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## Oliver Willis (who I met last year at the first Bloggercon) is having fun dreaming up pithy ads for “Brand Democrat.”

## Merlin Mann of 43 Folders offers some good tips on breaking thru writer’s block — not my particular affliction, thankfully, but the advice is useful for all sorts of creative logjams.

## Reason #5637 to love RSS: I knew that NPR offered RSS feeds, but only recently did I realize that they’ve intelligently broken up shows like “Fresh Air” into individual segments — so that, for instance, I can listen to my friend David Edelstein’s movie reviews even when I don’t have a full hour to hear the whole show.

Book break

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Earlier this year I wrote about the book project I’ve been working on. For the past six months I’ve been splitting my time between Salon and work on the book. That’s been great but, as you might imagine, at times I’ve felt my world to be a little…bifurcated. (Since I’m a father of twins, this is not an unfamiliar sensation.) And there’s no way to write a book — none that I know of, anyway — without putting your back into it, 100 percent.

So beginning this week, I’m stepping aside from my job at Salon. It’s a highly orderly transition: I’ve planned it for some time, my colleagues and friends at Salon have been great about giving me the freedom to do it, and I expect to return when I’m done — but for now, the book is my work. After nine years (I left the San Francisco Examiner for Salon at the beginning of October, 1995, and we went live on the Web on Nov. 13 of that year), I’m ready for a creative sabbatical.

This blog will continue pretty much in its current form, with the usual spasms and lapses in posting, but the mix of entries may change a bit — in this post-election period, I’ll probably be posting less on politics (hey, the War Room is still on the case!) and more on the subject of the book: the nature of computer programming and software development. Why it’s still so hard to build the stuff that runs our world. And what interesting ideas are out there to make things better.

I won’t be writing the book in public here on the blog. I’m in awe of those people who seem able to blog full-time about the subjects of their books-in-progress, and I admire experiments in wiki-style open editing like J.D. Lasica’s. But I’m still a linear sort of guy at heart; if I’m able to do what I plan on doing, this book will be something more than the sum of its parts, and I can’t imagine how to roll it out piecemeal without altering its nature. I also don’t see how I’ll ever get the writing done if I put too much of my energy into blogging about it. But I certainly expect to be opening up some of the topics as I tackle them. And I know I’m gathering for more material than I will ever be able to include in the final text.

I’m profoundly lucky to be exploring this subject at a moment in history when throngs of thoughtful programmers have adopted the Web as a public space to talk about their work. It makes my work almost too easy.

Except that some time soon I have to stop collecting great notes and URLs and interviews and start, uh, writing.

Two good things

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J.D. Lasica and others have begun building Ourmedia, a/k/a Open-Media.org, “an open-source initiative devoted to creating, sharing and storing works of personal media” — “a place where people can share works of personal media and have them stored forever — for free.” It’s a work in progress right now, but the basic notion of an accessible and reliable (thanks to the Internet Archive) repository for “grassroots media” — “digital stories, photo albums, video diaries, documentary journalism, home-brew political ads, music videos, children’s tales, Flash animations, student films, parodies of Hollywood films” — makes wonderful sense. There’s a wiki here for people interested in contributing.

Rebecca McKinnon, a fellow at the Berkman Center who describes herself as “a recovering TV reporter-turned-blogger,” has sparked the formation of Bloggercorps. The nonpartisan group’s mission is “Matching bloggers with activists and non-profit groups who want to blog and need help getting started.” Here’s more info.

The Iranian information blockade

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I read this New York Times op-ed by Iranian Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi with great interest. Ebadi complains about the absurd U.S. Treasury Department rules that prevent American publishers from commissioning or editing work by people in Iran:

  Despite federal laws that say that American trade embargoes may not restrict the free flow of information, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control continues to regulate the import of books from Iran, Cuba and other countries. In order to skirt the laws protecting the flow of information, the government prohibits publishing “materials not fully created and in existence.” Therefore, I could publish my memoir in the United States, but it would be illegal for an American literary agent, publisher, editor or translator to help me.

We encountered this ridiculous regulation here at Salon a couple of years ago in trying to pay a reporter who was spending time in Iran. Applying the rules of trade embargos to informational products is not only silly, it’s counterproductive to the United States’ larger global effort. We should be working hard to open up the flow of information into and out of these so-called axis-of-evil nations — not behaving like petty dictators eager to clamp down on the free reporting of news and expression of ideas.

Oh, wait, that is the order of the day for our new, improved, “mandate”-driven democracy. I guess it all makes sense.

Doctorow at WIPO Geneva

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Cory Doctorow’s reports for the Electronic Frontier Foundation from the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) meeting in Geneva are fascinating for what they illuminate at this bizarre crossroads of global bureaucracy and globalized corporatocracy. But most peculiar of all is his tale of how “all of the handouts set out by the ‘public interest’ groups (e.g., us, civil society coalition, IP Justice, Union for the Public Domain) were repeatedly stolen and pitched into the trashcans in the bathrooms.”

Here’s an excerpt of the full saga:

  Let me try to convey to you the depth of the weirdness that arose when all the public-interest groups’ papers were stolen and trashed at WIPO. No one gets into the WIPO building without being accredited and checked over, so this was almost certainly someone who was working on the treaty — in other words, a political opponent (none of the documents promoting the Broadcast Treaty were touched).

As the Indian delegation put it, WIPO is an organization based on information. For someone who believes in an information-protection instrument like the Broadcast Treaty to sabotage the negotiation by hiding information from the delegates is bizarre. The people who run the table were shocked silly — this has apparently never happened before at WIPO.

Digital Storytelling event

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If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area this weekend and interested in the notion of digital storytelling, On Saturday at 6 p.m. there’s a get-together over at KQED, cosponsored by the Digital Storytelling Assocation, the KQED Digital Storytelling Initiative, the Center for Digital Storytelling and the Digital Storytelling Festival. That’s a lot of organizational names for one event, but I think this is less bureaucratic than that sounds — just a bunch of people who’ve been involved with this movement checking in with their community and hearing what one another are up to.

Bloggercon, belatedly

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Bloggercon III was great. I barely had time to digest everything I took in because I was flying off on a long-planned trip the next morning. Here are some notes.

My session was on Journalism: I talked for about ten minutes, outlining some basic things that I think bloggers can learn from professional journalists and vice versa.

What bloggers can teach the pros:
*How to blur the line between the personal and the professional — creatively
*How to improvise in real time
*How to have a conversation with the “people formerly known as readers”
*How to be humble — you don’t know everything!

What bloggers can learn from traditional journalists:
*the value of legwork
*the nature of accountability
*The positive aspects of editing
*How to be humble — you don’t know everything!

Then I just opened the mike, which is the custom at Bloggercon, where there are no speakers — just “discussion leaders.” We didn’t get trapped in the “Is blogging journalism?” rathole, thankfully; and I think we are now well past the stage of simply re-fighting the old holy war between bloggers and pros, which was never as heated as press accounts had it, anyway. Journalists cast every new phenomenon in horse-race terms — who wins? who loses? — because that’s such a fundamental news template. But I think the smarter participants in both camps, and the many of us who have feet in both camps, or wear hats with multiple insignia, now well understand that this ought to be a win/win game.

I was too busy moderating to take decent notes, but the entire audio for the session is now online (along with other Bloggercon sessions) at Doug Kaye’s excellent ITConversations site, and there’s tons of others who did take notes.

Staci Kramer wrote it up for OJR (those are my bullet points quoted anonymously). There are also good posts about the event from Rebecca McKinnon, Claude Muncey, Barnaby, and Colin Brayton, who posted a a big picture of me that shows just how tired I was… (Note to Colin: if I was edging away from you after our brief conversation it’s because it was late in the day, I was trying to hit the road — my kids were waiting at home!)

Most interesting idea aired at the session (and apologies that I can’t remember whose idea it was — step forth and remind me so I can give you credit): Perform a controlled experiment in which readers take in the work of a number of journalists covering a controversial issue or election who are striving to be “objective” but who actually have a point of view that they do not disclose (i.e., they are normal human beings). The readers will try to guess the writers’ sympathies based on the “objective” work. Can journalists really hide their views? Or, as some critics maintain, can we always tell which side they’re on, anyway?

It is, as Dan Gillmor suggested, a great idea for a thesis. Only you’d also somehow have to control for the biases and sympathies of the readers making the calls. This “objectivity is impossible” thing cuts in all directions. There is no alternative to being human. (Unless you’re, er, a marsupial or something. But then you’re probably not worrying about the nature of journalism.)

UPDATE LATER: That was indeed conference host and organizer Dave Winer who proposed the great “controlled experiment” idea. Thanks for that. Could someone — Poynter? Columbia Journalism School? NYU Journalism School (Jay?) — now put up a little money, or assign it to a class, to make it happen?

Also — more good notes from the session over at John Adams’ blog.

(Fwd) Re: Election fraud!

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My little coda below about exit polls and the thirst for tales of a stolen election among the throngs of disappointed Kerry voters, of whom I am one, led to a little fracas in the comments. So here’s my position, plain and simple, and maybe we can move on:

There’s no question that the paper-trail-free, unaccountable, closed-source model of electronic voting is flawed, precisely because it leaves no room for after-the-fact authentication, and allows rumors and suspicions of skulduggery to ferment. We need to change that system. Salon, and particularly our reporter Farhad Manjoo, have been at the forefront of coverage of this issue since long before the current election.

When complaints of problems at the polls arise, it’s the duty of responsible journalists, including us here at Salon, to take them seriously and try to evaluate them. If reported patterns of voting raise questions of any kind, that’s worth looking into. Nothing is more important than assuring ourselves that our elections are won fairly.

But elections are messy exercised in democracy — there’s no such thing as a perfect one. There’s always some conniving local official trying to win an edge for his side; the history of voter intimidation and voter-roll tweaking and political-machine tampering is endless. (“Vote early, vote often” was not a joke in Daley’s Chicago, and most historians have concluded that in 1960 Kennedy probably won Illinois, and the White House, thanks to some deft ballot-box stuffing.)

The inevitability of problem precincts and questionable tallies is a given. They demand our inquiry nevertheless. But their presence does not, in and of itself, offer proof of electoral crookedness or a stolen election.

My beef is with the legions of outraged and aggrieved e-mail correspondents who are utterly convinced that the election was stolen. Why? They got an e-mail that told them! They read an article by Greg Palast! And they’re not going to be satisfied by the work of some Salon reporter who went out and actually reviewed the evidence and talked to the participants. (Here’s the most recent back and forth between Palast and Manjoo.)

There’s a dynamic at work here that people really ought to be recognizing by now — the “I have no idea if this is true, but I’ll pass it on anyway” meme-propagation that the Internet so efficiently accelerates.

The worst case is that the more gullible and misinformed wing of the Democratic left will turn into our side’s version of the gullible and misinformed legions of Republican voters who believe that Saddam had WMDs and worked with al-Qaida. We’re not there yet, but if we keep going down this road of crying “fraud!” at the drop of a dubious e-mail tip, we’re in for trouble.

We need to become smarter, more skeptical consumers of the information we get online. All the information, including — no, especially — the information that confirms our preconceptions and prejudices. If we (here at Salon, or in the blogosphere, or even on CBS or Fox!) find real evidence of the sort of significant voting problems that could affect the election’s outcome, then I will join the charge. But I won’t leap to the barricades on the basis of me-too forwards from people who are desperate to believe and unwilling to face facts.

The 2000 election, with its razor-thin margins, its rampant problems at the polls and its ultimate resolution by a partisan Supreme Court, left us all understandably hyped up on this issue. This battle should have been fought then, and wasn’t. But 2004 turned out to be a different sort of disaster. We can close our eyes to that change and pretend it’s still 2000, or we can look around at the landscape of reality and figure out what we have to do to pull our nation back from the brink of its current madness.

Good morning, Fallujah

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Well — with several dozen Americans dead, many more American wounded, and who knows how many Iraqi casualties that we’ll never be able to count — we now control Fallujah again. I heard an American official quoted on NPR this morning saying that we’ve “broken the back” of the resistance.

When we invaded Iraq a year and a half ago, we broke the back of the resistance pretty quickly, too. Only it turned out that the resistance had simply dissolved into the countryside to regroup. Similarly, today, most of the Iraqis from Fallujah seemed to have moved on before we moved in. Mosul is awash with Iraqi rebels now. Samarra, which the U.S. made a lot of noise about clearing out a few weeks before Fallujah, became a center of unrest again once the U.S. troops moved on and turned it over to shaky Iraqi government forces.

So now we own a bombed-out Iraqi city, one that, having strewn with rubble, we will pay to rebuild. But the Iraqi rebellion doesn’t appear any weaker. At what point will our leaders get their heads around the simple fact that our enemies here have no back to break? Isn’t this the starting point in fighting a guerrilla war? Didn’t we learn anything from Vietnam?

Our idiocy is not just wasting American lives and money; it is telegraphing to our enemies that we are clueless. Because the same lesson from Fallujah — that we are fighting an unconventional enemy with no “back” to break — applies to the larger war on terrorism. And until we learn it we have no hope of winning.

The corrections

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I was traveling a lot during the past week, then returned to my backlogged domestic duties, and both kept me from this blog for far too long — apologies for the hiatus. Now for some catching up!

Soon, reports from Bloggercon and some other comments from my trip. But first, an amazing cavalcade of corrections.

Every news organization has to deal with a difficult or embarrassing correction every now and then; since everyone makes mistakes, the only alternative (pretend you never goofed) is unthinkable. But surely this season has been extraordinary.

We started shortly before the election with the Wall Street Journal’s act of postmodern performance-art journalism, in which the leading national conservative newspaper absolved the leading national conservative TV network of leaning Bush-ward: “NEWS CORP.’S Fox News was incorrectly described in a page-one article Monday as being sympathetic to the Bush cause.” Oh, right, thanks — you know, without the tip we just might have gotten that one wrong…

But the strange corrections keep coming. Here’s a couple of recent ones from the New York Times.

At the end of the most recent column by David Brooks came this timid confession: “Not that it will do him much good at this point, but I owe John Kerry an apology. I recently mischaracterized some comments he made to Larry King in December 2001. I said he had embraced the decision to use Afghans to hunt down Al Qaeda at Tora Bora. He did not. I regret the error.”

Unfortunately, the quote Brooks is now retracting formed the centerpiece of the columnist’s Oct. 30 piece; it was the key piece of evidence he cited as to “why Kerry is not cleaning Bush’s clock in this election.” Yeah, I guess it won’t do Kerry much good at this point. In this little craven act Brooks is simply working in line with the administration he supports, whose modus operandi routinely involves lying when it matters and letting the truth mop up when it no longer makes any difference.

But as we Bush opponents rightly push back on the distortions and outright lies that the crew in Washington have been peddling for four years, we need to take care that, in our anger and frustration, we don’t fall into some of the same practices.

For instance, take the matter of President Bush’s chief legal adviser, Alberto Gonzales, whose nomination to be Attorney General has raised hackles because of a memo (PDF) Gonzales wrote suggesting that the war on terrorism meant we could ignore aspects of the Geneva Conventions. Now, Gonzales wrote that memo, and no matter how you cut it it’s a fairly appalling document — one that can accurately be linked to the abuses and torture committed by American troops at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, crimes that Bush administration officials have amorally and shamefully refused to take any responsibility for. (In the Bush White House, the buck stops nowhere.)

Gonzales has plenty to answer for. But some critics (including Salon’s Joe Conason) have latched onto a single word that his memo uses to describe aspects of the Geneva Convention: “quaint.” Unfortunately, tarring Gonzales with that particular adjective appears to be unfair. If you read this correction from Friday’s Times, it’s clear that Gonzales used “quaint” only in the fairly narrow and reasonably defensible context of several trivial provisions that are not at the heart of this controversy:

  “A front-page article yesterday about the nomination of Alberto R. Gonzales to be attorney general included an incomplete version of a quotation from a memo by Mr. Gonzales or his aides that his critics contend opened the door to the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. (Excerpts from Mr. Gonzales’s legal writings, published with the continuation of the article, included the complete quotation.) The passage, discussing the war on terrorism, read in full: “In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions requiring that captured enemy be afforded such things as commissary privileges, scrip (i.e., advances of monthly pay), athletic uniforms and scientific instruments.” The version in the article yesterday was truncated after “some of its provisions.”

Oppose Gonzales? Sure. But let’s leave the selective quotation, the context-free criticism and the misquotational smears to the GOP. They’re better at it, anyway.

BONUS LINKS: For those of you who are still burning the midnight oil with nightmares of electoral fraud and recount fever, I can only recommend the yeoman work of Salon’s Farhad Manjoo (here and here). Every potential election problem is worth looking into, and Salon will keep at it, but let’s face it, it is hugely unlikely that this election was stolen. (Guess what? The exit polls were off because exit polls are lousy. And this entire election was within the margin of error at all times.) The more energy we spend focusing vainly on pursuing the chimera of fraud, the less we have to fight real battles.

And to keep up one’s spirits in this dark hour, there’s always The Onion’s deadpan realism: “Nation’s Poor Win Election For Nation’s Rich.”