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Pew Study: Bloggers ‘r’ us

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I’ve been reading and digesting the new Pew study of bloggers (page, PDF) that’s been making headlines this week. The study’s central finding — that the majority of bloggers are in it as a creative personal outlet, blog occasionally rather than obsessively and don’t seek or expect mass readership — come as no surprise. But the coverage, along with portions of the report itself, reveals some confusion about the relationship between blogging and journalism. Let’s dig in.

Take that Chronicle story. Its lead tells us that we think that bloggers are “pajama-wearing partisan ranters” who “fancy themselves a new type of journalist.” Now, thanks to Pew, we can see that in fact bloggers are “more like Christina Palsky,” who “blogs as a creative outlet and does not fancy herself a journalist.”

Note that we are being told that there’s an either/or situation here: Either you’re a wannabe-journalist partisan ranter who dreams of making a big splash or you’re a creative diarist who blogs for friends and relatives.

This misses the most interesting characteristic of blogging (and the Pew report, though less oversimplified than the Chronicle piece, misses it too): because of the nature of the Web, any posting to a little public diary can, under the right circumstances, end up in a national or global spotlight. Every “I’m just doing it for myself” blogger is a potential journalist. If you’re in the right (or wrong) place and time — when the next tsunami hits, say, or the next Rodney King incident unfolds — and you decide to write about it or post photos or video, you’re a journalist, whether you think of yourself as one or not. You’re witnessing events and telling the world about them. And the Web’s structure means that the information you provide can spread quickly and widely.

At its worst, if people see blogging as a competition for the spotlight, this potential could drive people to do dumb things to attract attention. This happens, but it’s hardly epidemic. At its best, it creatively blurs the boundaries of the old mass-market news world. Every “consumer” of news is also a potential producer.

I am saying nothing new here. It’s just strange to see the Pew report — and the discussion around it — fail to take note of the obvious.

New blog notes: Rosetta stone

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In moving the blog over I learned that I’ve written a little over one thousand posts in four years. At 250 a year that puts me averaging one per weekday. In truth, I have had spasms of more vigorous blogging and, particularly during my book leave, periods of radio silence. Still, that’s a useful stat.

The header graphic is a chunk of the old Rosetta Stone. (Turned on its side for, uh, aesthetic reasons: if you slice it horizontally to suit a blog header and you don’t turn it on its side, you only get rows of hieroglyphics, *or* rows of demotic Egyptian, *or* rows of Greek, without the cross-language effect, and that’s no fun.)

I’ve always seen myself as someone whose work translates complex concepts and ideas across various divides. When I wrote theater criticism I aimed to explain the most interesting and ambitious work I encountered for intelligent readers who weren’t necessarily steeped in theater history or the contemporary arts; when I moved on to writing about technology I trie d to immerse myself in the digital world but send back reports that readers back on land could make sense of. So the Rosetta Stone — symbol of translation-breakthroughs across tribes and times — feels right. (I liked the look, too.)

Here’s a Rosetta Stone for code: “Hello World” programs in nearly 200 programming languages.

The blog rebooted

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Almost exactly four years ago, on July 22, 2002, I started my first blog. Blogging felt natural to me since I’d been writing for the Web since 1994 and self-publishing since 1974 (originally via mimeograph).

My blog was part of a larger blogging program I’d put together at Salon, in partnership with Userland. It was the tech-downturn doldrums — an era when every time we at Salon opened the papers or fired up our browsers we knew that someone, somewhere, would be predicting our imminent demise. And there wasn’t a lot of extra cash at the company at the time, so the blogs program was chiefly a labor of love, launched in the wee hours. I did the CSS, wrangling Salon’s home-page design into Radio Userland templates, all by myself (which anyone who knows anything about CSS can probably tell with a single glance at the unruly code).

I loved Radio Userland at the time for the way it combined a blog publishing system and an RSS reader. But times change; Userland put its energy into other products; Salon Blogs produced many great blogs but not a substantial change in Salon’s business; and my blog settled down from the program’s focal point to a personal-publishing bullhorn.

Several months ago, in anticipation of Salon’s plan to build a new platform for users to contribute their own writing, we closed off new signups to the old Salon Blogs platform. Today I’m moving my own blog to a new home, here, at Wordyard.

I’ve managed to export my whole four years’ worth of archives (over 1000 posts, averaging about one per weekday for the whole timespan) to WordPress. (For those who care, I used the Radio Userland exporter, which pops out a plaintext file in Movable Type export format; edited that file to make things like titles and categories work; then imported into WordPress.) The comments, alas, will remain back at the original Salon Blogs location, where they will continue to be available.

With this move, I plan to blog somewhat more vigorously, and to provide more posts about my forthcoming book, Dreaming in Code, as its January 2007 publish date nears. I also look forward to leveraging some of the great features and plugins created by the WordPress open-source community.

If you subscribe to my RSS feed in Bloglines (the reader I’ve been using daily for years), the transition should be transparent — Bloglines will do the flip for you, you don’t need to touch anything. If you subscribe through other feed readers or services, you’ll have to resubscribe to the new feed address, which is here.

More anon!

Stem cells: Bush’s shameful first veto?

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President Bush appears poised for the first veto of his presidency. The cause that has finally pushed him to reject Congressional legislation? An attempt to expand funding for stem cell research that Bush hobbled back in 2001.

For millions of Americans, the potential fruits of stem cell research — in the form of cures to dangerous diseases — are a serious matter with grave personal import. For President Bush, the issue has always served as a political football.

On the one hand, Bush argues that the destruction of human embryos (microscopic organisms made up of a few cells) is a kind of killing. His press spokesman, Tony Snow, adopting the supercharged cant of anti-abortion activists, referred to it recently as “murder.” In order to stop such “murder,” Bush agreed in 2001 to limit all federal funding of stem cell research to a handful of pre-existing “lines” of cells — cells that had been created specifically for research. His argument was, let’s not use tax dollars to pay for the destruction of more embryos for the sake of research.

Here is why Bush’s position is a joke: Thousands and thousands of embryos are destroyed every year in fertility clinics. They are created in petri dishes as part of fertility treatments like IVF; then they are discarded.

If Bush and his administration truly believe that destroying an embryo is a kind of murder, they shouldn’t be wasting their time arguing about research funding: They should immediately shut down every fertility clinic in the country, arrest the doctors and staff who operate them, and charge all the wannabe parents who have been wantonly slaughtering legions of the unborn.

But of course they’ll never do such a thing. (Nor, to be absolutely clear, do I think they should.) Bush could not care less about this issue except as far as it helps burnish his pro-life credentials among his “base.” This has been true since the first airing of Bush’s position in 2001, as I said back then. So he finds a purely symbolic way of taking a stand, but won’t follow the logic of his position to the place where it might cause him any political harm — as opposing the family-building dreams of millions of middle-class Americans would doubtless do.

(And please don’t test our credulity with the laughable “Go ahead and do the research, but let’s not spend taxpayers’ money on things they don’t believe in” argument: If that had any bearing, my tax dollars would not be funding a war that 2/3 of the country opposes now that the specious arguments used to launch it have collapsed.)

If Bush believes destroying embryos is murder, let him take a real stand against it. If he doesn’t, he shouldn’t make it harder for the thousands of embryos that are being discarded anyway to be used for a valuable purpose that could improve real lives.

That’s why Bush’s stem cell position isn’t Solomonic — it’s craven. His upcoming veto is an act not of moral leadership but of hypocrisy. And the cost of this hypocrisy, assuming Congress can’t muster the votes for an override, will be borne by everyone who dreams of new cures for awful illnesses.

Sonic middle age: Everybody’s happy nowadays

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I’m knocked out, stunned, by the new Sonic Youth album, Rather Ripped. I’m not one of the band’s cultists. Over the years, from the mid-’80s on, I’d hear, from friends who were, that I was missing out: They’d tell me that whatever their latest album was — “Daydream Nation”! “Goo”! — it was the album that would persuade me to join their ranks. I’d listen, feel respect for the legendary New York art-noise band’s work, but never feel like coming back for more.

So I’ve been out of the Sonic Youth orbit for a while. Maybe I missed some transformation or evolution; “Rather Ripped” is incredibly seductive — just melodic enough to engage you, just experimental enough to keep you hitting “repeat.” The guitars shimmer with lanky Lou Reed/Feelies lines; the lyrics are entirely audible; the incredibly tight rhythm section could do this in their sleep, but they’re wide awake. There is a fundamental joy working its way out in this music, in a fully audible way. I am hooked.

In other musical events, the Mountain Goats are slated to release a new album, Get Lonely, next month. But if you are impatient, there is an EP from their Australian tour titled Babylon Springs that is also a fine piece of work. If some of the chord sequences sound a tad familiar, the full-band arrangements are sparkling, the lyrics sharp, the feelings painfully intense.

Mashup Camp 2

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Yesterday I spent the day at Mashup Camp 2. I missed the first one last winter, but what I read intrigued me enough to make a point of showing up when it came around again.

The two relevant things here, one having to do with mashups, the other with that word “camp,” which is really a proxy for the whole “unconference” movement of which this event is a high-profile example in the tech world. (Mashup Camp organizer David Berlind wrote about the first event’s experience with the format back in February.) Let’s start with that.

When I showed up at 9 a.m. down in Mountain View, at the Computer History Museum, the conference had no schedule — just an open grid on an eight-foot-long pad at the front of the meeting hall. An hour later, several dozen developers (and some “API providers,” a k a vendors or company reps) had introduced themselves, proposed sessions, posted the sessions on the grid, and presto, there it was, a conference schedule.

Mashup Camp instant schedule grid

There had been no arguments over process, no disputes, no grandstanding or boring throat-clearing. Part of that was the result of deft moderation by Kaliya Hamlin (she writes about the event here); part, no doubt, was the nature of the attendees — this was primarily an engineering conclave, after all. If we’d been talking about Iraq, something tells me the process might have been bumpier.

In the pop culture world, “mashup” means creating a new work by combining elements of two (or more) existing works. (Danger Mouse’s “Grey Album” — the Beatles’ White Album meets Jay-Z’s Black Album — is probably the highest-profile example in music to date.) In software, a mashup is a new program or service created by wiring up two or more existing programs or services.

Web-services mashups can be remarkably easy to hack together and provide immediately gratifying results — the canonical example was the Craigslist/GoogleMaps mashup that Paul Rademacher made last year, placing the Craigslist for-rent ads on Google’s map service. At Mashup Camp, developers got the opportunity to show off their projects during a “Speed Geeking” event (modeled on speed dating) at which visitors in groups of a half-dozen wandered from table to table to hear five-minute demos. Here’s a full list of the participating demo-ers.

I didn’t come away with the sense that any one of the projects I saw was going to change the universe. But put it all together and you got a window onto a simpler, faster, and perhaps smarter approach to software product development — one that trades in the virtue of from-the-ground-up consistency and thoroughness for the even more compelling virtue of “getting something working fast.” It’s software development as a Darwinian ocean in which large numbers of small projects are launched into the water. Only a handful will make it to land. But most of them required so little investment that the casualty rate is nothing to lose sleep over.

Fallows, PIMs and Chandler

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James Fallows has been writing thoughtfully about computer software for longer than most of us have been using it. Years ago he wrote a definitive paean (long online here but apparently no longer) to Lotus Agenda, Mitch Kapor’s legendary personal information manager. (I say “a” rather than “the” because this program evoked such loyalty from smart writers it actually ended up with two definitive paeans; the other was by Jimmy Guterman.)

In the new issue of the Atlantic, Fallows writes about two latter-day PIMs — Microsoft’s OneNote and Chandler, the long-gestating project of Kapor’s Open Source Applications Foundation, the tale of which forms the central narrative of my book, Dreaming in Code. He interviewed me for the article; though most of our conversation wound up on the cutting-room floor, I did make it into one paragraph. I wish the article were online (there’s a stub here, but the full piece is only accessible to subscribers). But I couldn’t ask for a better venue for my first distant-early-warning book publicity. Here’s the relevant graph:

Despite substantial follow-up grants from foundations and universities, the team developing Chandler has so far released only a partly functional calendar application. Scott Rosenberg, of Salon magazine, became an “embedded journalist” on the Chandler project from 2003 to 2005 in order to investigate why good software is so hard to make. (His book about Chandler and complex software design, Dreaming in Code, will be published in November [now, January]). “It is taking a long time, but anyone who writes off Chandler is being short-sighted,” he told me. “They are on a quest.”

Fallows asked me whether I thought the book had turned out to be a comedy or a tragedy.

“Neither,” I replied, thinking furiously on my feet, my brain flashing back to my decade as a theater and movie critic. “It’s an epic!”
[tags]James Fallows, Dreaming in Code, Chandler[/tags]

The Journal vs. the Times

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Sometimes when I read things in the Wall Street Journal like the recent editorial attacking the New York Times over its expose of the Bush administration’s secret banking surveillance program, I’m tempted to cancel my subscription.

Then I think of articles like Greg Jaffe’s “A Camp Divided,” a detailed and arresting portrait (from June 17, 2006) of the conflict between two American colonels over how to approach the effort to build an Iraqi army. Or today’s fascinating feature about a schism between two competing Afghan-exile poetry reading groups in Washington, D.C. And I remember that the Journal editorial page — which serves up doses of bitterness, invective and hypocrisy in nearly every piece it publishes — should not be held against the impressive work of the larger Journal newsroom.

In yesterday’s Times, Frank Rich dissected how the Journal editorialists, in their effort to knock the Times and promote Bush’s anti-journalism power-play, wound up unfairly denigrating their own newsroom colleagues. (Rich’s column is behind the Times pay wall; Editor and Publisher offers excerpts.)

Meanwhile, the Times’ op-ed page has two conservative columnists, while the Wall Street Journal failed to replace its last centrist when he departed, and now presents its readers with an ideologically pure roster of righties. Oh, I forgot, conservatives don’t believe in diversity anyway.

The Dolls and the Aeneid

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I have been preoccupied with work and reviewing the copy edits on my book, a surprisingly lengthy and arduous process. (I thought I’d satisfied the gods of the Serial Comma, but there appear to be other complex negotiations I neglected relating to contractions and the use of “and” and “but” to begin sentences. Who knew? I am drawing the line at a proposed correction in the punctuation of my quotation from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which I think deserves a once and final “stet.”)

But I note with amazement the apparently imminent release of a new album by the New York Dolls. They are probably best known for their glam wear, but it was their proto-punk sound — in particular, the roaring bleating chords of their “Personality Crisis” — that won over my adolescent soul. Three of the original band’s lineup are now dead, including the astounding guitarist Johnny Thunders, but that doesn’t seem to have stopped the surviving two, David Johansen and Sylvain Sylvain, from putting out a worthy reunion album, if Rob Levine’s piece in New York is to be believed.

What I am trying to wrap my brain around is their title, One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This. If I am not mistaken, this is a translation of one of the more famous lines from the Aeneid, which I was studying in high school around the time that the Dolls were putting out their second album — one of Aeneas’ rally-the-troops orations, in which he tells his men, chin up, someday you’ll be tickled to remember just how awful what you’re going through right now was.

Are the New York Dolls closet Latin freaks? Is there some actual relationship between these minstrels of our epoch’s imperial city and the epic poet who shaped the imagination of the Roman imperium? If we live long enough, do connections emerge between every single thing we know and love?

Craigslist’s money left on the table?

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Brian Carney’s Wall Street Journal piece about Craigslist wants to know why Craigslist isn’t maximizing its revenue:

One industry analyst has estimated that Craigslist could generate 20 times that $25 million just by posting a couple of ads on each of its pages. If the estimate is to be believed, that’s half a billion dollars a year being left on the table… Google has turned unobtrusive text ads into a multibillion-dollar revenue stream. And posting a Google-type ad or two next to its search results wouldn’t cost Craigslist users one thin dime. So why not cash in?… If Craigslist does what its users ask of it, and Craigslist doesn’t need or seem to want all the ad revenue it declines to collect, maybe we, as end-users, should ask them to post some banner ads and give us the money instead.

Carney is either failing to see or deliberately ignoring a simple element in the equation here: The absence of ads is one of the key factors behind Craigslist’s phenomenal success. No barriers, no annoying popups, no distractions, none of the gaming and manipulation that Google text ads increasingly invite. Instead, simplicity and effectiveness — and trust.

Of course Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster could turn on the ads and rake in some cash, short-term, but they would undermine what they’ve built and compromise the principles that have served them so well to date. They’ve clung tightly to those principles, against the conventional wisdom, and doing so has served them too well to stop now.