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Stimulus plan — rebate or bonus?

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The president and Congress are falling all over each other to hand money out to Americans in some vague hope that we will spend it and thus avert a recession. Economists tell us that the only people who actually spend these “rebates” are people who are poor enough that a few hundred dollars makes a big difference to them. Unsurprisingly, the Bush administration is not interested in giving money away to poor people. The only way Bush can stomach the notion of giving people money is to call it a “tax rebate,” so, as in 2001, tax rebates are what we are going to get.

An op-ed by a behavioral psychologist in today’s Times reports his research demonstrating that when you give people money and call it a “rebate” they don’t spend it. When we hear “rebate” we think we’re getting back money we already spent, and we’re most likley to sock it away. On the other hand, if you call it a “bonus,” our wallets open — it feels like found money and can fuel a splurge.

It would indeed make sense to call the sort of bales-of-bills-out-of-helicopters stimulus that Congress and the president support a “bonus.” But then Bush and his party couldn’t clothe their handout in the protective coloration of a “tax cut.” “Bonus” sounds too close to what’s really going on — the government handing some cash to its citizens — and such forthrightness has certainly not been a Washington priority during the past seven years.

This is politics, not economics, and it matters far more to the Bush administration than the minor issue of whether or not the measure actually achieves its goal of boosting consumer spending.

“Bonus” also carries echoes of a distant time when Army veterans thronged the capital demanding that the government make good on its promises while banks collapsed and markets panicked.

And nobody in either party wants to think about that. They are fortunate, in any case, that the Depression is receding from living memory, and few Americans have studied its history.
[tags]recession, economics, tax rebate, stimulus plan[/tags]

Some Gibson, then a break

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We’re leaving tomorrow on a brief mid-winter getaway, so I may be absent from these precincts for a handful of days. Before I go, two passages worth savoring from Andrew Leonard’s recent interview with William Gibson in Rolling Stone:

How does it break down for you? Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future?

I find myself less pessimistic than I sometimes imagine I should be. When I started to write science fiction, the intelligent and informed position on humanity’s future was that it wasn’t going to have one at all. We’ve forgotten that a whole lot of smart people used to wake up every day thinking that that day could well be the day the world ended. So when I started writing what people saw as this grisly dystopian, punky science fiction, I actually felt that I was being wildly optimistic: “Hey, look — you do have a future. It’s kind of harsh, but here it is.” I wasn’t going the post-apocalyptic route, which, as a regular civilian walking around the world, was pretty much what I expected to happen myself.

Also:

The very first time I picked up a Sony Walkman, I knew it was a killer thing, that the world was changing right then and there. A year later, no one could imagine what it was like when you couldn’t move around surrounded by a cloud of stereophonic music of your own choosing. That was huge! That was as big as the Internet!

My review of Carr’s “Big Switch”

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I return to the pages of Salon tonight with a full review of Nick Carr’s new book, “The Big Switch”:

“The Big Switch” falls neatly into two halves. The first, which I can enthusiastically recommend, draws an elegant and illuminating parallel between the late-19th-century electrification of America and today’s computing world. In the less persuasive latter section, Carr surveys the Internet’s transformations of our world, and questions whether we should welcome them. His questions are good ones; indeed, any treatment of this subject that failed to explore them couldn’t be taken seriously. But in his eagerness to discredit “techno-utopian dreamers” and expound a theory of the Internet as a technology of control, Carr fast-forwards to dour conclusions that his slender argument can’t possibly support.

I had a variety of quarrels with Carr’s book (here’s the official site), but it’s most certainly an important contribution to today’s debate about the Web’s cultural sway. I remain more of an optimist than the author, but he presents the darker view with more heft, more care and more credibility than many others attempting to make this case (like Andrew Keen and Lee Siegel).

One of the points I didn’t cover in my Salon piece was the great comparison Carr makes between the “millwork” of Victorian-era factories and the complex custom software products today’s developers build for contemporary information factories. Millwork meant elaborate, Rube-Goldberg-like devices, unique to each location, designed to transfer the power from some source like a water-wheel to the factory’s machinery. Once electricity came along things got simpler, but each factory still ran its own plant — until the electrical grid rendered that whole approach obsolete.

In one of the best parts of his book, Carr argues, pretty definitively, that today’s custom software work is destined to disappear, as the old millwork did, once the Web-based software-as-service grid really takes off. I think Carr may discount a little too readily the difficulty of building effective and reliable Web-based services; even after you outsource your infrastructure and “mash up” your tools and so on, this stuff doesn’t happen by itself — somebody’s got to write the code to put it all together, and somebody’s got to fix it when it stops working. But Carr is plainly right that much of what we’ve taken for granted as the stuff of corporate information management is about to go up in smoke.

In an amusing coincidence, I was listening today to the first of Mitch Kapor’s lectures about “disruptive innovation” — the one in which he talks about the early days of the PC and his role as one of its most spectacularly successful software entrepreneurs. Kapor tells a hilarious tale (if you get the audio file, it starts around the 59:00 mark) of being summoned in 1983 to visit the office of Ken Olsen, founder of the Digital Equipment Corporation. Kapor’s company, Lotus, and the new IBM PC its products run on, are beginning to worry the minicomputer industry establishment. So Olsen sends a helicopter out to whisk the young upstart to Digital’s HQ. Olsen proceeds to deliver a mad rant to Kapor. What is he so miffed about? The flimsy construction of the IBM PC’s case!

It’s a curious instance of fiddling in the face of an inferno. But the detail that stuck with me was Kapor’s mention that Digital’s headquarters, in Maynard, Massachusetts, occupied a grand old mill building.
[tags]nicholas carr, big switch, mitch kapor, technology history[/tags]

David Simon asks, does news have any value?

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I’ve been reading with some fascination the latest round in the garment-rending “What’s happening to our newspapers?” lament — this one sparked by the current season of The Wire and a Washington Post op-ed by its auteur, former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon.

I haven’t been watching The Wire. (I know, I should be.) But I’ve read Simon’s piece — a thoughtful but I think sentimental and wrongheaded portrait of the decline of newspapering that coddles the industry for its failure of foresight.

Simon writes with the perspective of a newsroom veteran who entered the field in the wake of Watergate:

Bright and shiny we were in the late 1970s, packed into our bursting journalism schools, dog-eared paperback copies of “All the President’s Men” and “The Powers That Be” atop our Associated Press stylebooks. No business school called to us, no engineering lab, no information-age computer degree — we had seen a future of substance in bylines and column inches.

My journalism pedigree is of the same vintage as Simon’s, and though I never went to journalism school, I shared his idealistic fervor. During the 13 years that Simon worked for the Sun, I worked first for the Boston Phoenix (three years) and then for the San Francisco Examiner (a decade).

But my memory’s a little different from Simon’s. Apparently he was lucky enough to experience the ’80s as a golden age of fat editorial budgets and bold projects. Not once in my career have I worked for a newsroom that actually had the resources to devote to the sort of comprehensive coverage that Simon fondly recalls. When I entered print journalism in the early ’80s recession, with magazines closing left and right, it already seemed to me to be a decrepit and failing institution.
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A year of Dreaming in Code

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I can’t believe that it’s been a whole year since my book came out (the official publication date was Jan. 16, 2007). The paperback will be out the third week in February, with a new afterword that carries the story through the release of Chandler’s Preview edition. The recent restructuring and cutbacks of the project are foreshadowed in this section. But they happened way past the time we could have added material, which is too bad — but I guess that’s one reason that I have a blog.

I’m proud to say that Dreaming in Code also recently went into its fifth hardcover printing. We did pretty well for a book about a Beckettian software project.

This is a good moment to thank Mark Bernstein for his warm review of the book, which posted over the holidays, so I caught up with it late. I’ve met Bernstein only a couple of times — many years ago at one of the Digital Storytelling Festivals in Colorado, and then once again at one of the Bloggercons. He’s a formidable innovator and leader in the field of serious hypertext fiction, and a software entrepreneur as well, both under the umbrella of his company Eastgate Systems. One of Eastgate’s products is a Mac-based PIM called Tinderbox, one of the very few programs I know of that fulfills at least a portion of the ambitions that Chandler set out with.

Anyway, here’s a bit from his post:

On this framework, Rosenberg hangs a masterful and engaging survey of the thinking that underlies contemporary software engineering. This overview will have lasting importance, as I think it’s destined be the textbook that introduces a generation of students throughout the world to the professional practice of software and to its founding voices — Brooks and the Mythical Man Month, Parnas, Joy, the postmoderns, the agilists.

He also offers some fair criticism:

What Rosenberg doesn’t capture — because Chandler seldom captured it — is the way software actually gets written: in slow, steady segments, in dashing sprints, in long nights of inspiration, in weeks of staring at the screen, but always — in the end — by one or two people working to get something to work. In practice, this usually means one or two people imagining how it might work, and then making it happen. There wasn’t enough of this in Chandler, and when it did happen, it too often happened to infrastructure, deep in foundations that were expected to underpin grand structures that were never built.

But concludes:

To have carved such a fine, generous, and useful book out of the debris [of Chandler] is a very fine accomplishment indeed.

I’m grateful for such a response. Bernstein has also posted some fascinating ideas on what he calls “NeoVictorian Computing,” which I keep intending to post on. Soon!
[tags]chandler, mark bernstein, tinderbox[/tags]

China and the U.S. economy: Fallows follows the money

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I know I linked to it yesterday, but that just wasn’t enough.

If you want to understand the world economy today, and what has happened during the last decade between the U.S. and China, amd how the Chinese have ended up holding $1.4 trillion, you need to sit down and read James Fallows’ piece in the new Atlantic. (In the time between the piece’s research and its publication that number jumped to $1.53 trillion, Fallows reports on his blog — another reason you should read the piece!)

This is a topic of sufficient complexity that most of us have very little hope of understanding it, yet Fallows lays it out with care and clarity. Here are a handful of key passages, offered primarily to get you to click on the link to the full piece, because that’s what you should do:

Through the quarter-century in which China has been opening to world trade, Chinese leaders have deliberately held down living standards for their own people and propped them up in the United States. This is the real meaning of the vast trade surplus — $1.4 trillion and counting, going up by about $1 billion per day — that the Chinese government has mostly parked in U.S. Treasury notes. In effect, every person in the (rich) United States has over the past 10 years or so borrowed about $4,000 from someone in the (poor) People’s Republic of China. Like so many imbalances in economics, this one can’t go on indefinitely, and therefore won’t. But the way it ends — suddenly versus gradually, for predictable reasons versus during a panic — will make an enormous difference to the U.S. and Chinese economies over the next few years, to say nothing of bystanders in Europe and elsewhere…

Neither government likes to draw attention to this arrangement, because it has been so convenient on both sides. For China, it has helped the regime guide development in the way it would like — and keep the domestic economy’s growth rate from crossing the thin line that separates “unbelievably fast” from “uncontrollably inflationary.” For America, it has meant cheaper iPods, lower interest rates, reduced mortgage payments, a lighter tax burden. But because of political tensions in both countries, and because of the huge and growing size of the imbalance, the arrangement now shows signs of cracking apart…

So why is China shipping its money to America? An economist would describe the oddity by saying that China has by far the highest national savings in the world. This sounds admirable, but when taken to an extreme — as in China — it indicates an economy out of sync with the rest of the world, and one that is deliberately keeping its own people’s living standards lower than they could be…

This is the bargain China has made — rather, the one its leaders have imposed on its people. They’ll keep creating new factory jobs, and thus reduce China’s own social tensions and create opportunities for its rural poor. The Chinese will live better year by year, though not as well as they could. And they’ll be protected from the risk of potentially catastrophic hyperinflation, which might undo what the nation’s decades of growth have built. In exchange, the government will hold much of the nation’s wealth in paper assets in the United States, thereby preventing a run on the dollar, shoring up relations between China and America, and sluicing enough cash back into Americans’ hands to let the spending go on.

So what’s the problem? There are several. One is that the U.S. has set up a tough situation for itself if it finds itself in conflict with China some time in the future.

Whatever the provocation, China would consider its levers and weapons and find one stronger than all the rest — one no other country in the world can wield. Without China’s billion dollars a day, the United States could not keep its economy stable or spare the dollar from collapse.

Would the Chinese use that weapon? The reasonable answer is no, because they would wound themselves grievously, too. Their years of national savings are held in the same dollars that would be ruined; in a panic, they’d get only a small share out before the value fell. Besides, their factories depend on customers with dollars to spend.

But that “reassuring” answer is actually frightening. Lawrence Summers calls today’s arrangement “the balance of financial terror,” and says that it is flawed in the same way that the “mutually assured destruction” of the Cold War era was.

I think you’d better just go read the rest now.
[tags]china, world economy, u.s. trade deficit, james fallows[/tags]

Around the economic world in four headlines

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Many years ago, thanks to some mutual friends, I had the privilege of meeting the late George W.S. Trow, and of sitting in on a class he was giving as part of a journalism workshop at Bard College. Each morning Trow would sit down with the day’s New York Times front page and begin to find links between the stories — not hypertext (this was way pre-Web), but causal connections, cross-currents and submerged conflicts, relationships that the newspaper couldn’t or wouldn’t overtly illuminate but that you could make out if you just let the stories rub against one another in your mind.

The author of In the Context of No Context (which I wrote about in Salon a decade ago) was giving us a lesson in how to place the loose atoms of conventional news reporting into molecular structures of context. Once the lesson took, the methodology was impossible to shake.

I got those old Trowvian vibrations again this morning as I scanned the front-page of the Wall Street Journal — crammed as it is these days with four or five headlines where there used to be three, an immediate result of the new Murdoch regime.

The lead story, “Trader Made Billions on Subprime,” tells of hedge fund operator John Paulson, who has made $3 to $4 billion, personally, by “betting against the housing and mortgage markets.” Since those markets, you may have heard, have been going through a rough patch, Paulson’s “bets” paid off.

Paulson himself sounds almost contrite about his success: he’s “reluctant to celebrate while housing causes others pain,” intends to increase his charitable giving, and thinks that “a lot of homeowners have been victimized.”

This stands in contrast to Los Angeles real estate investor Jeff Greene, the subject of the Journal’s second lead, a friend of Paulson’s. Paulson invited Greene into his housing-crash fund, but Greene went off and implemented the investment strategy on his own. Paulson is irked, but Greene protests, “He never told me, ‘Don’t do it.’ ”

The “bet” paid off for Greene, too. He now has three jets. (What does one do with three jets?) He believes that he is “pretty conservative in the way I spend money”; after all, his newest jet is an “older model” Gulfstream that he got for only $2 million — a steal!

We understand that the financial engineers of Wall Street have always been handsomely rewarded. Lots of people and institutions in the financial industry lost the gambles that Paulson and company won. But I can’t help thinking there is something broken with a system in which Olympian financiers place their bets on incomprehensible financial instruments and risk winning or losing bonuses and jets — while these same transactions bear real consequences that are very comprehensible and tangible for the people whose lives they affect. When the roulette wheel of the derivatives market stops, some people get to buy jet number three; other people lose their homes.

Which leads us to headline number three: “States to Tighten Belts as Weakness of Economy Cuts Into Tax Receipts.” Here we move down from the rarefied air of Wall Street back into the thicker atmosphere of everyday reality, where, it seems, the mistakes made in the mortgage market — all the stuff that Paulson “bet” against — are now dragging down the economy, dampening consumer spending, slowing economic growth, reducing employment and cutting into government coffers. Which means less money for schools and police and children’s healthcare and other stuff that people without three jets — or even two jets! — might care about.

Finally, if your eyes scan down the page, you hit headline number four, “Toxic Factories Take Toll on China’s Labor Force” — an account of the cadmium battery industry. Making the batteries requires toxic chemicals, and when the U.S. started regulating their manufacture, the industry simply moved to a lower-cost, no-hassle home in China, and took its poisonous impact with it.

The story pulls our gaze out from the national to the global scale, reminding us that the U.S. economy now rests, even more completely than in the past, on foreign foundations. James Fallows explains how in painfully clear terms in the new Atlantic:

Through the quarter-century in which China has been opening to world trade, Chinese leaders have deliberately held down living standards for their own people and propped them up in the United States. This is the real meaning of the vast trade surplus—$1.4 trillion and counting, going up by about $1 billion per day—that the Chinese government has mostly parked in U.S. Treasury notes. In effect, every person in the (rich) United States has over the past 10 years or so borrowed about $4,000 from someone in the (poor) People’s Republic of China.

There you have it: the story of the economic world today, from prosperous financial buccaneers to worried middle-class America to the developing-world workforce that can only dream of someday upgrading its problems to the sort we in the United States contend with. It’s all on the Journal’s front page today, but the newspaper won’t connect the dots for you — that work is left to each of us.

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
— John Muir

[tags]george trow, wall street journal, subprime crisis[/tags]

When Nintendo cartridge meets spin cycle

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I am accustomed to, and accommodated to, the fragility of our electronic gadgets. At best, they are built to have a fighting chance of surviving a few knocks. I have used Thinkpads until their plastic cases began to disintegrate, and I have an unusually durable cellphone — an antediluvian model with a black-and-white screen. But in general, our PDAs, Ipods, cameras and all other manner of digital gewgaw are prone to failure given the slightest abuse. And we accept this as the nature of contemporary stuff: cheap to make, quick to fail, cheap to replace — and your replacement will be faster, cooler, more capacious.

So when my son Jack reported, with a downcast face, that he had failed to remove three Nintendo DS cartridges from the pocket of a pair of pants that had just passed through the washing machine, I figured, oops — there goes $100 worth of ROM chips. I knew Nintendo does a great job of protecting its hardware from the depredations of its puerile customer base; how many times had I seen Game Boys survive impacts that would have totaled any laptop? Yet I had no hope for the laundered cartridges.

“Maybe they still work!” my son proposed, with the look of a gambler willing to bet on a long shot, knowing full well he faced brutal odds. I just pursed my lips and thought, “Dream on.”

I fished the pants out of the washer and located the cartridges — turned out to be two, not three. They seemed remarkably dry, yet I had no hope of their survival. This micro-finery of silicon and contacts, marinated in Tide and then roughed up by wash, rinse and spin? No way, Mario and Luigi.

I handed the cartridges to Jack and left the room, torn between urges to console my son and to chastise him.

A moment later, I heard: “YESSS! It works!” Sonic Rush had survived. So, we learned a moment later, had Pokemon.

Somehow, Nintendo had managed to manufacture a game cartridge that could take a licking from an eight-year-old boy — and his family’s household appliances — and keep on clicking.

To such engineering prowess, one can only bow.
[tags]nintendo ds[/tags]

OSAF cuts back — Chandler leaving the nest

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Earlier this week the Open Source Applications Foundation — the organization developing Chandler, whose work I followed for three years and whose story I tell in Dreaming in Code — announced what it called a “restructuring,” which meant laying off roughly 2/3 of its employees. (Infoworld’s story has the basics.)

So does this mean that Mitch Kapor, OSAF’s founder and chief funder, is “pulling the plug” on OSAF, as Techdirt has it, or “bailing on” Chandler, as a CNET blogger put it?

Kapor is indeed leaving the OSAF board and handing the rest of the reins to Katie Capps Parlante, who’s been running the project day-to-day for some time. That’s a big change. From what I can tell, though, this isn’t so much a “plug-pulling” as an amicable parting of the ways.

Kapor’s financial withdrawal is not a big surprise. He had told the Chandler developers several months ago that he intended to fund the project through the end of 2008 but no further; that decision had been discussed on the project’s public mailing list, so the looming changes couldn’t have come as a total shock to anyone who’d been following the story. (I write about these changes in a new epilogue to DREAMING IN CODE that will be included in the forthcoming paperback edition, due out in late February.)

What actually happened at the end of 2007, according to Parlante, who I interviewed today, is that OSAF and Kapor agreed that it would be healthy for the project to move out from under Kapor’s wing faster than they originally envisioned. Over the past year, Kapor has been less involved with Chandler and more focused on new projects (such as Foxmarks), and Parlante says that the project leaders felt that if they were headed towards independence anyway, it made sense to move faster.

“We’ve been joking that we laid off Mitch,” she says.

At that point, Kapor agreed to provide transitional funding for the group — less than he’d originally planned when envisioning paying the entire project’s bills for another year. That triggered the staff cuts.

How much exactly did Kapor commit? Referring to the deal that launched the Mozilla Foundation in 2003, which Kapor brokered when AOL was shutting Netscape down, Parlante says, “He’d told AOL to give Mozilla enough support for it to become viable on its own, and he decided he should follow his own advice with us.” (In 2003, AOL put up $2 million, and Kapor himself put up $300,000, to fund the Mozilla Foundation, which is now a hugely successful enterprise, based on Firefox’s revenue from Google.)

Chandler started in 2002 as a high-profile project that aimed to produce a novel personal-information manager and demonstrate that the open source development methodology could produce innovatively designed desktop software. But the work proceeded at an agonizingly slow pace, and it took about five years for OSAF to ship a usable “Preview” edition last fall.

So there’s no question that the cutbacks represent a come-down for a project that started out with such grand ambitions and golden prospects. But surely there are better metaphors for what’s happening than “pulling the plug”: “leaving the nest,” perhaps. In fact, as of the end of the month, OSAF will move out of its longtime home at Kapor’s offices on Howard Street in San Francisco’s SOMA district and become a virtual team.

From the start of OSAF, Kapor had made clear that he did not envision the project as an open-ended philanthropic obligation, but rather as a test-bed for new ideas in software design and project organization. During the time I spent at OSAF, he would regularly repeat his belief that OSAF ultimately needed to become financially self-sustaining.

Parlante says OSAF will use its transitional funding period to explore lots of different business models — everything from selling advertising or charging for service to community support (donations and fundraising) to business partnerships or deals to bundle the Chandler Hub server with other products. “Open source business models are always a little up in the air, they’re always changing — that’s true even of Mozilla,” Parlante says.

Can Chandler survive on its own? Right now I’d give it good odds for continuing in some form: as long as there are developers interested in continuing work on it, there’s no reason for it not to. It will be harder, but by no means impossible, for the organization to find enough money to support a small full-time staff beyond the transition.

The obituary writers are already chomping at the bit. And of course many of the criticisms of OSAF’s mistakes are accurate. Still, those mistakes are now history. Since shipping the Preview version of Chandler its team has sped up the flow of new releases, new features and bug fixes, suggesting that the pressure of looming independence has already made a difference. The question is, does Chandler today offer enough innovative value to build a thriving community and win support — both volunteer development effort and cash?

Given the history, it would be foolhardy to say “yes” for sure; but I think it’s also a mistake to say “no way.”

I’m a veteran of a company that spent roughly three years disproving premature reports of its demise. Salon is still around and doing good work. It’s certainly going to be challenging for OSAF to continue on its own, and it’s entirely possible that the organization will be gone within a couple of years. But writing it off today seems wrongheaded to me.

Of course, in spending so much time and thought on telling Chandler’s story, I invested something of myself in it, too, so maybe I’m just unwilling to let go. But there are other indicators that the project is unlikely to simply evaporate.

At the very moment that OSAF announced its cutbacks and the obituary writers jumped the gun, geek-hero blogger Cory Doctorow posted an enthusiastic endorsement of Chandler on the extremely popular BoingBoing. Doctorow’s post might be part of an effort to rally support for Chandler among its users now that its future isn’t guaranteed. That’s what happens when an enterprise that people care about is threatened. Or maybe it was a spontaneous coincidence — that happens too!

The big question is whether enough people care enough about Chandler to keep it afloat. In a sense, that is the final experiment in the OSAF lab, and as long as Kapor continued to fund the project out of his own deep pockets, it would never be able to get results.

* * *
I’ve posted this before I’ve had a chance to talk with Kapor, because this story is already generating a lot of commentary. I’ll update as needed. This is what he told Infoworld:

“I would say I had a lot of ambitions that we wound up, for very good and practical reasons, scaling back on,” Kapor said in an interview Thursday. He described the outcome as “a working subset of a grand vision.”

Kapor said his interest in continuing waned. “We found ourselves in the situation that the team wanted to continue on very much,” he added. “I found myself in a different place. I did not have that same level of commitment and desire, because I had the original dream in mind.”

UPDATE: I did catch up with Mitch Kapor late today. He confirmed the accuracy of this account. “It’s time for me to move on,” he said. See also Kapor’s own blog post on this topic.

I’ve also received a couple of anonymous emails from people involved in the project, suggesting what I’m sure is just the tip of the iceberg of disagreements over Chandler’s direction, its leadership, and the personnel choices involved in the layoffs. Having lived through the difficulty of such events more than once myself, I know that they’re deeply emotional — and that there is often more than one “right” view of the situation. I haven’t been following Chandler closely enough for the last couple of years, since I wrapped up the book, to gauge the accuracy of these perspectives.

I also don’t yet know exactly who’s leaving. I’ll try to link to the participants’ own reports. Here’s Ted Leung’s announcement of his departure. Here’s Matt Eernisse’s. And Mike “Code Bear” Taylor’s. Taylor and Eernisse have both joined Seesmic, Loic LeMeur’s new startup. Brian Moseley, who for a long time was the central developer for the Cosmo Server (later Chandler Server), is also leaving.

Funny footnote: Moseley and I crossed paths a decade before we met at OSAF; he was part of a small development team of Cornell students who wrote the first, somewhat disastrous version of Salon’s Table Talk in 1995. He’s plainly become a very different developer in the interim. His colleagues went on to fame and fortune during the dotcom boom before going bust.

My next book: the story of blogs

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I left Salon last summer with the idea of working on a new book. I’m happy to report that the book now has a deal and a publisher — Crown, with whom I had such a happy experience on DREAMING IN CODE — and I’ll be spending the next year or so researching and writing it.

I am, I think the word is, stoked.

The topic will seem obvious to any of you who’ve been reading my stuff over the years: It’s going to be a book about bloggers and blogging. The working title is SAY EVERYTHING, and we’re describing it as the story of how blogging began, what it’s becoming, and what it means for our culture.

Upon delivering this news I typically hear two wildly divergent responses from two different groups of listeners. People in the tech world tend to react like this: “Blogging? Oh, that’s so 2000!” They think blogging is something that happened way back in the early part of this decade, about which everything has already been said. Meanwhile, people outside the tech-industry bubble — who’ve never heard of Techcrunch or Techmeme — respond with variations on “I’d love to read that.”

I should probably point out here that the population of potential readers in the second group outnumbers those in the former. Yet I belong to the first group myself. So I also hope to show the insiders that there is more to be learned and understood about blogging than they perhaps realize.

In other words, I’ll continue to do the sort of writing on technology I’ve always done, since I started back at the old S.F. Examiner: trying to be accurate enough to keep the respect of those immersed in the field, and insightful enough to hold their interest, while doing my best to make sure that everything I’ve written appeals to smart people who know nothing about the subject. It’s a bit of a straddle; some readers thought I pulled it off with DREAMING IN CODE, some thought I fell to one side or the other. I’m going to try it again.

Why blogging? I think I harbor a secret wish to spend the next couple of years explaining that writing a, you know, book about blogging is really okay — and that, no, I don’t think it should have been a blog instead.

Seriously, there’s a great tale that has still not been fully told of how the practice actually evolved — from technical invention to media craze to cultural phenomenon. As the haphazard efforts to mark some sort of 10th-anniversary-of-blogging this year proved, people are still a little fuzzy on the basics of the story. (Rebecca Blood’s account from 2000 remains invaluable, but it’s incomplete and now far out of date.)

When Mike Arrington asked, last summer, “Will Someone Who Actually Cares About Blogging Please Write the History Of It?,” I just smiled. But I wasn’t ready to talk about my plans yet; I remain uncharacteristically superstitious about announcing big projects until their financing is in place. I realize this is terrible un-Web-2.0ish of me, but there it is.

So there’s a story, one about how innovations emerge, how they bubble up from the creativity of geeks and pass into the wider culture. There’s also an argument, one that I’ve been making for ages, in different forms, from my very first column on blogging eight years ago: that blogging is not, despite what you hear from so many different quarters, a trivial phenomenon. And that, despite all the dismissals (most recently by Doris Lessing), blogging — far from contributing to the demise of culture and the end of civilization — actually offers a lifeline in the sea of information overload.

There’s much further to say but that’s enough for now. More as the work progresses!
[tags]books, blogging, say everything[/tags]