Hand-forged posts since 2002
We’ve been on vacation this week — springtime on the Pacific coast! — so no posts about Hillary vs. Obama, the transformation of the WSJ by Rupert Murdoch (the original Mediogre) or anything much else.
LATE CLARIFICATION: There was no seal massacre! These mothers and pups are just taking a little break (as we were).
Here’s a fascinating story from Jay Rosen about the Off the Bus blogger who first reported on Obama’s “bitter in Pennsylvania” comments.
It turns out, as so many important stories do, to be far more complex and nuanced than anything you’re likely to have heard on TV or in the papers, which mostly preferred not to name the story’s source: Mayhill Fowler, an Obama supporter who has been blogging for Off the Bus (a collaboration between Huffington Post and Rosen’s NewAssignment, for which I have served as an adviser in the past).
Fowler attended Obama’s San Francisco fundraiser. Traditionally, the press has not reported on what candidates say at private fundraisers. Fowler seemed blur the roles of “supporter” and “reporter” well enough that she got access to the event without ever being asked not to cover it.
Rosen talks about how “uncharted” the campaign terrain is today, with no clear boundaries separating those participating in the campaign from those covering the campaign. In the New York Times, Katherine Seelye asks, “Is it possible to straddle the line between reporter and supporter?”
Fowler’s story answers that question pretty definitively. Of course it’s possible. The fixed roles of the old campaign drama are dissolving. Everyone’s improvising. The bad news is that a lot of people are confused. The good news is that a lot more people can participate — and hear what’s said behind previously closed doors.
If you are a politician speaking to a crowd — any crowd — you should pretty much assume that everything you say can and will be broadcast to the world. That’s the lesson that George Allen learned, and it’s one Obama should know, too.
Apparently some Obama supporters feel that bloggers should be understood to be “activists” not “journalists,” and that Fowler betrayed their cause:
Bloggers are viewed as activists, not journalists. It’ s why some campaigns have blogger conference calls and press conference calls. The blogger calls are to pump up the base. The press calls are to do spin and answer arguably tough questions. She was admitted to the private San Francisco fund-raiser as an activist blogger and then functioned as a journalist.
This strikes me as one of those distinctions that is untenable. Some bloggers are activists, some are journalists; some are diarists, some are businesspeople. Saying you’re “a blogger” doesn’t make you an activist or a journalist or anything else; all it means is that you’re someone who posts stuff on the Web. Since the Web is public, this practice has a natural slope, a gravitational pull; things roll naturally from the private to the public.
So, yes, on the Web the “line between supporter and reporter” has been smudged out. One result, this week, is that Obama’s campaign has suffered a setback — and as an Obama supporter, I might be mildly disappointed. But, far more importantly, as a journalist I’m happy to see more and more of the previously curtained elements of our election process brought forth into view. Ultimately, it’s better for everyone to know what Obama said at his fundraiser.
But now we’ve only heard from one of three candidates. Next, let’s turn on the mikes in the rooms where Hillary Clinton is talking to her backers. And let’s listen in on John McCain wooing those wary evangelicals!
As long as I can remember I’ve read the New York Times (I grew up in NYC). Since the mid 90s — when I moved from being a newspaper critic to the Web universe, both covering it and participating in it — I’ve also read the Wall Street Journal daily. The Journal, despite its paleolithic editorial page, had a whole different slice of material than the Times: more in-depth coverage of tech business, lengthy investigative features, those quirky column-three features on the front page. The two papers were complementary.
Now, under Murdoch, the Journal is getting more — there’s no other word for it — redundant. The front page has more news headlines and fewer unique features. Increasingly, I find myself saying, “I’ve already read this.”
I don’t get why Murdoch is pushing the Journal to be more generic. The stuff the Journal does that nobody else does is the only reason to buy the paper (or read it online). Breaking news and color photos are commodities today.
Maybe Murdoch sees himself moving into some sort of old-fashioned newspaper war with the Times. But from where I sit, he’s just pushing me closer to the point where I say, “Why do I need two newspapers?”
At many a conference I have attended on new media and journalism, some old pro whose subsidy is fast disappearing will (mentally) place hands on hips and say about the Internet as a whole, “Well, that’s all very nice, very Web 2.0, but where’s the business model, people?” As if that were some kind of contribution. I can’t tell you how disconcerting — and weird — I find some of these performances.
The funny thing is, those guys have been doing that as long as the Web has been around — pointing this lack of prospective revenues out as if it were not their problem but someone else’s.
Today’s Journal features a Portals column by Vauhini Vara that represents yet another attempt to gauge how far Web apps have come by attempting to “live on the Web,” forsaking all desktop-based software. (Others — like James Fallows in 2006 in Technology Review, whose effort I wrote about back then — have done this before.)
The trouble with this approach is that it’s a total straw man. No one would ever do this except to provide column fodder. The shifts in our software habits are incremental; we don’t “change state” 100 percent, we just drift in one direction. And the drift today is overwhelmingly towards the Web.
Of course Vara finds the trouble spots exactly where you’d expect: If you’re tied in to a corporate email system, giving up Outlook for a Web interface is still painful. Spreadsheets and PDFs are harder to work with. Web-based writing tools are pretty good but so far they haven’t provided a good replacement for Word’s clumsy but essential “track changes” feature.
OK. In the meantime, those of us who aren’t locked in to Outlook long ago went with Gmail or some other Web-based email system. We keep and share our calendars on the Web, and increasingly we use Web-based tools to coordinate small work groups. No one is holding a gun to our heads, so we happily mix Web apps and desktop apps. Why not?
If you’re starting a small business today, are you going to invest in Outlook or are you just going to piggyback on some Web service? When the business begins to grow, are you going to pay the big Outlook tax or stick with what’s working? As developers devise new useful tools for communication and coordination, are they introduced on the desktop or on the Web — or in both places?
These are the trends that matter. “All or nothing” is beside the point.
My friend and former colleague Chad Dickerson has a great post about Facebook developers reliving the perennial platform-developer’s nightmare: if you build something really wonderful, sooner or later the platform owner incorporates what you invented into the core software.
This line should be savored:
As the old Santayana quote goes, “those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” but in Silicon Valley, those who rely on their command of history too much often find themselves getting crushed by a 23-year-old who skipped history class in favor of a CS degree.
The platform developer’s dilemma goes back a long way: among other things, to the early days of Dave Winer’s web writing (he’d experienced the phenomenon when he saw his own Macintosh scripting environment eclipsed by Apple’s less versatile in-house effort). But it goes even farther back than that — back before Windows. In the 80s, DOS dominated the world, but you couldn’t really run DOS without a zillion helper utilities. Over time and successive DOS releases many of these helper utilities were incorporated into the OS. Much of the time this was a Good Thing for users, and many of the utilities were freeware anyway, but if you’d tried to build a for-profit business around some essential extension to DOS, you were on shaky ground — and Microsoft was the beast causing the tremors.
Chad locates the difference in today’s software world in the speed of development:
Velocity changes everything. As the developers dance faster in this new environment, so too does the platform elephant. The faster the elephant dances, the more likely “the little people” underneath (as Ariana calls platform developers in the News.com story) could get unwittingly trampled in the process.
Very true. But in the end, I think, developers understandably flock toward any platform on which large numbers of users have pitched their tents — true for DOS decades ago, Facebook today, and who knows what tomorrow.
PS I’m reasonably sure the canonical version of the Santayana quotation is:
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
But the Web is full of variations. And those who cannot remember their quotes are condemned to wander the Web’s copycat quote pages!
Matt Richtel is on the front page of today’s Times with a piece about the tech blogosphere as a 24/7 sweatshop — one that might even be killing some of its (older) practitioners.
“It looks like a desk job, but for some bloggers it is more like a factory,” reads the pullquote.
The piece is, I think, reasonably accurate as a portrait of the tiny sliver of the blogging universe that the commercialized tech-news blog world represents. Where it goes awry is in suggesting that this represents the archetypal blogging experience.
This passage is the problem:
There are growing legions of online chroniclers, reporting on and reflecting about sports, politics, business, celebrities and every other conceivable niche. Some write for fun, but thousands write for Web publishers — as employees or as contractors — or have started their own online media outlets with profit in mind.
“Some write for fun.” I think, realistically, this might say, “Most write for fun.” The emphasis now suggests that “a limited number write for fun, but THOUSANDS write for publishers…” To me even “thousands” seems exaggerated — does the pro blogosphere really employ that many?
Leaving that aside, the “some/thousands” construction suggests that the majority of participants are in sweatshop mode, and that’s obviously wrong. This sentence should really read: “Millions write for fun, but thousands write for Web publishers…”
Achieving more clarity on this point might have made the piece somewhat less appealing to the page one editors, of course.
More: Matthew Ingram says the Times was just “trolling” for links. Doc Searls points out that “scoops are overrated.” And Marc Andreessen mocks the Times with some other headlines we can look forward to, including “The Bloggers have WMD.”
P.S. I will make $0.00 on this post! And I’m at least 8 hours late with my observations. Then again, I got to drink my coffee before I sat down to write.
LATER: Larry Dignan of ZDNet has some sensible observations similar to some of what I was thinking as I read the Times piece:
Let’s put a little perspective on this blogging thing. You could be getting shot at in Iraq. You could be a single mom working three jobs to stay afloat (Happy Birthday mom). You could work in a coal mine. You could be in a life and death battle with Leukemia. You could be doing any one of thousands of high-stress jobs. Sure, the Web has a lot of stress but let’s get real: If you’re stressed out over 5,000 RSS feeds chances are good you’d be stressed by any profession you chose.
And Dave Winer points out in a comment below that there’s an element of professional-journalistic defensiveness in the article’s premise:
Of course this piece is aimed at themselves and others like them. Look, we’re being replaced by crazies who work for nothing, never sleep and die of heart attacks.
It’s like NAFTA for professional writers.
I’ve spent most of this week deep in the archival attic, researching the new book in old documents, digging through the dull roots of today’s Web, planted back in the 90s. It’s been strange and enlightening; I’ve found much interesting material.
One thing that becomes clear is that what we now think of as “the Bubble” was surprisingly brief. The Web actually experienced something of a downturn beginning in late ’97 and early ’98, and extending through the Long Term Capital meltdown later in ’98. It was only toward the end of ’98 that the bubble really began to inflate in a serious way. The High Bubble lasted till April 2000, when the market suddenly realized, like Wile E. Coyote poised in midair above a canyon, that it was standing on air.
So the era of high dotcom madness was really barely a moment: 18 months or so.
The other thing I’ve learned is how much more extensive the Internet Archive is than I’d realized. I’ve been using the archive heavily for days. I’ve picked up some pointers that, perhaps, others already know; I’ll share them anyway in case they prove helpful.
First of all, ignore all the error messages the Archive itself sends you, like “bad gateway” or “failed connection.” These are indicators of momentary failure; they don’t mean your page isn’t there. Try, try again; reload; eventually, you may get what you’re looking for. (On the other hand, error messages that are stored on target pages that represent the archive’s record of a snapshot of the web page itself — they’re real. They mean that the archive’s bot hit that error message and never recorded the page you’re seeking.)
Also: If the archive tells you that the earliest edition of a particular page it has is from, say, 1997, this doesn’t mean that the site’s content from previous years is gone forever. Iit’s true that you’ll probably never be able to recall, for instance, the Hotwired home page from 1995 — since it was constantly mutating, day by day with new content and year by year with new designs. But the material published on a site that lived at permalinked or semi-permalinked addresses can still often be dug up from Archive.org by poking your way carefully from the present into the past through the site’s own “back issues” or archives or “previously” links.
For instance, Web Review, the early GNN-backed web zine, vanished long before the Web Archive started up, along with most of GNN itself — a crib-death for one of the Web’s earliest original content ventures. Still, I was able to unearth my friend Andrew Leonard’s first piece (from Sept. 1995) for Web Review, all about “clickstream” measurement: Here it is.
We don’t have all of the early Web, but we have more of it than you might think!
My former Salon colleague Farhad Manjoo is out the gate early with an elaborate and delightful April Fool’s stunt called “I Google For You.” Check it out.
I can’t figure out if it’s truly the latter-day, John Henry, man vs. machine thing it purports to be, or whether there’s in fact some Eliza-style script behind the scenes cranking out the slightly customized search results. Since upon inputting one query I learned I was 84th in the queue, yet I received a link to my answer in an emailed reply within a minute or so, something tells me there’s more machine than man at work here.
Either that, or Farhad’s in for a long night!