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Open Salon launches

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Not one but two big developments (coincidentally simultaneous) in projects that are intertwined with my life! The first, noted below, was Chandler 1.0. The second is the unveiling — for what is being labeled a public beta — of something called Open Salon.

While the news is not live on the Salon site yet, it’s already on Techmeme, so I’m going to go ahead and note it.

Open Salon is the present incarnation of a project I proposed a long time ago at Salon as we tried to figure out a future for the old Salon Blogs program, which had been built on Radio Userland, a program that had fallen by the wayside.

When Dreaming in Code was done I returned to Salon and started to work on it. A year and a half later, we had some neat prototypes, but we were still awfully far from launching, I got excited about a new book idea, and it was time for me to move on.

The Open Salon that opens its doors today — it’s been in private beta for a while — is an outgrowth of the work I did back then, but of course over the past year the project has evolved much further. I’ve been concentrating too assiduously on my book deadline to do more than cheer the present effort from afar, and I can take little credit for much of anything about Open Salon in its present form. It’s the work of Kerry Lauerman and his team — and, now that the participants are using it, it’s in the hands of Salon’s readers the people formerly known as Salon’s readers, to make of it something new and exciting.

The one thing I’ll claim is to say, proudly, that from day one at Salon I was the editor pushing the publication hardest toward opening out to the Web and experimenting with ways of using it to bridge the ancient divide between writer and reader. I’m delighted to see Salon taking this next step. Congratulations to everyone there who helped make it happen.

There’s a post by Matthew Ingram up already. Also one at CNet (“Salon launches blogger ‘tipping’ system”) that, I think, may put far too much emphasis on one small feature of the project — the “tip jar.” I have no inside information but it seems inevitable to me that Salon will want to experiment with the whole idea of reward mechanisms, and I would be really surprised if the “tip jar” was the only effort made in that direction.

UPDATE: Joan Walsh’s official announcement about Open Salon is now up.

Chandler 1.0 ships

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When I first began reporting on Chandler for Dreaming in Code at the very start of 2003, there was talk of shipping a 1.0 version within a year. Then, in following years, the project got so bogged down that at times it was hard to imagine it ever arriving at such a milestone.

Well, on Friday, the OSAF team released a 1.0 version of Chandler. At the moment I am too deep in the swamps of blog history circa 2001 to do full justice to this news, but must take note nonetheless.

Chandler, of course, is the personal-information-management application whose story sat at the center of my first book. I last checked in on the project at the start of this year, when OSAF and Kapor parted ways.

It’s been close to six years since Mitch Kapor first announced plans for Chandler, and the application today is quite different from what was envisioned then. But it does fulfill at least a portion of the ambitious agenda Kapor set: It’s fully cross-platform, and, from the user side, it takes a very flexible approach to data. The program was once positioned as a calendar with email and task capabilities, and it’s still got those features, but it’s now presented as a notebook program — it’s “The Note-To-Self Organizer.” You store information free-form and then can organize it according to now/later/done triaging, turn items into tasks and schedule them on the calendar, group data in multiple collections, and share it across the web via the Hub server. I’m looking forward to experimenting more with it.

The OSAF blog post announcement includes some more detail. And James Fallows has a good post up at the Atlantic.

McCain’s pass on adultery: the real double standard

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There’s a lot of fingers pointing today about double standards in the media because of the mainstream outlets’ unwillingness to follow the National Enquirer’s lead on the Edwards adultery story. But there are other, more important double standards that have to do with candidates who are still in the race.

This — from Electoral-vote.com, a site that was of great value in 2004 and promises to be so once more this year, given the electoral-vote teeter-totter — is worth the virtual ink to re-blog, I think:

It will be interesting to see if any enterprising reporter asks John McCain point blank: “Have you ever committed adultery?” It is a germane question because (1) Edwards adultery is big news and (2) McCain has made “moral character” the main issue of his campaign.

McCain may not be too keen to answer yes or no because the truth won’t please the family values crowd. While he was a P.O.W. in Vietnam, his first wife, model Carol Shepp, was seriously injured in a horrific traffic accident in which she was thrown through the windshield. She didn’t mention this in her letters to him in Vietnam to keep his morale up. When he got back and saw her 4 inches shorter, seriously overweight, and on crutches, he began having affairs. One piece of indisputable evidence is the fact that he obtained a license to marry wealthy beer heiress Cindy Hensley on March 6, 1980, while still legally married to Carol. Here is the L.A. Times story but if you type: McCain adultery to Google, you’ll get 500,000 hits. Journalistic standards ought to require that if Edwards cheating on his sick wife is an indication of a deep moral flaw, then McCain cheating on his sick wife ought to be the same thing. And McCain is a candidate for President; Edwards is not.

Here’s a permalink to that post at electoral-vote.com. This story is neither new nor a secret, yet it never seems to have weighed in the scales against McCain. Like George W. Bush’s drinking and drug use, the GOP campaign has successfully transformed these past transgressions into non-issues, and the political press seems largely OK with that.

Sarah Lacy’s Once You’re Lucky: Money doesn’t change everything

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I’ve just finished Sarah Lacy’s book Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0, and I’m feeling a little…green. Lacy’s portrait of this decade’s Web industry is so relentlessly shaped by the yardstick of cash — how much money this entrepreneur made, how many millions that startup is valued at — that by the end of the book, you can’t help having absorbed a little of that world view.

As I put down the volume, I found myself thinking, gee, why didn’t I start a company in my dorm room and pocket tens of millions before I turned 30? Then I slapped myself in the face a couple of times and reminded myself that the last time I lived in a dorm room, the Web didn’t even exist — and that when I set out to become a writer the idea wasn’t, how can I make millions, but rather, is it possible to support myself doing what I love? (I was lucky enough to have the world answer “yes!”)

To be fair, Lacy’s a business reporter; she’s written a business book; business is all about money. She paints a colorful and absorbing portrait of the world of Silicon Valley’s latest wave of smart kids to strike it rich. On the other hand, I can’t accept that her account offers an accurate portrait of “the rise of Web 2.0.” Because, in a way, I feel like I was there, too, at least in the earlier phases, talking with many of the same people and companies that Lacy writes about, showing up at many of the same conferences, witnessing the same phenomena. And it just looked, and felt, different to me: at the start, it was much less about retaining control of one’s company and much more about giving control to one’s users.

First, the good stuff about Once You’re Lucky: It’s full of amusing anecdotes, some of them illuminating, and it offers some valuable insights into the motivation of many of today’s young Web entrepreneurs and the complexity of their relationships with their financiers. It gives a great tour of how the startup and venture capital games have changed over the past decade, as the cost of launching a company has dwindled, reducing the need for big upfront investments that dilute founders’ stakes, even as the prospect of everybody-gets-rich IPOs has grown rarer.

I fault the book in a few areas. In tracing the emergence of the Web 2.0 era’s emphasis on social networking and user contributions, Once You’re Lucky is neglectful of the long history of these phenomena that predates the Web 2.0 era. From Amazon book reviews to the Mining Company (later About.com) to the AOL “guides” and on and on, the so-called “Web 1.0” era was actually full of content created by “the crowd.” Its most overinflated and notoriously flaky IPO, in fact, that of TheGlobe.com, was entirely a “community play” (though in a way that betrayed the best possibilities of online community). The Web of the day just wasn’t as efficient as the later generation of companies at organizing the material contributed by users, and there weren’t nearly as many contributors, and Google hadn’t come along yet to help the rest of the Web find the contributions (and to help the companies profit from them).

My biggest beef with Lacy’s book is that its choice of which companies to focus on seems capricious. Maybe it was just based on who she got access to. Plainly, Lacy got lots of great material from one of her central figures, Paypal cofounder Max Levchin, and she paints a thorough profile of the driven entrepreneur. But, his company, Slide, just isn’t all that interesting or innovative. After reading several chapters about it I still can’t tell you exactly what the company’s driving idea is. It does slideshows on MySpace! It’s big on widgets! It out-Facebooks Facebook with apps like Super Poke! But, you know, if you were stuck in the proverbial elevator with Levchin, could he actually tell you what Slide is all about?

There are other stories in the book whose inclusion makes more immediate sense. Few today would argue against Facebook’s significance, and it’s worth the time Lacy spends on it (though one might look for a little more skepticism). Ning may or may not prove important, but Marc Andreessen’s story is valuable in itself. What’s most interesting about Digg is its model for group editing (which, again, is based on “Web 1.0” roots via Slashdot), not its so-far-unfulfilled quest to sell itself.

Lacy might have delivered a more comprehensive portrait of Web 2.0 by offering more than cursory mentions of the companies that, in my book, really created the template for that phenomenon: Flickr, Delicious, the short-lived Oddpost (which got absorbed into Yahoo Mail). These small startups, growing like mushrooms out of the mulch of dead dotcom treetrunks, pioneered virtually all of the tools and technologies we now think of as “Web 2.0”: easy sharing of media creations; tagging of content to create user-generated “folksonomies”; Ajax techniques for inside-the-browser applications; and so on.

It seems that even though these services and companies were at the heart of the invention of Web 2.0, they don’t figure prominently in Lacy’s narrative because, by the financial yardstick, they were relatively small potatoes (all three were acquired relatively early by Yahoo for amounts rumored to be in the low tens of millions). Levchin is a lot richer than the founders and creators of these companies, but in my view, their work was far more significant.

As someone in the middle of writing a book on a related topic that is inevitably going to face similar criticism (how could you write about this blogger and not that one?), I know that Lacy couldn’t possibly cover every significant company. It’s just not clear what criteria she used to make her choices beyond the will-o’-the-wisp that is market valuation (especially wispy when your company is not actually traded on the market).

So this is where I say: the importance of a company does not lie in how rich it makes its founders, but rather in how widely its ideas spread. The business reporter who is too easily mesmerized by the number of zeroes in a company’s valuation is like the political reporter who is only interested in the horse race.

By themselves, numbers are dull. To me, the fluctuations of a company’s market value, like the ebb and flow of a politician’s polling numbers, is only of interest as part of a larger picture: How is that company, or politician, influencing our world?

[The book’s site is here, and here’s Lacy’s blog. Katie Hafner’s critical review is here. The SF Chronicle review by Marcus Banks is here.]

ABC should reveal anthrax-Saddam connection sources

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In Salon, Glenn Greenwald spent the weekend doggedly pursuing a series of disturbing questions — old but terribly pertinent once more — about ABC News’ coverage of the anthrax attacks in Oct. 2001. Specifically, the network promoted reports that linked the anthrax letters to Saddam Hussein — reports that (a) we now know had zero basis in fact and (b) were based on confidential sourcing. The identity of those sources (whom we can today judge as manipulative liars) could tell us a lot about the deceptions that led us into Iraq and the many unanswered questions still swirling around the anthrax incidents.

ABC has essentially stonewalled on the whole matter. Jay Rosen, Dan Gillmor and Dan Kennedy have picked up on Greenwald’s work and pushed for answers.

The key thing about protecting anonymous sources is: it’s all about protecting whistleblowers from retribution. If you’re a reporter and you discover that your sources demanded anonymity because they were manipulating you or lying, you’re no longer under any obligation to protect them. (See Greenwald on all this here.) In fact, the public good probably demands that you expose them. Which is what Greenwald, and Rosen, and Gillmor, and what I hope will be a growing number of respected voices are all pushing for in the case of ABC and anthrax.

Blogging and journalism: it’s a graph, not a line

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Romenesko is linking to this from Adam Lashinsky at Fortune:

I’ve been coming around to the opinion that bloggers are just journalists and that the oft-discussed distinctions aren’t meaningful. Let’s just say I’m in the minority. Old-school readers can’t stand these folks for their perceived lack of standards, and the new crowd (my panelists were no younger than I am) wants nothing to do with fuddy-duddy readers. I’m willing to make the same prediction about blogging that I made 10 years ago about “Internet” companies: In 10 years there won’t be an distinction. Blogging will be part of the multi-media spectrum.

So let’s repeat this once more.

Being a blogger does not make you a journalist any more than being a journalist makes you a blogger.

Journalists can (and more and more, they do) blog. People who have blogs are not typically writing journalism but have the opportunity — thanks to the technology — to perform acts of journalism and see them reach a wide public.

Lashinsky wants to erase the line between “journalist” to “blogger,” but it’s not a line, it’s a classic four-quadrant graph. There’s an X axis from “not blogging at all” to “blogging all the time,” and there’s a Y axis from, say, “writes the equivalent of a private diary” to “writes exclusively about public affairs.”

Calling blogging “part of the multimedia spectrum” speaks to the pro journalist’s perspective, for whom the blog is just one more form to explore. That’s a relatively minor aspect of blogging; the real excitement lies in the far wider reaches of the blogosphere that are filled with non-journalists who are beginning to figure out that journalism is no longer a closed guild.

I tried to explain this when I started my blog in July, 2002, and still think the explanation holds:

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.

McCain’s celeb ad, Obama’s premature presidentiality

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It was just about four years ago that the Swift Boat campaign kicked into high gear and knocked the Kerry campaign back on its heels. Kerry’s failure to deal with the attack quickly and decisively probably cost him the election. Here it is, four years later, and pretty much the same team of GOP attack dogs are pulling the same set of tricks.

The day kicked off with a front-page NY Times story talking about the new McCain campaign ad juxtaposing images of Barack Obama with those of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. The ad struck some observers as an underhanded subliminal attack, and reminded a lot of Democrats of how the GOP took down Harold Ford, the black Tennessee senatorial candidate in 2006, with suggestive ads featuring a white woman talking about meeting the black candidate at “a Playboy party” and concluding with her cooing, “Harold — call me!”

The McCain team says The Britney-‘n’-Paris ad is innocent: all they’re trying to say is that Obama has become too much of a celebrity, and we need someone with more substance. To which one can only say: C’mon! Whatever you think of Obama, the “airhead” charge seems bizarre and so remote from reality as to be laughable. But then it all starts to make sense when you remember that rule number one in the Karl Rove playbook is, attack your opponent where he’s strongest. Running against a genuine war hero? Smear his heroism. Running against a gifted orator and charismatic leader? Call him a fluffball.

I don’t think it can work this time, but my optimism has been cruelly disappointed in the past. And if you followed the other big campaign narrative of the last couple of days, you might get a little pessimistic, too. A Dana Milbank piece in Wednesday’s Washington Post delivered a new angle of attack on Obama: Somehow, Milbank seems to think, there is something wrong with the way Obama is projecting confidence, traveling the world, talking to leaders in politics and finance, and being protected (like all presidential candidates) by the Secret Service. Why, he has even begun doing some transition planning (a move that a recent bipartisan op-ed piece suggested is essential for national security). The candidate should not be doing these things! He is guilty of acting prematurely presidential!

It’s a pathetic, damned-either-way kind of complaint. When a presidential candidate acts un-presidential, the pundits are all over him for it — and well they should be. Now we have a guy who has some genuinely presidential characteristics, and, what — he’s supposed to keep the leadership, the dignity, and, yes, the power that comes with leading in the polls all cloaked till after Election Day?

The Milbank piece was built around a statement that Obama had purportedly made at a meeting with members of Congress:

“This is the moment . . . that the world is waiting for,” adding: “I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.”

This statement turned out, upon further investigation, to be a third-hand, out-of-context misquote. What the candidate actual said was that he wished he could take credit for the big crowds and the excitement, but that “it’s not about me, it’s about America.” In other words, he wasn’t saying, egotistically, “I am a symbol”; he was saying, self-deprecatingly, “I’m just a symbol.”

None of this stopped Milbank’s misquote from sparking a cable-news feeding frenzy (you can watch a hilarious summary of it in this TPM video). The agenda item of the day was to call Obama “arrogant,” “messianic,” “presumptuous” — or, in the words of Fred Barnes, who made the “uppity Negro” undertones a little too overt for comfort, “too big for his britches.”

This kind of chattering-class duncery is laughable — until it coalesces into conventional wisdom and starts affecting the polls. The Obama campaign responded to the McCain celebrity attack quickly, with an effective counterpunch spot. The next two to three weeks will be critical in determining whether the Swift Boat technique will once again sway an election.

It’s a different year, with different issues, and Obama is a far more adroit candidate than Kerry. Still, when the slime begins to pile up like this, the floor starts to get awfully sticky.

Here’s the great TPM compilation video:

Tools for an informational self-audit

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“Pay attention to what you’re paying attention to.” I believe I first heard this exhortation from Howard Rheingold. Don’t know if he said it first or got it from some other wise person. It’s always struck me as good advice. And as I return from a week spent entirely offline I find myself wanting to take it — in a systematic way.

People go on diets where they watch what their bodies consume. Some of us keep budgets where we track the money we earn and spend. What about pursuing a similar approach to the information we feed our minds?

I’d like to do this: take some period of time — a day, a week? — and track exactly how I’m spending my media time. I’ve read about the concept of the media fast, but this is something different — more like keeping a food diary for one’s media intake.

Are there any tools out there for doing this? Examples of other people who’ve done it? I’ve googled “Media audit” but, alas, this phrase appears to have been monopolized by the advertising industry. Maybe Lifehacker has posted on this? Post me some pointers and I’ll follow up.

Bloggers vs. journalists again: Getting it right the first time

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You go away for a week, you come back, and people are still arguing about blogging and journalism! Sheesh. This bit jumped out at me from my catchup reading, an exchange that took place on a panel at a conference hosted by Fortune:

Scoble said that the difference between bloggers and traditional media like Fortune magazine is that the audience participation helps keep his blog honest. “This is written by the audience. People participate in fact-checking,” he said.

Lashinsky, however, got the last laugh. “In the old school, we like to get it right the first time.”

This exchange could have taken place in any year since 2002. I imagine it will still be taking place five years from now. Here’s the problem: both positions are off in a fundamental way.

Scoble’s audience doesn’t write his blog; he does. Saying “this is written by the audience” is simply repepating a formulation of Web 2.0-style idealism that overstates the audience’s role. If it was “written by the audience,” then the audience would cease to be such — it would have become, in Dan Gillmor’s amusing coinage, the people formerly known as audience. (I haven’t seen a video or full transcript of the panel; context might shed some clarity here.) What Scoble means is what most bloggers understand: that their writing exists in a real-time dialogue with their readers, in a fashion that is simply impossible in print, and that does transform the writer’s experience.

Scoble is guilty of exaggeration; Lashinsky’s comment is the one that’s really off. It’s a glib line that I’m sure harvested a wave of guffaws. The thing is, everybody — old school or new — “likes” to get it right the first time. Doing so is hard work. I’m working like mad trying to get every little bit of chronology nailed down for my blogging book; this stuff matters when you’re composing non-fiction.

The problem with the “old school” defense is that, sadly, the old school — newspapers, magazines, broadcast — really screws up the details too regularly to make this argument a credible case. If you have personal deep knowledge of a story, you are bound to find an alarming volume of errors in most versions you encounter in the professional press: everything from misspelled names to basic factual goofs to broad misunderstandings of subject-area subtleties. Yes, there are rare reporters who you can count on to Get Stuff Right. Sadly, they are the exceptions.

Of course we all want “to get it right the first time.” If that’s not a given, then — blogger or ink-stained wretch — you’re in the wrong field. The question is, which approach, the old-fashioned newsroom or the two-way Web, yields the best results when you don’t get it right the first time? If you accept that we live in a fallen world and journalism is always going to be full of errors, one might well prefer the corrective feedback loop of the blogosphere, where you have the chance, thanks to the technology, both to hear from your readership that you’ve gotten something wrong and to correct the story immediately.

Amusingly, as I dig into the history of blogging, its coverage in the media has provided me with an alarming pile of gaffes and errors. Consider this one tiny but glaring example of many: When Justin Hall shut down his blog, posting a dramatic confessional video explaining his decision, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote about his decision. The front-page article was headlined, “Time to get a life — pioneer blogger Justin Hall bows out at 31.”

Unfortunately, if you read the article carefully, you learn, a few paragraphs in, that “Hall recently turned 30.” The newspaper had contradicted itself in its own front-page headline. The article text was correct; the hed was wrong. The paper never fixed the error.

UPDATE: Here’s more from Scoble on this.

BlogHer and beyond

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Whenever anyone says “the blogosphere” (yes, this includes me), you need to back them up and ask, “Which blogosphere would you be referring to?”

If you come from the tech-news world, as I do, you will think of that realm. Or perhaps you’re immersed in the political blogs, and that’s what you mean.

Today there are a myriad blogospheres, scattered like alternative realities across the Web. I was reminded of this, forcefully and delightfully, over the last day and a half at Blogher. I got some interviews done for my book, met some great people, but mostly marveled at the energy and the stories.

There’s so much more to write. But we’re getting ready for our final trip of the summer — off for a few days in the mountains, and off-the-grid. So all that will have to wait. Keep things together while we’re away, ok?