of some company’s loss in the big Web wars of the late 2000s. Think back a decade: the reason we have a great open-source browser platform is that Netscape got trounced in the commercial battle by Microsoft, and, with little left to lose, decided to release its code for free. It took more than half a decade after that for Firefox to emerge in its present form, but now it’s a central piece of any open Web infrastructure.

I think it’s possible that, over the next few years, if we end up with a social-web business battle that, say, Yahoo or even Microsoft feels that they can’t win under current rules, a big company might decide to make its identity system truly open — or somehow merge it with an already-evolving open-source approach to the problem. As Winer said, that could be a game-changing move — one, I’d argue, as significant as the release of the Netscape code. It won’t change things overnight, but in 5 or 10 years we might end up with the useful system Winer outlined.
[tags]dave winer, open identity, wordcamp, wordcamp 2007[/tags]

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Wordcamping

July 23, 2007 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

I spent much of this past beautiful weekend at Wordcamp, an informal, vibrant conclave of WordPress users and developers held in the funky wood-panelled confines of the Swedish American Hall on Upper Market in San Francisco.

One of the highlights of the program was John Dvorak and Om Malik bantering on Saturday morning about the weblogs/journalism conundrum — about as well as one could, given how many times this block has been circled. It’s hard to believe that it was 2002 when I wrote the following, and I thought the discussion was old and tired then:

Bloggers can be journalists any time they practice journalism by actually trying to find out the truth about a story. A journalist can be a blogger by installing some blogging software and beginning to post. These words should be labels for activities, not badges of tribal fealty.

Jay Rosen tried to end the debate in 2005. In 2006, Steven Johnson wrote a definitive argument-closer. But this is one of the great undead Internet debates; it simply won’t die, and we will probably still be hearing it long after both blogging and journalism have been superseded by Vulcan mind-melds via Bluetooth cerebral implant.

Malik suggested that professional media companies would have a difficult time competing with super-specialized blogs powered by passionate proprietors willing to post around the clock on their niche topic. Dvorak argued that bloggers looking to be taken seriously by readers should design sites that don’t look like standard blogs: “You lose credibility when people hit the blog and say, ‘Oh, it’s a blog.’ ”

I argued that, in fact — for some significant and perhaps growing portion of the public who feel their newspapers and broadcasters failed them in the leadup to the Iraq war — the inverse is true: The formal look-and-feel of “pro” media is a turn-off, it screams “this is the official story,” whereas the rough-hewn blog format holds forth at least the possibility (though no guarantee) of unfiltered authenticity. Dvorak responded by saying this argument only reinforced his point that there really is a difference in how people perceive the “newspaper or magazine” site format and the blog format.

Lorelle VanFossen, proprietor of the phenomenally popular Lorelle on WordPress blog, wandered the auditorium like some sassy cross between a talk-show host and a revival preacher, offering tips on how to create good blog content. When she declared that, if you want to get people’s attention, you should “show them something they’ve never seen before, or show them something in a way they’ve never seen before,” my first reaction was, “Well, duh.” Then I realized that I’ve been a journalist all my life and this principle is etched into my brainpan (“burned into ROM,” as they say in the Valley), but might actually bear repeating for the new hordes of self-publishers that blogging has created. So if this stuff is new to you, I imagine VanFossen’s book “Blogging Tips” would be a pretty good investment. (Haven’t seen it — there were supposed to be copies at the conference, but the shipment got derailed, perhaps by the global Harry Potter delivery madness.)

What made Wordcamp fun was the sense of a dynamic, two-way exchange between the active, committed users of a piece of software and the developers who created it. It was closer in spirit to the user-group meetings that propelled the personal-computing revolution than to the dollar-fixated industry conferences of more recent vintage. The Wordcamp Report blog offered good summaries of the sessions. (At some point in future I think there may be audio or video of the proceedings, too.)

In my next post: Dave Winer’s talk on blogging, and a discussion of open-identity systems.
[tags]blogging, wordpress, wordcamp, wordcamp 2007[/tags]

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