Here’s a fascinating story from Jay Rosen about the Off the Bus blogger who first reported on Obama’s “bitter in Pennsylvania” comments.

It turns out, as so many important stories do, to be far more complex and nuanced than anything you’re likely to have heard on TV or in the papers, which mostly preferred not to name the story’s source: Mayhill Fowler, an Obama supporter who has been blogging for Off the Bus (a collaboration between Huffington Post and Rosen’s NewAssignment, for which I have served as an adviser in the past).

Fowler attended Obama’s San Francisco fundraiser. Traditionally, the press has not reported on what candidates say at private fundraisers. Fowler seemed blur the roles of “supporter” and “reporter” well enough that she got access to the event without ever being asked not to cover it.

Rosen talks about how “uncharted” the campaign terrain is today, with no clear boundaries separating those participating in the campaign from those covering the campaign. In the New York Times, Katherine Seelye asks, “Is it possible to straddle the line between reporter and supporter?”

Fowler’s story answers that question pretty definitively. Of course it’s possible. The fixed roles of the old campaign drama are dissolving. Everyone’s improvising. The bad news is that a lot of people are confused. The good news is that a lot more people can participate — and hear what’s said behind previously closed doors.

If you are a politician speaking to a crowd — any crowd — you should pretty much assume that everything you say can and will be broadcast to the world. That’s the lesson that George Allen learned, and it’s one Obama should know, too.

Apparently some Obama supporters feel that bloggers should be understood to be “activists” not “journalists,” and that Fowler betrayed their cause:

Bloggers are viewed as activists, not journalists. It’ s why some campaigns have blogger conference calls and press conference calls. The blogger calls are to pump up the base. The press calls are to do spin and answer arguably tough questions. She was admitted to the private San Francisco fund-raiser as an activist blogger and then functioned as a journalist.

This strikes me as one of those distinctions that is untenable. Some bloggers are activists, some are journalists; some are diarists, some are businesspeople. Saying you’re “a blogger” doesn’t make you an activist or a journalist or anything else; all it means is that you’re someone who posts stuff on the Web. Since the Web is public, this practice has a natural slope, a gravitational pull; things roll naturally from the private to the public.

So, yes, on the Web the “line between supporter and reporter” has been smudged out. One result, this week, is that Obama’s campaign has suffered a setback — and as an Obama supporter, I might be mildly disappointed. But, far more importantly, as a journalist I’m happy to see more and more of the previously curtained elements of our election process brought forth into view. Ultimately, it’s better for everyone to know what Obama said at his fundraiser.

But now we’ve only heard from one of three candidates. Next, let’s turn on the mikes in the rooms where Hillary Clinton is talking to her backers. And let’s listen in on John McCain wooing those wary evangelicals!

I’ve spent most of this week deep in the archival attic, researching the new book in old documents, digging through the dull roots of today’s Web, planted back in the 90s. It’s been strange and enlightening; I’ve found much interesting material.

One thing that becomes clear is that what we now think of as “the Bubble” was surprisingly brief. The Web actually experienced something of a downturn beginning in late ‘97 and early ‘98, and extending through the Long Term Capital meltdown later in ‘98. It was only toward the end of ‘98 that the bubble really began to inflate in a serious way. The High Bubble lasted till April 2000, when the market suddenly realized, like Wile E. Coyote poised in midair above a canyon, that it was standing on air.

So the era of high dotcom madness was really barely a moment: 18 months or so.

The other thing I’ve learned is how much more extensive the Internet Archive is than I’d realized. I’ve been using the archive heavily for days. I’ve picked up some pointers that, perhaps, others already know; I’ll share them anyway in case they prove helpful.

First of all, ignore all the error messages the Archive itself sends you, like “bad gateway” or “failed connection.” These are indicators of momentary failure; they don’t mean your page isn’t there. Try, try again; reload; eventually, you may get what you’re looking for. (On the other hand, error messages that are stored on target pages that represent the archive’s record of a snapshot of the web page itself — they’re real. They mean that the archive’s bot hit that error message and never recorded the page you’re seeking.)

Also: If the archive tells you that the earliest edition of a particular page it has is from, say, 1997, this doesn’t mean that the site’s content from previous years is gone forever. Iit’s true that you’ll probably never be able to recall, for instance, the Hotwired home page from 1995 — since it was constantly mutating, day by day with new content and year by year with new designs. But the material published on a site that lived at permalinked or semi-permalinked addresses can still often be dug up from Archive.org by poking your way carefully from the present into the past through the site’s own “back issues” or archives or “previously” links.

For instance, Web Review, the early GNN-backed web zine, vanished long before the Web Archive started up, along with most of GNN itself — a crib-death for one of the Web’s earliest original content ventures. Still, I was able to unearth my friend Andrew Leonard’s first piece (from Sept. 1995) for Web Review, all about “clickstream” measurement: Here it is.

We don’t have all of the early Web, but we have more of it than you might think!

That Orwell quote earlier this week that began “Our civilization is founded on coal” had a “pace Chesterton” at the start that puzzled me. A number of you wrote in with suggestions, including a pointer to a fascinating debate between Chesterton and Bernard Shaw about whether to nationalize the coal mines, moderated by Hilaire Belloc.

But I believe Mark Bernstein found the ur-instance of the Chesterton reference:

This is the true and exact account of the Great Cigar Fraud, and the moral of it is this–that civilisation is founded upon abstractions. The idea of debt is one which cannot be conveyed by physical motions at all, because it is an abstract idea.

So, what Orwell was really saying was: sorry, G.K., our civilization is not founded upon abstractions, it’s founded on the hard reality of coal mining. And thus Stroustrup’s reformulation — “our civilization is built on software” — takes us full circle, back to the many layers of abstraction that constitute our program code.

It all connects!

Overheard at the end of Michele Norris’s interview with Jeffrey Eugenides on last night’s All Things Considered:

MN: Happy Valentine’s Day to you.

JE: Thanks for having me.

MN: I was going to ask you if you’re doing anything special for Valentine’s Day, but your someone special might be listening.

JE: I’ll tell you, one of the first things my wife and I decided when we got together was that we would never celebrate Valentine’s Day.

MN: What?

JE: One of the first things that made me fall in love with her was our mutual antipathy to Valentine’s Day.

MN: Wait a minute — an author who puts together a collection of love stories has total antipathy for Valentine’s Day?

JE: Oh yeah. Don’t you think it’s the cheapening and commodification of something rare that we’d all like to celebrate in private and on our own time?

MN: I personally like flowers and chocolate.

JE: Well, your special person, I hope, is listening.

I have always come down on Eugenides’ side of this argument. Fortunately, my “special person” does too.

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.
(more…)

Every year around this time John Brockman poses some Big Question to his Edge discussion group, a salon of scientists and intellectuals. The results are typically all over the map but you can almost always find something of value and/or use. This year’s question was “What have you changed your mind about?” Here are some nuggets I excavated from the sprawling pile:

BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin writes about how online communities need tending, describing BoingBoing’s experience with managing its comment space (the site hired Making Light’s Teresa Nielsen Hayden to moderate). Her conclusion is that online discussions are best moderated by human hosts rather than voting systems or algorithms:

Plucking one early weed from a bed of germinating seeds changes everything. Small actions by focused participants change the tone of the whole. It is possible to maintain big healthy gardens online. The solution isn’t cheap, or easy, or hands-free. Few things of value are.

This isn’t exactly news; the gardening metaphor as applied to online conversation has a long history stretching back to the early days of the Well (and probably Usenet as well) and extending more recently into communities like Flickr and Wikipedia. But each new generation of online services needs to learn this lesson through experience; BoingBoing has managed it well.

Linda Stone writes insightfully, as always, about attention — and how we habitually hold our breath as we answer email (I tried observing myself and, yes, it’s true!):

I believe that attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit and that we can enhance or augment our attention with practices like meditation and exercise, diffuse it with technologies like email and Blackberries, or alter it with pharmaceuticals.

But lately I have observed that the way in which many of us interact with our personal technologies makes it impossible to use this extraordinary tool of attention to our advantage.

In observing others — in their offices, their homes, at cafes — the vast majority of people hold their breath especially when they first begin responding to email. On cell phones, especially when talking and walking, people tend to hyper-ventilate or over-breathe.

The rest is here.

Nick Carr — echoing ideas in his new book, The Big Switch, which I’m reading now — jumps off from a line by Chinese leader Hu Jintao to argue that the Net is becoming more centralized:

It’s not Hu Jintao who is deluded in believing that the net might serve as a powerful tool for central control. It is those who assume otherwise. I used to count myself among them. But I’ve changed my mind.

Kai Krause, who created software tools for designers that were hugely popular a decade or so ago, writes about the frustrating ephemerality of creativity in the software field.

Noting that “hardly any of my software even still runs at all,” he writes:

I used to think “Software Design” is an art form.

I now believe that I was half-right:
it is indeed an art, but it has a rather short half-life:
Software is merely a performance art!

A momentary flash of brilliance, doomed to be overtaken by the next wave, or maybe even by its own sequel. Eaten alive by its successors. And time…

Finally, Alison Gopnik, the psychologist and coauthor of The Scientist in the Crib, writes about the purpose of imaginative play:

Learning about the real world has obvious evolutionary advantages and kids do it better than anyone else. But why spend so much time thinking about wildly, flagrantly unreal worlds? The mystery about pretend play is connected to a mystery about adult humans - especially vivid for an English professor’s daughter like me. Why do we love obviously false plays and novels and movies?

…In fact, I think now that the two abilities — finding the truth about the world and creating new worlds — are two sides of the same coins. Theories, in science or childhood, don’t just tell us what’s true — they tell us what’s possible, and they tell us how to get to those possibilities from where we are now. When children learn and when they pretend they use their knowledge of the world to create new possibilities. So do we whether we are doing science or writing novels. I don’t think anymore that Science and Fiction are just both Good Things that complement each other. I think they are, quite literally, the same thing.

A fine insight — one that generations of readers of science fiction and fantasy know in their bones already.

While deepest in my book work over the past couple months I found it easier to stash links for future posting rather than to write real posts. So now I’ve got a backlog that I am going to unload here, in no particular order, and with no promise of timeliness.

If you’re reading this it means posting is working from my new computer.

Two amazing examples of the power of good graphic presentation: Here’s the most wonderful dynamic web-page chart showing the churning rise-and-fall of popularity in baby names, boy and girl, across 100 years. I don’t know where the data’s from — wait, I do, it’s from the Social Security Administration! — but it’s presented in a glorious interface (reminds me of Edward Tufte’s beloved graphic of Napoleon’s Russian campaign). Go, type your name in, see how the mighty monikers rise and fall on the waves of human fickleness! [link courtesy Steven Johnson]

Over at Flickr, there’s this cool series of charts exploring the web of inter-relationships of users of that photo-sharing service. Interesting stuff for the online social anthropologists, but what I dig is the reflexivity: the study’s offered up as just one more batch of Flickr images.

The post below shows the result of using Radio’s “mail to blog” feature and
forgetting to turn off your e-mail “signature”. So the bad news is, my
phone line is now posted to the whole web, and I can’t edit it till I get
home. The good news is, I’m out of town and not there to take your call