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Wordcamping

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I spent much of this past beautiful weekend at Wordcamp, an informal, vibrant conclave of WordPress users and developers held in the funky wood-panelled confines of the Swedish American Hall on Upper Market in San Francisco.

One of the highlights of the program was John Dvorak and Om Malik bantering on Saturday morning about the weblogs/journalism conundrum — about as well as one could, given how many times this block has been circled. It’s hard to believe that it was 2002 when I wrote the following, and I thought the discussion was old and tired then:

Bloggers can be journalists any time they practice journalism by actually trying to find out the truth about a story. A journalist can be a blogger by installing some blogging software and beginning to post. These words should be labels for activities, not badges of tribal fealty.

Jay Rosen tried to end the debate in 2005. In 2006, Steven Johnson wrote a definitive argument-closer. But this is one of the great undead Internet debates; it simply won’t die, and we will probably still be hearing it long after both blogging and journalism have been superseded by Vulcan mind-melds via Bluetooth cerebral implant.

Malik suggested that professional media companies would have a difficult time competing with super-specialized blogs powered by passionate proprietors willing to post around the clock on their niche topic. Dvorak argued that bloggers looking to be taken seriously by readers should design sites that don’t look like standard blogs: “You lose credibility when people hit the blog and say, ‘Oh, it’s a blog.’ ”

I argued that, in fact — for some significant and perhaps growing portion of the public who feel their newspapers and broadcasters failed them in the leadup to the Iraq war — the inverse is true: The formal look-and-feel of “pro” media is a turn-off, it screams “this is the official story,” whereas the rough-hewn blog format holds forth at least the possibility (though no guarantee) of unfiltered authenticity. Dvorak responded by saying this argument only reinforced his point that there really is a difference in how people perceive the “newspaper or magazine” site format and the blog format.

Lorelle VanFossen, proprietor of the phenomenally popular Lorelle on WordPress blog, wandered the auditorium like some sassy cross between a talk-show host and a revival preacher, offering tips on how to create good blog content. When she declared that, if you want to get people’s attention, you should “show them something they’ve never seen before, or show them something in a way they’ve never seen before,” my first reaction was, “Well, duh.” Then I realized that I’ve been a journalist all my life and this principle is etched into my brainpan (“burned into ROM,” as they say in the Valley), but might actually bear repeating for the new hordes of self-publishers that blogging has created. So if this stuff is new to you, I imagine VanFossen’s book “Blogging Tips” would be a pretty good investment. (Haven’t seen it — there were supposed to be copies at the conference, but the shipment got derailed, perhaps by the global Harry Potter delivery madness.)

What made Wordcamp fun was the sense of a dynamic, two-way exchange between the active, committed users of a piece of software and the developers who created it. It was closer in spirit to the user-group meetings that propelled the personal-computing revolution than to the dollar-fixated industry conferences of more recent vintage. The Wordcamp Report blog offered good summaries of the sessions. (At some point in future I think there may be audio or video of the proceedings, too.)

In my next post: Dave Winer’s talk on blogging, and a discussion of open-identity systems.
[tags]blogging, wordpress, wordcamp, wordcamp 2007[/tags]

Notes from Mashup Camp

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I spent a few hours on Wednesday at Mashup Camp — I think this was the 4th event, the second I’ve attended. As previously I found most value in the “speed geeking” portion: an hour or two spent moving from table to table in a big room hearing a succession of five-minute demos by developers showing off some cool trick or application mashup. Last year I wrote about what it all means:

…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.

This time I’ll just mention a few demos that I thought stood out:

  • Chime.tv: This is essentially a kind of Del.icio.us for videos, with a smart built-in video player and some basic tools for building and sharing channels. Nothing revolutionary here, except that (a) it lets you aggregate videos you find all over the Web (not just one provider like YouTube) into your own playlist/channel; and (b) it happens to be remarkably well-designed. I expect to be using it for a while as a video-viewing manager. We’ll see how it holds up.
  • Myk O’Leary’s twitterlicious serves as a simple hookup between Twitter and Del.icio.us (or Ma.gnolia.com). In other words: If you’re reading Twitter messages (“Tweets”) on a mobile device and they contain URLs that are inconvenient to save and that you can’t properly visit at the moment, Twitterlicious sends the “tweet” to your Del.icio.us account as a private bookmark with a special tag. You can review these at your desktop leisure.
  • Lignup showed a cool little application that lets you use your cellphone as a mobile input device to add voice annotation to a Web page or object (like, for instance, a Flickr photo). (This press release tells a little more.)

This Mashup Camp was a little less mobbed than the last one I went to, but there still seemed to be plenty of good ideas. And I even bumped into a few people who’d read Dreaming in Code, which always puts me in a good mood.

This weekend I’m going to try to go to at least some of WordPress Camp. Then next week my family will be doing some actual camping — like, in a tent. I think we’ll call it Camp Camp.
[tags]mashup camp, mashup camp 4, mashups[/tags]

Lucas, circus, and art

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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.
[tags]george lucas, d5, d conference, circus, youtube[/tags]

Last of the rock stars?

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Jimmy Guterman’s post (also here) about the Gates/Jobs show at D is worth reading. I like his thinking out loud here:

They do have so much in common. When Gates said, “Neither of us have anything to complain about” and “We’re two of the luckiest guys on the planet,” and Jobs quoted The Beatles’ “Two Of Us” to express his affection for Gates, it didn’t seem like a put-on. Indeed, one can think of Gates and Jobs (as opposed to Gates and Allen, or Jobs and Wozniak) as the Lennon and McCartney of the PC era. They worked together for a long time and they fought for a long time, but the two of them experienced extremes that no one else in their business ever faced. For all their differences, they’re two of a kind, unlike anyone else anywhere.

Nicely put. But I think the Lennon/McCartney comparison goes too far, because, after all, these guys are and always have been primarily rivals, not collaborators, and they have done their best work apart, not together — which was not really the John-and-Paul story at all.

Perhaps — as someone else pointed out this week (can’t remember now where I read this!) — a Beatles/Stones comparison would be more apt? Elvis/Dylan? Clash/Sex Pistols?
[tags]bill gates, steve jobs, d5, dconference[/tags]

D Conference: highlights reel

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  • Walt Mossberg asked CBS CEO Les Moonves about Al Gore’s critique of television culture in his new book, The Assault on Reason. “Gore said that TV in general has basically destroyed American democracy. He says the Internet is the hope –”

    Moonves interrupted: “That’s because he created it.”

    Mossberg grimaced. There was not a single laugh in the room.

    It is one sign of hope for the world today that this dead old line — discredited eons ago — now evokes only contempt.

    Meanwhile, here is Moonves’s stirring defense of his medium against the complaint that TV caters to too much of our love for celebrity news at the expense of more pressing issues: “I think there are other things that may have hurt the fabric of democracy more than the media.”

  • Time Inc. boss Ann Moore said that this past year the company crossed the Rubicon: its magazines can now see how to make money online, and — no longer weighted down by the internal civil war with AOL — they’re rushing headlong into the new medium.

    According to Moore, Time’s editorial staff are beginning to have the exact experience I and my colleagues did back in 1995 when we moved from the newspaper world to the Web: the flood of reaction from readers is energizing in a way you can’t imagine until you experience it.

    “The really big breakthrough is, editorial drank the koolaid,” Moore said. “The people leading the charge are the writers. You used to hang around the mailroom waiting for letters to the editor, and when you realized you could write online and get thousands of responses from readers… Writers also like how they’re edited less heavily online, she added.

  • Jason Calacanis’s “human-powered search” startup, Mahalo, intends to take the opposite of the “long tail” approach: call it the “fat head” of search. (Or maybe not.) Mahalo is hiring editors to create human-filtered search results for the top 10,000 search terms — which, Calacanis said, account for 24% of all English language search. The idea is to defeat search spam and help people get the best results from the general queries that Google doesn’t always handle elegantly.

    It’s ambitious, and Calacanis says he has money to keep it up for five years. But isn’t it just Yahoo circa 1995 — or DMOZ? How will its results keep up with the dynamically changing Web? How will it scale? I wouldn’t write it off, but I wouldn’t bet on it, either.

  • Jeff Hawkins, co-creator of the original Palm, unveiled a new gadget called Foleo. It’s theoretically intended to be a companion to Treos and other smartphones: it’s a laptop-like device, two pounds, with a full-size keyboard and a nerly full-size screen. It syncs email wirelessly with the smartphone. It’s got no hard drive or optical drive, but it’s a full Linux-based system, with wireless, an Opera browser, and other basic applications. It’s instant-on and has all-day battery life. But its processor is too slow for good video playback.

    The D crowd was distinctly unimpressed. But for a journalist on the road, it looks like a great e-mail and note-taking machine. I don’t even have a smartphone, but for $500, I could see wanting one of these. And, hey, you even got a Trackpoint without springing a fortune for a Thinkpad.

  • Don’t miss five minutes of Steven Colbert cocking a snoot at the conference’s collection of moguls and plutocrats while ostensibly introducing his boss, Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman. Demanding true broadband, Colbert attempts to sip a chocolate cake through a fiber-optic cable.

    • [tags]d5, d conference, foleo, jeff hawkins, philippe dauman, stephen colbert, mahalo, jason calacanis, les moonves, ann moore, time inc., viacom, cbs[/tags]

    Steve Ballmer: Microsoft’s incompetent youth

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    As most successful companies evolve and expand they develop some nostalgic sense of romance around their freewheeling early days. An exchange here at D with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer suggests that Microsoft is atypical in this regard. Perhaps one root of Microsoft’s paranoid corporate DNA — its collective sense that no matter how successful it is, the roof could cave in any minute — lies in an inferiority complex that goes back to its formative years.

    Here is what Ballmer said, responding to a question from Walt Mossberg about managing such a huge company today: “Don’t think the early days of Microsoft, when I joined, were so great. We didn’t have great agility.”

    Mossberg: “What, it was small but ossified?”

    Ballmer: “The people we had weren’t as good — they just weren’t pushing as much.”

    Mossberg: “Like Paul Allen?”

    Ballmer: “Paul was good. Bill was good. Four out of 30 were good — and believe me, the rest are gone.”
    [tags]steve ballmer, microsoft, d5, d conference[/tags]

    Chernin, News Corp., and the Journal

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    This conference is a Wall Street Journal event, so the specter of Rupert Murdoch’s buyout hovered over everything — like the Eye of Sauron turning its gaze upon, well, not exactly a settlement of happy hobbits, but, let’s just say, a crowd of sheltered journalists. (As a Journal reader, I’d hate to see the paper’s quality decline, but then again, as I’ve said, it’s only fitting that market forces should be threatening this champion of free markets.) Pushing this analogy to an extreme would cast NewsCorp president Peter Chernin, who spoke here and defended Murdoch’s bid, as the Mouth of Sauron.

    Here is what Chernin had to say when quizzed about Murdoch’s plans for the Journal by Kara Swisher, who — like the rest of the WSJ journalists at the event — would work for him should the deal be consummated: “The notion that we want to buy one of the great trophies, a genuine public trust — the notion that we want to buy that to change it is completely counterintuitive. We made an offer at a significant premium. We believe it is the premier source of news and information on a specific aspect of this society.”

    But what else was he going to say? “We intend to rape and pillage?” Assurances like these are pro forma.

    “News Corp. is mischaracterized,” Chernin declared. “This is a very broad church.” Indeed; any media empire that can embrace moralistic right-wing politics and least-common-denominator popular entertainment has to be broad.

    It wasn’t surprising that Mossberg and Swisher would be direct in confronting a News Corp. interviewee with tough questions about the deal: It’s still an open question whether Murdoch will win his bid, and everyone here had the same questions in mind. But, if Murdoch gets the Journal, is it likely that, a year from now, at the next D conference, we’ll be watching News Corp. execs get grilled on stage?
    [tags]d5, d conference, wall street journal, peter chernin, rupert murdoch, news corporation[/tags]

    Jobs, Gates, and the road behind

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    The much-ballyhooed joint interview with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs here at the Wall Street Journal D conference not only failed to throw sparks — it was a veritable orgy of hugs and nostalgia for the revolution the men led in their now long-ago youth.

    Just this afternoon, Jobs had knocked Windows software: he’d explained why Windows users love iTunes’ jukebox software so much by declaring, “It’s like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell.”

    But in the warm evening glow Jobs dropped that familiar braggadoccio and joined in the spirit that interviewers Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher set, of thoughtful reminiscence and mutual appraisal. On those terms, the event was a fascinating bout of PC-industry psychoanalysis.

    Many others live-blogged the event (Engadget, the D5 blog, Dan Farber, Paul Kedrosky, Eric Savitz and more), so instead let me offer some impressions based on the unusual opportunity to observe these two industry pioneers side by side.

    Gates has always tended to let his words wander into thickets of technical minutiae, but the trait only showed itself in deeper relief next to Jobs’ ability to cut quickly and cleanly to the heart of an anecdote. As Gates began to fumble through some digressive detail in telling the tale of how Microsoft’s floating-point BASIC ended up on the Apple II, Jobs watched impatiently, then finally broke in — “Let me tell the story!” — and provided the key bit of human color. For reasons nobody ever figured out, Jobs explained, Steve Wozniak had written, by hand, on paper, “a BASIC that’s like the best BASIC on the planet, it’s perfect in every way,” except it only did fixed-point math. So Apple bought Gates’s floating-point version for $31,000 — and got the Microsoft code on a cassette.

    Jobs is also faster with a joke than his old rival. When Swisher asked them to describe “the greatest misunderstanding about your relationship and about each other,” Jobs deadpanned, “We’ve kept our marriage secret for over a decade.” Gates froze for a painfully long silence before mumbling something about how “It’s been fun to work together” and “I kind of miss some of the people who aren’t around any more.”
    [Read more…]

    McCain in techland

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    I’m down at the Wall Street Journal D conference this week.

    Tuesday night, Sen. John McCain, following up on his appearance at Google 3 weeks ago, courted the tech industry’s money and talent here. Quizzed by conference hosts Walt Mossberg, Kara Swisher and members of the audience for nearly an hour, McCain didn’t always tell the crowd what it seemed to want to hear — particularly about the Iraq war. But after a subdued opening, McCain found his voice, and a measure of positive response, by promising an administration that would tap the nation’s best minds, JFK-style.

    In filling the federal bureaucracy’s leadership positions, like the Federal Communications Commission, McCain said, “Don’t pick the person who’s contributed the most or shown the most loyalty. Bring in experienced people that know the field and ask them to serve.”

    “I know who the smart people in America are,” he said. He could easily have added, They’re right here! He proceeded to drop names like Federal Express founder Fred Smith (who could whip the “screwed up” defense acquisition system into shape), Cisco CEO John Chambers and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. The latter two men, as it happened, were in the room.

    “I’m curious,” Swisher interjected. “Steve Ballmer as secretary of state?” (In the tech industry, Ballmer is known for his pugnacity.)

    “Ambassador to China,” McCain quipped back.

    McCain seemed most relaxed in these “pick your dream cabinet” exchanges, and least at ease in attempting to square his ardent free-market principles with complex questions about Net neutrality and the failure of the U.S. broadband market to match the speeds and services available in other countries. At times the senator trotted out stump-rhetoric set pieces that felt oddly stiff in this relatively intimate venue. After sketching the dangerous scenario of a nuclear-armed Iran passing a bomb to terrorists, for instance, he realized he was sounding too gloomy for a successful presidential candidate, so he hastily added, “We’re the strongest nation in the world and the best nation in every way, and we will prevail again.”

    On Iraq, he restated the position he shares with President Bush: “setting a date for withdrawal is setting a date for surrender.” He recalled his record criticizing the conduct of the war, including his relatively early break with former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. But today, he said, “We are where we are. If we leave, there will be chaos in the region…and they will follow us home. Now, we have got a new general and a new strategy. It is working.”

    “You really believe that?” Mossberg looked dubiously at McCain. McCain started reeling off the names of experts who, he said, share his view that withdrawal would be a disaster: Scowcroft, Zinni, Kissinger. Mossberg pointed out Kissinger’s iffy record of managing the wind-down of the Vietnam war, and McCain started to work up a heated response about that era’s history — which he knows a bit about — but then thought better of it.

    The same issue came up again when Brian Dear, founder of Eventful, held up a copy of the 2000 reissue of the late David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, and reminded the senator that he’d written a preface that urged leaders to read the book twice before entering any war. “Did you urge the Bush Administration to read this book? Doesn’t seem like they did.”

    “It’s a lot of pages,” Swisher pointed out.

    There’s more coverage of McCain over at AllThingsD, Mossberg and Swisher’s new blog site.
    [tags]d conference, john mccain[/tags]

    Michael Wesch’s “Machine” video

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    Before the opening talk at the Web 2.0 Expo earlier this week, the conference organizers played Michael Wesch’s video-ode to the participatory Web, “The Machine is Us/ing Us”. Given the insider-y nature of the crowd, I have to assume that most of the attendees had already seen it — it had rocketed to blogospheric celebrity in early February. But I didn’t realize the guy who made the video, a professor of cultural anthropology from Kansas State University, was at the conference.

    On Tuesday afternoon I literally stumbled upon his talk in the hallway (on a tip from my neighbor Tim Bishop); it was a part of the free, informal “Web2Open” parallel conference. Across the hall, a hubbub made it hard to hear Wesch — the Justin.tv people had set up camp there and needed to be asked to pipe down.

    Wesch turns out to be a rare combination of ingenuous Web enthusiast and smart cultural critic. In my experience, the cultural critics are usually pickled in cynicism and the Web enthusiasts are often blinded to their technology’s drawbacks. Maybe the discipline of cultural anthropology has helped Wesch maintain some balance; or maybe his sheer distance from Silicon Valley-mania — whether in the flatlands of Kansas or the mountains of Papua New Guinea — has helped him find a fresh perspective.

    The came-out-of-nowhere saga of Wesch’s video neatly serves to mirror its message about the generated-from-the-bottom-up nature of the Web. Wesch originally made the video, he explained, because he was writing a paper about Web 2.0 for anthropologists, trying to explain how new Web tools can transform the academic conversation. He created it “on the fly” using low-end tools. Its grammar, with its write-then-delete-and-rewrite rhythms, emerged as he made goofs and fixed them: “The mistakes were real, at first. Then I thought they were cool, and started to plan them.” The music was a track by a musician from the Ivory Coast that he found via Creative Commons. (Once the video became a hit, Wesch says, he got a moving e-mail from the musician, who said that he’d been about to give up his dreams of a life in music, but was now finding new opportunities thanks to the attention the video was sending his way.)

    The video’s viral success took Wesch by surprise. He’d forwarded it to some colleagues in the IT department to make sure that he hadn’t erred in his definition of XML. They sent it around. It took a week to go ballistic.

    At one point someone in the small audience asked Wesch a question about his field research in Papua New Guinea. He paused for a second, asking, “There’s about a two-hour lecture there, I’m not sure I can compress that into a five-minute answer — should I try?” I couldn’t help myself; I blurted, “Hey, you did the entire history of the Web in four minutes — go ahead!”
    [tags]web 2.0, web 2.0 expo, michael wesch, the machine is us/ing us, viral video[/tags]