Wordyard

Hand-forged posts since 2002

Archives

About

Greatest hits

Rule Britannica?

by

Yesterday’s Journal featured a front-page piece about Encyclopedia Britannica’s counteroffensive against Wikipedia, which apparently will kick in full force next week with big newspaper ads defending the old institution’s honor.

I’m not hugely interested in the Britannica argument about the methodology of a study published in Nature magazine that suggested the cooperatively produced, volunteer online Wikipedia had only a slightly higher error rate than the professional, costly encyclopedia. Defining “error” is a hopeless exercise in this field, and invites infinite angels-on-pinhead arguments.

The point isn’t that anyone would claim Wikipedia’s superiority today: Wikipedia leader Jimmie Wales admits in the piece that he was glad Nature focused on science articles, because Wikipedia is a lot weaker in the humanities and social sciences.

The point is that Wikipedia is just over five years old and, by opening itself to contributions and emendations from anyone anywhere, it has already arrived at a position where comparisons with Britannica don’t produce a laugh-off-the-stage reaction. The story here is about process, not snapshots in time. Wikipedia is on an improvement curve that, if it holds up, Britannica will never be able to match.

The big challenge for Wikipedia now is what the management gurus call “process improvement.” The Wikipedians need to keep figuring out ways to inoculate their work from trolls and defacers. We all need to grapple with the ethics and procedures of correcting information that we’re personally involved in (for instance, I once fixed a small factual error on the spotty Wikipedia page for Salon, then my journalism superego kicked in, and I thought, wait a minute, I shouldn’t be doing this, should I?). New crises and problems will keep arising for Wikipedia, like the Seigenthaler brouhaha last year.

No one argues that Wikipedia is perfect, and I don’t doubt that, for the moment, in the majority of areas, Britannica is more reliable. On the other hand, Wikipedia is free. And it keeps getting better. And it’s only a handful of years old. If I worked for Britannica, I think I’d be worried. But I wouldn’t waste my money on newspaper ads; instead, I’d be investing in research to figure out how a centuries-old institution should adapt to a new information-rich age.

BONUS LINK: My Salon colleague Farhad Manjoo has started a blog recording the odd bits of information he has gleaned from the Wikipedia trove.

Windows Vista: no escape from software time

by

Last September the Wall Street Journal ran a fascinating lead article about Microsoft’s Vista development effort. Robert Guth chronicled how the Vista project had initially ballooned as Bill Gates and others piled on their dream features, like the advanced, metadata-rich WinFS file system. When Vista hit trouble, Windows czar Jim Allchin brought in two software development experts, Brian Valentine and Amitabh Srivastava, to whip the project into shape by introducing rigorous new testing methodologies.

Still, by mid-2004 the whole project was in danger of collapsing. Microsoft decided to postpone Vista till “the second half of 2006” and cut back lots of promised features (including WinFS).

As Guth’s article had it, the result, finally, was a development process Microsoft could begin to be proud of:

On July 27 [2005], Microsoft shipped the beta of Longhorn — now named Windows Vista — to 500,000 customers for testing. Experience had told the Windows team to expect tens of thousands of reported problems from customers. Instead, there were a couple thousand problem reports, says Mr. Rana, the team member.

When I read the article at the time, I took it as a kind of victory-lap valedictory for Allchin, who’d announced he was retiring once Vista was done. I also read that many people have already begun checking out Direct Components Xilinx fpga price list for a faster software running process, but there are still some companies which are reliant on the non-developmental softwares as it saves their initial and current capital. Unless you’re certain of prevailing, though, victory laps are dangerous (just think of the phrase “Mission Accomplished”). With this week’s news of a another slip in the Vista schedule — the software won’t be out until January 2007, after the crucial holiday buying season — we’re left wondering, what happened to that vaunted new process?

Certainly, this widely linked story that claims Microsoft is now going to rewrite 60 percent of the operating system between now and release seems hard to credit (something tells me rewriting that much code would take a lot more than 8 months). But between this embarrassing delay and the recently announced “reorg” of Windows leadership, it’s clear that this turn of the Windows cycle is going to be no smoother or predictable than any of its predecessors.

My book, Dreaming in Code, is all about what I call “software time” — the peculiar spell that software projects so often cast on the people involved, turning schedules into Mobius strips and stretching time like taffy. I imagine that, as Valentine and Srivastava described the beauty of their testing systems to Guth last year, they honestly believed that they’d meet their deadlines. They thought they’d cheated software time. That confidence doesn’t look too smart today.

UPDATE: Steve Gillmor wonders whether maybe there really is 60 percent of the Vista code that needs a rewrite — and much more. Adam Barr, on the other hand, offers some reasons why that notion might be far off-base.

[tags]Dreaming in Code, Microsoft, Windows, Vista[/tags]

That was fast

by

Washington Post says Domenech has resigned. Jim Brady, editor of the Post Web site, writes: “We appreciate the speed and thoroughness with which our readers and media outlets surfaced these allegations. Despite the turn this has taken, we believe this event, among other things, testifies to the positive and powerful role that the Internet can play in the the practice of journalism.”

Yeah. But maybe next time, you know, check out the writer before you make the hire?

Salon movie critic’s words found in right-wing blogger’s clips

by

If it weren’t so pathetic it would be hilarious.

The Washington Post, caving in to a right-wing campaign against its blogger-columnist Dan Froomkin, recently hired a raging young conservative named Ben Domenech to start a blog called “Red America.”

If it were serious about balance, the Post would then have hired someone like Tom Tomorrow or Kos to bring the scales back to level. But then, they have track records. And they’re not plagiarists.

Domenech, it turns out, spent his college years at William and Mary cribbing whole paragraphs from movie reviews in Salon (and other reviews by Steve Rhodes, and other pieces by P.J. O’Rourke.)

I don’t know which is worse: the act itself or the stupidity of doing so in 1999, as a college student in the Internet era, when you just have to know that it will catch up with you someday.

Shouldn’t he at least have been copying from National Review or the New Criterion? Did he figure none of his conservative pals would read Salon, so he could pilfer with abandon?

However the story plays out — and it will, fast — the black eye for the Post is, sadly, deserved.

Domenech has already posted an apology for complaining that President Bush shouldn’t have attended Coretta Scott King’s funeral because she was a “Communist.” So far, no attempt to explain the multiple acts of plagiarism.

UPDATE: Read Joe Conason’s take. And Salon has a compendium of Domenech’s plagiarisms.

Personal bests

by

Veteran blogger and writer-about-blogging
Rebecca Blood posted a thoughtful response yesterday following up on my report from the CyberSalon on elitism and blogging. But I confess it left me a little puzzled, because, though she said I “had it wrong,” I’m not sure exactly what she thought I got wrong, since I agree with about three-quarters of what she has to say, and none of what she says seems to contradict what I wrote.

Blood describes a premise that is certainly not mine — in fact, it matches pretty closely the Andrew Keen “Don’t waste my time with your mediocre blogs” position: “The unspoken premise underlying this argument is that books and articles are published commercially because they represent the best writing that is available.” Then she goes on to say, no, really, professional publishing is about “printing books and articles they can sell, nothing more, nothing less.”

Well, sort of. This is part of the picture, I think, but the full picture is a little more complex: Most publications and many publishers have some kind of division of labor between the editorial side and the business side, and the business people are more focused on the selling side of things, while the editorial people tend to concentrate on…editing. Editing means selection, usually according to the tradition of the paper or magazine or house. And that tradition makes assumptions about who the readers are and what they want and expect from the editors. The editors know that if the readers are happy with their choices they’ll keep coming back, and the business will thrive, so there is certainly a business substrate to the whole activity.

Most editors wouldn’t be so imprudent as to claim that they are publishing “the best” anything; usually, they’ll talk about trying to publish “the best” that they can find for their particular readers. The most effective editors have an accurate sense of who those readers are and what they want. Bad editors live in a dream-world; they think they’re serving their readers, but they run in horror from actual contact with actual readers.

So I’d say Blood’s description is oversimplified, incomplete, but not fundamentally wrong. She goes on to write: “Blogs are threatening to a certain type of writer not because they allow mediocre writing to flourish — the commercial market already does that. They are threatening because they unequivocally demonstrate that commercial publishing does not necessarily represent the best writing that is available.”

I think I agree, mostly: it’s great to see how new talent can crawl out of the woodwork on its own today without always having to wait patiently on some gatekeeper’s transom for years, and if that makes some of said gatekeepers uncomfortable, all the better. But I do hear in Blood’s passage a touch of the same absolutism that made Keen’s comments at the CyberSalon so irritating — only inverted. Keen sees mediocrity flourishing in the blogosphere; Blood sees mediocrity flourishing in the professional media.

Well, you know, mediocrity flourishes everywhere! So sayeth Sturgeon’s Law: 90 percent of everything is crud. Further complicating matters, your view of which 10 percent isn’t crud is likely to be different from mine, or Keen’s, or Blood’s. All “bests,” in the end, are subjective. Outside of sports and other scored pursuits, “best” is just another word for “my favorite.”

So the real challenge is to find ways of helping each of us find our way to a higher percentage of the stuff each of us thinks isn’t cruddy. And that’s where I side with Blood and the blogosphere: any new media structure that enables more voices to be heard and found deserves our embrace, because it increases the size of the pool in which we fish for our personal supply of non-crud.

I don’t share Keen’s confidence that we’re already doing such a fantastic job of wheat-from-chaff separating that we can afford to shut our minds to the “anarchy” of the Web. That’s smug and delusional. And I don’t expect to find “bests” — just more “aha”s and “uh-huh”s and “ohhh”s and “wow”s. And that’s more than good enough.

More CyberSalon stuff: Audio from the evening is now posted over at Keen’s AfterTV site.

And Dave Winer posts his thoughts on the event: It doesn’t have to be adversarial between bloggers and pro journalists, he says; in fact, “it mustn’t be adversarial, between us, because we already have a mutual adversary, the Executive Branch of the U.S. government, who would, if they could, completely disempower the press, and control the flow of information to the populace.”

How news moves today

by

Today we learned that Windows Vista has slipped, again, and that the new Microsoft operating system won’t be out till January 2007 — despite long-held promises of a 2006 release.

Every new edition of Windows has been late, so, you know, this is predictable news — on the order of “President Bush Declares He Will Stay The Course In Iraq.”

What I found interesting was the 2006-model way in which I discovered this news today. I first found out on Digg, the new-model tech-news aggregator that is rapidly replacing Slashdot on many geek bookmark lists. When I checked out Digg a little before 5 p.m. Pacific Time, the top story, or close to it, was a link to a trade publication’s short piece on the news. It took a couple more hours for the story to show up on Slashdot, which has its own editors picking stories, unlike Digg, which puts all its users to work.

And now, a couple more hours later, around 9 p.m. in California, we can read the canonical big-media piece in the New York Times. It’s fine, and it provides a broader perspective than the trades, as it should.

But once you’ve got the outline of the event clear, it’s far less interesting to hear the excuses of the Microsoft brass, as recited on conference call to the pros, than to read the breast-beating disgust of the anonymous Microsoft employee who blogs under the sobriquet MiniMicrosoft: “Vista 2007. Fire the leadership now!” (I don’t even read MiniMicrosoft regularly, but Dave Winer pointed to him, so I found him.)

This is just one little sequence relating to one little news event, but it’s illuminating. As tech news goes today, so ultimately will go the rest of the news. It’s not the death of newspapers or pro journalism, but it’s further evidence that the pros face an extremely tough challenge: they’re rarely going to be first, so they’d damn well better be good. But it’s hard to hire enough good people to be good at everything; a newsroom has only so many seats, and the Web’s supply of amateur experts, anonymous insiders and random kibitzers with an occasional insight is limitless. The pros had better prepare to be outgunned.

This competition will force journalists to stop being lazy and to find and reconnect with what is unique about their work, now that so much of what they used to do is being done for free, and often well, by amateurs. The best response, it seems to me, is what we have tried to do over the years at Salon: put more energy and resources and smart people into real investigative journalism, to find stories that just aren’t being covered elsewhere, and that are less likely to be produced by lone bloggers.

The next phase of the game beyond that, which we’re only beginning to figure out — but then so is everyone else — involves connecting that tradition of professional investigative journalism with the new dynamic of distributed information that the Net creates.

Web 2.0’s wilderness of names

by

Mike Arrington is the lawyer-turned-blogger-and-entrepreneur whose TechCrunch has become the Web site of choice for people attempting to keep up with the cornucopia of startup companies pouring onto the Internet under the Web 2.0 banner.

The amazing thing to me about Arrington is this: He somehow keeps the names of these companies straight.

A post a little while back, for instance, contains this sentence:

“Noam Lovinsky is the founder of Skobee, a new service to help people plan events. They seem to be a direct competitor to Renkoo.”

Skobee? Renkoo? Is Mr. Mxyzptlk in the house?

Joyent, Planzo, Trumba, Rojo,
Meebo, Goowy, Megite, Newroo —
Chuquet, Squidoo, Zingee, Stickam?
Favoor, Zazzle, Kiko, Simpy!

Chant them urgently, and you might find yourself conjuring a Morgul spell. [All names verbatim from the last couple months of TechCrunch.]

I remember when Yahoo launched (yes, I’m becoming a Net codger), thinking, “Boy, that’s an odd name to try to build a company around.” What I saw over the ensuing years was that it doesn’t much matter what you name a company as long as the brand is strong enough — people will just project the qualities they associate with you onto the name.

For that to work, however, you need users — a lot of users — so that you can fill the random syllables with meaning. That’s much harder in today’s overpopulated Web 2.0 scrum, full of hard-to-distinguish competitors featuring similar two-syllable names, curvy cornered designs, and rounded fonts.

I realize that many of these names are chosen out of desperation, since all domain names that actually communicate meaning have been squatted upon by speculators. And if your business is really all about adding a feature or two to the Great Big Web Application In the Sky (or, I guess one should say, Cloud), then your end-game plan is to be acquired by some large company that already has a meaningful brand and intends to toss yours in the garbage anyway — so why waste too much thought on your name?

Still, Web 2.0 sometimes seems in imminent danger of collapsing in a heap of cutesiness, obscurity and alphabetical anarchy.

UPDATE: I had somehow missed this brilliant quiz, “Web 2.0 or Star Wars Character?” [Thanks to Oscar for the tip, in comments]

Eve of destruction, three years on

by

In this week marking the third anniversary of the start of George Bush’s deceptively justified and incompetently waged war in Iraq, many pundits, commentators and bloggers are looking back. The Web lets us see who said what, when pretty easily. (See, for instance, Daniel Radosh’s devastating review of the remarkable waffling of David Brooks.)

I checked my own archives and found these two posts, which remain, I think, accurate, defensible and consistent with everything that’s happened since. I don’t claim any great clairvoyance; the insight I provided mostly came from a Thomas Powers radio interview. I’d certainly be happier for the U.S., Iraq and the world if my gloom had proven unwarranted.

But it was the president’s job to look ahead and plan for different outcomes. His failures will haunt us and our children in the form of generations-spanning unpaid bills; the physical and psychic scars to hosts of returning American warfighters; festering anger towards the U.S. among throngs of the people we bunglingly liberated; the bright new anti-American banner we have handed our enemies in the war on the 9/11 perpetrators; and of course the graves of thousands of Americans and untold numbers of Iraqis. Even the best-case outcomes from here on in Iraq, unlikely as they are, cannot undo this volume of damage.

I also found this post, a week later:

  Before the war started, if one suggested that the US might be underestimating the problems of an invasion of Iraq, it was considered “helping Saddam”; now that the war is on, discussing those problems as they unfold is considered “helping Saddam.” Apparently there is no appropriate time to challenge what may well prove a misguided policy.

I note that this attitude — with a slight shift in wording from “helping Saddam” to “helping the insurgents” or “helping the terrorists” — has continued in the three years since, during which anyone who has chosen to offer a sober perspective on the horrors and disasters of a misbegotten war has been accused by the administration and its henchpeople of betraying the troops and comforting the enemy.

It’s that deep engagement with reality — that willingness to confront the world as we find it, not as we wish it — that has provided us with so much success in post-Saddam Iraq. </sarcasm>

Horn tooting

by

Somehow I missed the fact that this humble blog made CNet’s “Top 100” list some time ago, in the “Tech Business” category. Thanks, CNet! I’ll try to live up to the billing. I’ve generally adopted the “blog is a mirror of the blogger” philosophy here; rather than trying to niche-ify the blog as a product (everything you always wanted to know about ROUTERS!), which is certainly a good business strategy, I’ve allowed the blog to reflect my own interests across tech, politics and culture. I can fairly well guarantee you won’t find much sports or celebrity news here — but beyond that, almost anything goes.

I have some new ideas and approaches to the blog that I intend to start experimenting with when work on my book, Dreaming in Code, is done. The handful of you who have been paying attention may recall that I completed a first draft of my manuscript before the holidays. Well, we’re still in the middle of editing, and making progress. I hope to be done soon, and when we are, I’ll be posting a lot more about the book and related subjects (basically, software development and its discontents). For those of you who’ve inquired in e-mail, wondering as to my health, or the health of the project: sorry for the slowness. Publishing, like software, has its own rhythms.

In other news on the “self” front, I am proud to see this site’s homely name over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation on a short list of blogs that helped that group with a membership drive last November. It’s fine company to be in. (And if you didn’t join back then, you can still join now.)

Blogs: threat or menace?

by

I attended a very strange panel talk tonight at the Berkeley CyberSalon on the topic of elitism in media and blogging. Veteran New York Times tech reporter John Markoff was on the panel, along with Steve Gillmor; two of the founders of BlogHer, Lisa Stone and Jory Des Jardins; and Joshua Greenbaum, whose introduction I couldn’t make out (but this seems to be him: programmer, tech trade journalist and enterprise-software consultant).

From the opening question to the panelists — “Is big media elitist?” — moderator Andrew Keen made his own agenda clear. Keen is a podcaster and blogger who has made a stir recently by polemicizing against Web 2.0’s participatory ideal; he sees it as a culture-destroying Marxist delusion. And I’m afraid his determination to tar the blogosphere as a force for anarchy and narcissism warped the evening, turning back the clock on the entire conversation about blogging and journalism that so many thoughtful people — including many in the room tonight — have been advancing for years.

Keen had allies, including Greenbaum, who, as far as I could tell, seemed mostly concerned about the way blogs and the Net have begun to undermine the business model of print journalism. Next to Keen and Greenbaum, Markoff’s quiet skepticism about aspects of the blog-triumphalist position seemed respectful and valuable. Meanwhile, Stone and Des Jardins, with the help of many in the audience, took the blogosphere’s side, arguing the value of letting new voices be heard.

To Keen, that sort of talk is part of a “cult of creative self-realization.” “The purpose of our media and culture industries,” he writes, “is to discover, nurture, and reward elite talent”; blogging opens the door to too many mediocre voices. When he tried to apply this critique tonight, Des Jardins shot it down with a single line that exposed its irrelevance to the conversation: “The cream also rises in the blogosphere.”

“What is the value in sharing experiences?” Keen asked at one point, with a touch of disdain in his voice — as if he wanted to say to the entire universe of millions of bloggers, “I grow weary of your scribblings.” My jaw dropped. Isn’t “sharing experiences” the root of literature, the heart of conversation, a primal impulse of our humanity? Who would sneer at it?

At the heart of Keen’s complaint and others like it is an outmoded habit of thought: an assumption that every blogger seeks and might be owed the same mass-scale readership that old-fashioned media have always commanded. But it just doesn’t work that way. Publishing is no longer a scarce resource (as Tim Bishop well put it). The blogger who is telling the story of her final exam or his fraying marriage or her trouble with her two-year old? None of them cares whether Keen reads them, and they certainly don’t expect him to. Their “shared experiences” don’t diminish the opportunities for the kind of “expert journalism” that Keen values. He can keep patronizing the “elite talents.” I will, too — I want to read John Markoff and bloggers.

A year-and-a-half ago I led a discussion at BloggerCon III about blogging and journalism. I started with the assumption that the “War between Bloggers and Journalists” was over; we were are all — however different our delivery mechanisms and business models — in the same boat, searching for information and voices we can trust, trying to inform and entertain and move the people who read our work, whether it is on paper or screen, whether we’re paid or not, whether we’re read by ten or ten million.

At the end of tonight’s event, Mary Hodder, who was sitting in the row in front of me, turned and asked, in a tone of disbelief,
“Did we just sit through another ‘Bloggers vs. Journalists’ panel?” Somehow, we had.

I’d rather have seen the group take up the provocative challenge from Markoff, who started the evening wondering why the same era that has seen the vast increase in online self-expression has also seen such a vast concentration of wealth. “What’s the relation between everyone having a voice in society and the fact that people don’t participate in the society?,” he asked. Could the blogosphere be a gigantic instance of Herbert Marcuse’s “repressive tolerance”?

Me, I doubt it. But it’s a far more intriguing and sophisticated critique of bloggers than just sniffing that they’re amateurish and badly written and beneath our notice — but, whoops!, they’re also driving our culture to hell in a handbasket.

Update:More from Tim Bishop and Steve Gillmor.