I have been hunkered down getting my life (and a mountain of notes and research) in order. Here’s a grab-bag of items:

• On Wednesday I spent the afternoon at UC/Berkeley at the kind invitation of Bill Allison, and talked with a thoughtful, interested group of faculty, administrators and IT people about Dreaming in Code and the wider topic of software’s innate difficulties. Berkeley, along with a number of other institutions, is about to kick off an ambitious project to build a new platform for much of its underlying digital infrastructure. Chandler, whose slow progress Dreaming in Code chronicled, has a university tie-in as well, and these folks are smart and foresightful enough to want to try to understand what pitfalls they might be facing.

  Too often, groups embark on big new software ventures as if they are the first pioneers ever to walk down their particular path, when in fact most of the field is full of well-worn roads (and the roads usually lead into one or another ditch). So hats off to my Berkeley neighbors for wanting to study an at least partial map of the terrain.

• Speaking of Chandler, the folks at OSAF are closing in on a major release, called Preview, later this month. I’ll be writing more about it here as it unfolds.

• Barcamp Block: This marks the second anniversary of Barcamp, a self-organizing conference for geeks, startup companies and related phenomena. It’s down in Palo Alto this coming weekend, it looks like great fun and interesting people, and I’m planning to be there, at least for the first day.

• Also here in Berkeley, my friend Josh Kornbluth’s great show “Citizen Josh” (I wrote about it when it opened) is settling in for a three-week run over at Berkeley Rep. Worth seeing if you missed it across the Bay when it played the Magic Theater earlier this year.

I watch precious little TV, but I had a long flight home late at night last Friday, and was brain-dead after too many hours awake but too wired to go to sleep. So I flipped the channels on Jetblue until I found myself staring at a group of a half-dozen or so of what looked like hybrid squirrel-rats, with raccoon eyes, who stood on their hind legs like begging dogs, only with an attentive, thousand-yard stare.

Meerkats. How little I knew! The show, Meerkat Manor — apparently, a big hit over on Animal Planet — follows a meerkat tribe or clan or whatever the term is. There’s a dominant female — she’s the only one allowed to breed — and a dominant male and a bunch of offspring. They hide from Kalahari predators in elaborate burrows — the title’s “manor” — but also engage in fierce territorial strife with other meerkat gangs.

Maybe it was my sleep deprivation, but I found these meerkats intensely dramatic: family tragedy, clan warfare, survival vs. the elements, all enacted by cute critters with sharp claws. The show anthropomorphizes its subjects to a degree that probably makes serious wildlife students cringe; each animal gets a name (like “Zaphod” and “Mozart” and “Flower”) and the gangs are “Whiskers” and “Lazuli” and such. In each show’s intro the meerkats are even given hushed voice-overs. But then the rest of the show proceeds in a less ridiculous, hyper-documentary mode. And fiber-optic cameras show you the action down in the burrows themselves! In this view, the meerkats all look like shoplifters caught on some dim subterranean security camera.

It was over to Wikipedia for me, to learn more. There I discovered that the show’s Wikipedia entry was under lock-down. There’d been an edit war over the meerkats! But why? Apparently some contributors posted information about some major deaths among the Whiskers in the latest season of the show. But that season hasn’t been aired yet in many places, so other contributors view the information as spoilers. And that has led to a fight. If you visit the discussion page you can follow an impassioned debate over whether it is possible to have a spoiler for a work of non-fiction.

If only the meerkats knew what mischief they were making for this strange species that’s filming them.

I loved Ratatouille, the new Pixar film from Brad Bird, as much as so many of the critics did. But there’s one little aspect of it that struck me as, not exactly wrong, but off.

Remy the rat is plainly born with the gift of taste; he apprehends flavors in a way his rat relatives simply can’t, and he is passionate about food from the start.

In the course of the film (I do not believe the following is a significant spoiler) he develops into an extraordinarily talented chef able to please demanding customers and wow the haute-est critics.

In my view, great creators are born and made. To arrive at the top of any field, you have to start with some kind of gift, some genetic bounty. But most stories of achievement — in any field that is both craft and art, which means virtually any field — also involve a phase of learning, of apprenticeship, of buckling down and arriving at mastery through repetition. Shakespeare acted and wrote forgettable stuff like the three parts of Henry VI; The Beatles did their time in the cellars of Hamburg.

But there is something of a lacuna in Ratatouille when it comes to this phase of Remy’s chefly evolution. It’s true that the rat finds a mentor in a deceased chef named Gusteau — and his bestselling tome, Anyone Can Cook. The book seems to serve as Remy’s teacher, and the chef himself becomes a sort of tutelary spirit. But we really don’t see Remy learn or make mistakes. He transforms in a blink from the rat equivalent of a foodie into a world-class chef.

Ratatouille is wonderful. But its shape as an artistic biography (portrait of the culinary artist as a young rat) would have been more graceful had it included episodes showing Remy the journeyman, in transition from gifted amateur to seasoned pro. Instead, Remy’s relationship to his talent is the same as the one the heroes of Bird’s previous movie, The Incredibles, had with their superpowers: The gift is simply a given. There’s no sign of the perspiration behind the inspiration.

From Rolling Stone’s obituary for the music industry, June 19, 2007:

Even worse, the record companies waited almost two years after Napster’s July 2nd, 2001, shutdown before licensing a user-friendly legal alternative to unauthorized file-sharing services: Apple’s iTunes Music Store… Rosen and others see that 2001-03 period as disastrous for the business. “That’s when we lost the users,” Rosen says. “Peer-to-peer took hold. That’s when we went from music having real value in people’s minds to music having no economic value, just emotional value.”

From my column in Salon, July 27, 2000:

What will be the impact of the court-ordered shutdown of Napster? These projects — small, underground efforts that grew unnoticed in the shadow of Napster the company — will be flooded with energy… From the recording industry’s point of view, it is slaying one enemy only to seed the field with a thousand new opponents — opponents who are, not incidentally, its own best customers…

The recording industry is in for a long, fruitless siege if it sets out to shut down each little Napster clone or slap a writ on every individual who uses Gnutella. Ultimately, if it wants to stop people from engaging in Napster-like behavior, the only thing that could work would be to shut down the Internet itself. Good luck.

Instead of going to court, of course, the music industry could be figuring out ways to use Napster to sell more music. After all, here’s a piece of software that cultivates people’s taste for new music and that appeals to the most dedicated fans. What a sales opportunity!

But by treating Napster as the copyright antichrist, the industry is simply insuring that the vector of Internet technological development will move rapidly toward a lawsuit-proof, free-for-all distributed network of file-sharing…

The latest paper by danah boyd, concluding that “MySpace and Facebook are new representations of the class divide in American youth,” has been much noted already, and it’s worth reading for anyone interested in the acceleratingly complex mass society we’re building online.

According to boyd, Facebook’s clean interface and Ivy League origins have made it home for the collegiate set, where MySpace’s anarchic graphics and pop-music focus orient it more toward “alternative” kids, minorities, dropouts and outcasts. If you spend any time on these services you can find plenty of anecdotal support for her analysis. On the other hand, though Facebook is now growing faster, MySpace still dwarfs it, so this is one “alternative” environment that happens, for the moment at least, to be in the majority.

What strikes me is that this social division across technical or business boundaries is nothing new. In the early days of blogging, a free Blogger address had less status than a self-installed Movable Type blog at your own URL. Similarly, in the mid-to-late ’90s, during the homepage-building craze, a page on GeoCities or Angelfire usually signified something less cool than your own site at your own domain. Before that, your email address was the marker of your status: remember the outcry when AOL’s horde of unwashed millions plugged into the Internet proper?

The difference today, it seems to me, is not that social class divides extend from the offline world into online space, but rather that online interaction has assumed such a central place in the lives of young people that the divisions now matter far more. For teenagers trying to figure out who they are, the choice of social networking site has become one more agonizing crossroads of self-definition.

Farhad Manjoo has more over at Salon’s Machinist.

I loved this article about information designer Jonathan Harris — even if it did use for its headline the same phrase that is the title of my book.

Several years ago, Harris created the 10×10 Web site — a snapshot of the moment’s hot news presented in the form of an image collage. He now he works as design director at Daylife. He’s a specialist in creating visualizations of Web-based pools of information — like his current project, We Feel Fine, which scours the Web for statements by bloggers and others that take the form “I feel [X]” and presents them in a novel interface that you can explore and also filter according to multiple criteria.

But these sites are best explored rather than explained. Have a look. Perhaps you will feel, as I did, happy to see such creative reuse of the Web’s expressive bounty.

UPDATE: I meant to highlight this quote from the end of the piece, with its perspective on digital storytelling:

Trying to depict everything is a fool’s game, and ultimately not that interesting — because it’s just as confusing and complicated as life. So then the task becomes limiting your scope, and within a limited scope providing amazing complexity and depth. That’s this process of ‘lens making’: coming up with a lens that you can point at all of reality but that only lets through certain things. That process is digital storytelling. It’s a process of exclusion — not a process of mimicry.

The backlash against Web 2.0 in all its manifestations — blogging, Wikipedia, “user-generated content,” citizen journalism and so on — seems to be hitting full tilt.

At the front of this parade, debating anyone he can persuade to share a podium, is Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur. Keen’s critique has already raised mountains of ire, from people including Dan Gillmor, Dave Winer, and Terry Heaton (who calls it “a whining, outrageous and defensive fantasy based on sweeping generalizations, falsehoods, paranoia and a form of condescension so pissy that it blinds the author to anything resembling reality”). I’m still planning to read the book soon and I’ll let you know whether I agree.

Next comes Nick Carr, who’s got a new book heading our way titled The Big Switch: Our New Digital Destiny. Carr is a contrarian by nature who often takes a cynical view of Web 2.0 phenomena a la Keen, but from what I can tell his book intends a more high-altitude portrait of the transformation of computing from a desktop-centric world to the Web-based universe.

Then there is Michael Gorman, the American Library Association honcho known for his broadsides against “the Blog People.” Gorman turns up this week in a “Web 2.0 Forum” organized by the Encyclopedia Britannica, which has been wrestling with the challenges it faces — intellectual, financial and institutional — in the wake of Wikipedia’s success. Gorman sees the rise of Web 2.0-style interaction ushering in a new dark ages, a “Sleep of Reason” –which, Goya fans know, “begets monsters.”

Keen and Carr are both participating in this forum as well. It couldn’t be that Britannica is stacking its expert deck, now, could it? Perhaps they should invite Kevin Kelly, whose civil but devastating retorts to Keen in this dialogue deserve wider currency. (Clay Shirky is in there, at any rate, handily dismantling Gorman’s self-contradictions.)

In any case, this is an important debate, worth mulling over — however crude some of the original contributions may be — and it’s not going to end any time soon. Early next year, for instance, we’ll get a new book on a similar theme from my Salon colleague Farhad Manjoo (now blogging as Salon’s Machinist). Farhad’s book examines similar questions of authority, trust and credibility in new media as Keen, but he does so less as a culture critic than through the lens of social science and psychology. (I’ve had the pleasure of reading an early manuscript, and though I don’t agree with everything in it, it’s a wonderful read, full of insight and valuable nuggets of research.)

Regardless of how you feel about all these issues, it’s hard to miss one meta-elephant in the room: The members of this phalanx of Web 2.0 cynics have all chosen to deliver their critiques via the very form that their rhetoric detests. Keen promotes his book from his blog. Carr weaves his ideas on his blog. Gorman explains what’s wrong with the “Blog People,” where? On a blog hosted by Britannica.

What’s the thinking here: First join them, then beat them?

However dangerous to the polity the tools of Web 2.0 may be, it seems that they are perfectly well-suited to providing a platform for assaults upon themselves. Which tells me that they may be considerably more resilient, and socially salutary, than their critics allow.

Since my decision to wrap up Dreaming in Code without a conclusive ending to the Chandler saga left me dealing with complaints (unfair! not true!) that I’d “bailed out,” I have become inordinately obsessed with tracking examples of successful creative works that lack a traditional conclusion.

Students of the epic understand that the classic form of that tradition begins in medias res — and ends that way, too.

Mitch Kapor and Tony Soprano could never be tagged as “separated at birth.” But I’m proud that my little book now has something in common with America’s highest-regarded TV series.

UPDATE: On the other hand, the Sopranos ending left Dave Winer with Post-Traumatic Sopranos Stress Disorder.

I loved the excerpt from Robert Frank’s new book Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich that ran in the Wall Street Journal last week, focusing on the rise of the butler trade among newly minted Bush-era plutocrats. It seems that the new rich want butlers, but the traditional ethos of the profession doesn’t always mesh well with the wishes and self-images of their employers. It’s like Upstairs, Downstairs transposed to the business-casual era:

Bob quickly discovered that managing a house staff has its own headaches. “Suddenly there’s all this funky politics going on in your house. Like the housekeeper might be nice to us, but she’s threatening to the other employees. So we had to get rid of that housekeeper.”

His first household manager was a nightmare. An exacting woman who specialized in formal entertainment, she aspired to throw lavish parties for prominent guests. Instead, she got Bob and his family, whose idea of a big Friday night is a mountain-bike ride followed by a big salad. The household manager was deeply disappointed. “We weren’t the rich, famous people she was hoping for,” Bob says.

I realized my own utter innocence of this trend toward ultra-pampering among the ultra-rich when I read the phrase “professional organizer” in another recent article in the Journal.

To me that term has always meant someone who earns a living organizing workers or tenants or political movements. But no, this is a person whose organizational skills are targeted at other people’s closets.

George Lucas drew a distinction for the crowd at D earlier this week that became something of a refrain for the rest of the event.

Lucas said: there’s circus, and then there’s art. “Circus is random and voyeuristic. What you see on YouTube right now — I call it feeding Christians to the lions. The movie term is, throwing puppies on a freeway. You don’t have to write anything or do anything — you just have to sit there, and it’s interesting. Like American Idol. Just put a camera on your neighbor’s window and see what happens. Then you get to art — where a particular person contrives a situation and tells a story, and hopefully that story reveals a truth behind the facts. With voyeurism all you’re getting is the facts.”

Lucas is a brilliant man who has told some great stories in his day. And I think he intended to defend the enterprise of making art, which we can always applaud. But with this generalization he has cast a great slur on the circus world.

I spent several years of my life as a working theater critic in San Francisco during the heyday of what was once known as New Vaudeville; I witnessed the work of pioneering Bay Area institutions like the Pickle Family Circus and saw the rise of “new circus” institutions like the Cirque du Soleil. And I do not think it’s going out on a limb to say that George Lucas is dead wrong in defining circus and art as opposites.

Circus is art. It doesn’t “just happen.” The people who perform in it spend years or lifetimes perfecting their skills.

Lucas, perhaps, really meant “sideshow” — where they used to put the freaks and the mutant animals and the geeks who would bite the heads off animals. In that sense, sure, YouTube is often a sideshow.

The videos Steve Jobs highlighted as he showed off AppleTV’s new YouTube connection were, essentially, sideshows. Mentos in Coke is sideshow. The “human slingshot” is sideshow.

But surprisingly often, YouTube is art. And when you experience a really great circus performance you encounter a kind of truth, too.