And now, we take a brief break from the financial apocalypse for some personal notes.

I remain in deep writing mode here — can’t say there’s light at the end of the tunnel yet, but I can say the tunnel is reasonably comfortable!

But I wanted to point those interested to an in-depth interview I recently gave to Geert Lovink, the critic and author of works like “Zero Comments” and “Blogging: The Nihilist Impulse.” It’s all about Dreaming in Code and Chandler. Here’s a brief excerpt:

GL: Most IT books you can buy are propped-up business show cases that only talk about success. Dreaming in Code is so radically different in this respect. The project drags on, and at times, the text is amazing honest, up to the point of straight out European negativity. How did you manage to do this? You wrote the book in San Francisco, not in Berlin.

SR: I’ll take this as a compliment. I started my career as a theater critic. I prize honesty. I can’t imagine working on a book for 3-4 years if I didn’t set out to be honest. When I hear “how did you manage it?” it sort of sounds to me like, “how did you get away with it?” But in fact my publisher and editor were always behind the project. My book proposal was really clear about what kind of book it was going to be…

Some readers were disappointed that Dreaming in Code didn’t give them more bullet points about how to improve their development projects. I had hoped that it was clear from the first page that this just wasn’t going to be that kind of book. If I knew how to solve these problems I’d be busy solving them, not writing about them! But writing about them has value, nonetheless, I hope. Just serving witness to the incredibly difficult and uniquely problematic work that software developers do — that was my aim, in the end.

Earlier this summer, Simon Owens asked me if I’d give him an interview for his blog about the book I’ve been working on. I was happy to oblige. Then it turned out he took the piece to the PBS Media Shift blog, which he contributes to, and there it is, today — a little introduction to the project, a couple of interesting tidbits I’ve dug up, and a little perspective from Rebecca Blood to boot.

Here’s a bit:

Speaking with Rosenberg about his book, I felt like we were discussing evolutionary biology. Rosenberg’s research goes beyond highlighting the earliest blogs, and slowly pieces its way through the primordial ooze of the Internet, tracing a line of websites in the early 1990s that first began taking on blog-like characteristics.

“Most of the people I’ve talked to, I’ve asked who had inspired them,” he said. “Who were you reading when you decided to start blogging? To a certain point that becomes a harder and harder thing the further back you go. For instance, Justin Hall started his site in January 1994, before most of us had heard of the web. I asked him, ‘Well, you’re one of the first bloggers, was there anyone out there who you were getting inspiration from?’ And he pointed me to this other guy named Ranjit Bhatnagar who was keeping a site at moonmilk.com in 1993. And, sure enough, it was a reverse chronological list of stuff he found on the web.”

Thanks to Simon for the piece. I’ve now got rough drafts of more than half of my chapters, and am racing frantically to meet my deadline, which is before the end of the year. If I’m scarce round these parts, you know why.

Oh yeah, I also see that I’d better update my author photo when I get the chance!

It is a strange thing to hear a Republican candidate attribute problems in our economic system to “greed, excess and corruption.” But I suppose we should get used to strange things between now and November.

The problem with John McCain’s new feisty populist talking point is that it’s aimed entirely in the wrong direction. It suggests that Wall Street’s implosion is the result of some moral fault in the individuals who run our financial institutions. They are, doubtless, no angels; but what we’re watching this week is the result of a systemic failure — a failure of government, and not just individuals.

The thing is, the financial marketplace that is at the heart of this week’s meltdown runs on greed. Greed is the whole point. It’s supposed to be that way: you got money, you seek a higher return on investment. Isn’t that, like, capitalism? Take the greed out of Wall Street and what do you have left?

As for corruption: Were there bribes on Wall Street? If so, let’s put somebody in jail. But McCain’s charge is the first suggestion I’m aware of that the collapse of so many financial institutions is the result of outright wrongdoing rather than incompetence and colossally imprudent risktaking.

I’m a liberal Democrat; I know from complaints about corporate greed. But really, McCain’s charges are head-scratchers. Because most of us expect Wall Street bankers to be greedy. Comes with the territory. And when we put money in one of their investment accounts, we usually expect them to get us the best return, too.

The problem is, we expect that investment to take place in an environment where there’s a reasonable guarantee of good information and fair dealing. We expect the brokers and bankers to have a good grasp on the nature of their financial instruments, and to give us good advice on the risks we’re taking when we choose one over the other. What’s evident in the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the other continuing shockwaves from the subprime mortgage mess is that, for a long time, the system suffered from a shortage of information and transparency and an excess of risky, blind betting.

We had a decade-long experiment in putting our economy’s assets largely in the hands of entirely unregulated institutions and managers. (Phil Gramm, who was one of McCain’s chief financial advisers until his impolitic comments about our “nation of whiners,” was one of the people who shot the starter pistol for this decade of excess when he served as chairman of the Senate Banking committee.) Now the experiment has proven a disastrous, costly failure. There’s no doubt that we will return to a more cautious, fairer, better-regulated system; we have no choice in that. The only real choice we have is who to trust to execute that re-regulation.

One party has always stood for kicking away safeguards and regulations in the name of the free market driven by — what? — oh, right, greed. The other has a long tradition of believing that responsible government oversight can keep markets fair and open. McCain and his party have a long record of opposition to the very sort of regulation that might have helped avoid, or minimize, the collapse of our financial institutions. The candidate’s eleventh-hour spasm of “eat the rich” rhetoric — however entertaining, in its topsy-turvy-world way — is far too insincere to occlude that record.

It seems to me that if the practitioners of campaign journalism can’t figure out a way to make it so that lying is punished, rather than amplified and rewarded, by the press then they ought to pack up their bags and go do something else.

From Matthew Yglesias. Via Jay Rosen’s Twitter feed, which I recommend for running meta-commentary on this bizarre unfolding Spectacle of the Society that our campaign has degenerated into.

I wouldn’t have said “punished”; it plays too much into the S&M imagery that Palin’s candidacy toys with. I’d have said that lying should be named, and shouted about, and hung around the neck of the candidate who is shameless about doing it.

I mean, this is a campaign that lies about the findings of Factcheck.org!

I think we’re gonna have to bottom out before things will get any better. Hoping that the ABC Palin-comium on Friday will mark the nadir, and then we can begin to gain some traction on reality again. If not, it’s going to be a rough season.

Plenty of Web startups begin with a good idea and fail because it’s just plain hard to build software well, and Web sites are tricky beasts, and getting users isn’t easy. Then there are the startups where the trouble isn’t with execution; it’s with the initial idea. The company has simply set out to solve the wrong problem.

I have to say that Spinspotter, which debuted at Demo today, looks like it’s in that latter category to me. This is a site that uses an algorithm to detect what it defines as bias or “spin” in news coverage. (Here’s coverage from the Times, the Journal, and BusinessWeek.)

The pitfalls and perils in getting an effort like this to work in any sort of way that doesn’t evoke titters are legion. But let’s not even bother with that part of the debate. (Businessweek offers a list of the six criteria, which include everything from too much passive voice to too much “reporter’s voice.”) The real issue here is that the very idea of SpinSpotter is wrongheaded.

Is having a computer program scouring news articles and underlining each appearance of what it defines as bias going to improve any journalist’s work, or any reader’s understanding of the news? If Spinspotter succeeds in redlining every appearance of what it considers “bias” from the news, surely the resulting gelded coverage — deprived of any trace of anyone’s voice, echoing with what Jay Rosen calls “the view from nowhere” — will no longer be of interest to any reader more human than the Spinspotter code.

There is plenty of room for Web sites and services that enable us to better sort fact from fiction, to help us think about what coverage is fair and what is duplicitous, to figure out who we might want to trust and who we might want to distrust among our media sources. But the helful site needs to start by asking those questions — not by simply exhorting its users to “Find bias and tear it a new one.” (The slogan makes me all warm and nostalgic for the blogosphere’s old promise of “we can fact-check your ass.”)

The complaints about “bias in the media” today do not emerge in a vacuum. It’s not as if there were some platonic ideal of news, an attainable and perfect “objective news reporting” standard that our reporters and editors just need to sweat a little harder to achieve. The frequent accusations of bias you hear today, from every point on the political spectrum, are a symptom of the extreme divisions in our political system and our nation.

Journalists are human beings. “Objectivity” is not within their capacity. Bias will always be charged. Sometimes it will come as a result of genuinely shoddy journalism, where reporters have slanted coverage unfairly based on their own prejudices; sometimes it will come as a result of shoddy news consumption, where a reader just doesn’t like the facts that a reporter has presented because they conflict with his world view. Spinspotter promises both “wisdom of the crowd” style voting and human “referees” to build checks and balances into its system. But I suspect these will just end up either recapitulating the left-right fusillades that already fill the political blog-comment-sphere, or reproducing the “view from nowhere” bromides that satisfy no one.

SpinSpotter’s design starts from an assumption that there is some abstract and definable concept of “bias” independent of our own relative perspectives. But we all encounter the biases in the coverage we read through the lens of our own pre-installed biases. And so what? Every act of journalism is biased! We can’t and shouldn’t set out to eliminate bias from journalism, not only because it is impossible but because it is unwise. Instead, we should expect journalists do a better job of being fair and accurate and passionate in their quest for the truth as they see it. We should help readers find the journalists they trust and question the ones they don’t. And we could all use help finding our way through this new era when there is little boundary left between the one group of journalists and the other of readers.

The real problem with our media in this decade has not been too much bias. The problem has been that too often our most influential journalists have not stepped forward to call out official lies. We have suffered from a surfeit of “on the one hand, on the other hand” journalism, which is a poor substitute for anyone’s truth. The Spinspotter-style effort to eliminate “bias” ultimately leads down the road to more of that ritual, not less.

Spinspotter’s home-page rhetoric crows, “The truth is back in town”…”Behold the epiphany of unfiltered news”…”take back the truth” — as if the truth were some golden residue left behind once you have stripped off all the layers of bias you can find. But I think that, even if Spinspotter could somehow perfect its algorithms and unerringly remove all the human perspective and “reporter’s voice” from the articles it points at, you’d find there’s nothing of any value left.

The problem with too many journalists — and especially those journalists inside the Beltway — is this: they do not write what they’re thinking. The reporters do not tell us what they know. The columnists and analysts do not tell us what they believe. Their resulting work is boring, uninformative, and manipulative.

Today at the Republican convention, Peggy Noonan, a former speechwriter for the first President Bush who now writes a column for the Wall Street Journal, got caught by a mike that I guess she thought wasn’t on. She was talking with Republican strategist and former McCain associate Mike Murphy. Here’s Salon’s transcription of the exchange:

Apparently referring to some of McCain’s current advisors, Murphy then says, “These guys, this is all like how you win a Texas race — you know, just run it up. And it’s not gonna work.”

Noonan can then be heard agreeing with Murphy, saying, “It’s over.” A little later, Noonan responds to a question about whether Palin was the most qualified woman McCain could have chosen. “The most qualified? No,” Noonan responds. “I think they went for this, excuse me, political bullshit about narratives … Every time Republicans do that, because that’s not where they live and it’s not what they’re good at, they blow it.”

(You can watch the video and read a full transcript over at TPM.)

Now, if Peggy Noonan wrote a column every week that was as honest with her readers as she is here, with her colleagues, when she thinks the microphone is off, I would read it religiously. She’s part of a world that I don’t inhabit. But now I have a bright picture of the fact that she’s not writing what she knows and believes.

I know columnists are people; they have relationships to protect; they want insiders to keep talking to them. Still: virtually every journalist in DC could go a lot farther down the road of writing what they know and think. Doing so would probably earn them more respect, and more readers, and the sources and players would end up talking to them anyway.

We went through this five years ago when Laurie Garrett, a talented reporter, sent an email to her friends from Davos telling them about the big conference there in blunt, unvarnished and informative terms. Then she freaked out because this report — in which she was doing exactly what she ought to have been doing in her role as a journalist — became public and embarrassed her.

Here is some of what Noonan published today in the Journal about Palin:

Gut: The Sarah Palin choice is really going to work, or really not going to work. It’s not going to be a little successful or a little not; it’s not going to be a wash. She is either going to be magic or one of history’s accidents. She is either going to be brilliant and groundbreaking, or will soon be the target of unattributed quotes by bitter staffers shifting blame in all the Making of the President 2008 books. Of which there should be plenty, as we’ve never had a year like this, with the fabulous freak of a campaign.

So: in print, it’s up in the air. But in truth, “it’s over” and the McCain campaign got seduced by “bullshit about narratives.”

How can anyone ever read a word by Peggy Noonan again and take it seriously? (And she’s been around the block long enough not to get too much sympathy for, you know, not knowing that microphones can betray you.)

If her editors had any respect for their readers, they’d fire her.

UPDATE: Noonan says the excerpt was edited or truncated and that her “it’s over” did not refer to the McCain campaign or the Palin nomination. I don’t know if that’s true; hope we can find out. Even if it is, she still expressed herself far more directly, bluntly — and persuasively — when she thought she was off-mike. That’s really my point.

Watching the gyrations of this election has been diverting, but really, the road from here is not going to change no matter what happens this week in Minnesota. All right: maybe they’ll discover Sarah Palin is a Muslim, or find old tapes of her pastor denouncing America as the modern Sodom, or some other explosive revelation will knock her from the ticket and leave the GOP in awful disarray. Barring that, this race will come down to what it has been coming down to ever since it became a clear Obama/McCain contest: A handful of swing states will tip the election to one candidate or the other.

I’ve been hopeful for an Obama victory, and friends and relatives sometimes give me that fearful-Democrat look that has become prevalent over the past decade — that frown of “I’m worried, we screwed it up so many times in the past, the Republicans will find some way yet again to squeeze out a victory.” And sure, it could happen. But here’s why I think it won’t.

(1) Yes, it’s true that there will be more people voting against Obama because of his race than the polls are capturing. But the Obama campaign’s prodigious and effective get-out-the-vote effort, and its ability to pull in new voters among the young, will counterbalance the negative race vote, effectively canceling it out. So I’m not worried about it.

(2) The popular vote doesn’t matter. The electoral college chooses the president. So the map is really all that counts. And the map doesn’t look so bad. There are a number of combinations of states that get Obama over 270. For McCain to even have a shot, he’s got to win all of the big swing states (FL, OH, VA); then he also must either wrest something like PA or MI from the Obama column or, alternately, win in a whole bunch of smaller swing states like CO, NV, and NH. He could do it, but the stars will have to align just right for him. Obama can win without FL, OH or VA if he pulls it out in a few of those other states. He’s just got more roads to a win right now.

(3) What’s keeping me up at night is the possibility of an electoral college tie. You can see how easily this could happen from the recent electoral maps: If Obama holds all the Kerry states and in addition wins Iowa and Nevada and New Mexico but loses Colorado (or if he wins Iowa and Colorado but loses Nevada and NM) then he comes out with 269 electoral votes and so does McCain. Constitutional madness! The election goes to the House, but each state delegation casts one vote. Consensus seems to be that Obama has the edge in that scenario. But it’s a mess no matter how you play it out, and as we saw in 2000 the GOP is far more willing to play hardball in such circumstances. Still, any electoral-college tie is likely to involve Obama having the lead in the popular vote; the constitution doesn’t care about that — and it didn’t matter in 2000 — but it ought to put at least some weight in the scales with wavering congressional delegations.