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Off to OOPSLA

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I’ll be heading up to the OOPSLA conference next week (I’ll be there all day Tuesday and Wednesday). It’s in one of my favorite cities in the world, Portland; and it’s a chance for me to brush up on the software realm as my book nears publication.

OOPSLA stands for “object-oriented programming, systems, languages and applications”; it’s a venerable conference dating back about 20 years, and it serves as something of an epicenter for the more visionary or radical tradition in the software development world.

I attended OOPSLA two years ago, and it was one of the highlights of my book research — with presentations from all sorts of interesting people, including Alan Kay, Jaron Lanier, Ward Cunningham and Richard Gabriel. This year’s speakers include Brenda Laurel and Charles Simonyi.

If you’re at the conference and want to chat, leave a comment here or drop me an email.
[tags]oopsla, portland[/tags]

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.

Give my regards to Bloggercon

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I was on a panel at the first Bloggercon and led a session at the third. I missed number two, and I’m sorry to say I will miss number four, even though it is right here in my backyard, because my family is taking a long-planned vacation that week. (I seem to be an attendee of odd-numbered Bloggercons only.) Anyway, it sounds like it’s going to be a great event — sorry to miss it.

We’ll be off celebrating Father’s Day and a wedding anniversary and my birthday and the solstice, an abundant conjunction (or syzygy, a word I almost got to use in Scrabble recently!) of happy events; the week also marks the 20th anniversary of my move from the east coast to the Bay Area.

In 1986 I was a staff writer at the Boston Phoenix, writing movie and theater and book reviews. The prospect of moving to California had never been anywhere on my horizon. I thought of California the way Woody Allen’s character in “Annie Hall” did; it was a place inhabited by fecklessly superficial philistines who lived for their automobiles — a place where a native New Yorker like me could never thrive. I’d never been west of the Mississippi, and I had no idea that there might be some distinctions between Northern and Southern California. It was all new to me. San Francisco won me over on my first job-interview visit, and here I still am, unlikely to go anyplace else.

In defense of Al Gore’s history lesson

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The Wall Street Journal kept up a group blog during the D conference. Here’s how it characterized my post below about Gore’s talk:

  “I went into the hour-and-a-half session hoping that Gore would run in 2008, and by the end I was hoping he wouldn’t,” Mr. Rosenberg wrote, adding that after Mr. Gore’s talk, he sees more potential for him as a media player than a politico.

Thanks for the link and all, but this is just wrong, distorting a positive posting into a negative review. I said that Gore’s critique of the media was so powerful and delivered with such passion that I thought it might be even more important for him to dedicate himself to “changing the very structure of the media landscape” than merely to run for president. In other words, I’m not talking about Gore as a “media player” but rather as a media game-changer. I think anyone who read my admittedly lengthy post could see that.

While we’re on the subject: It was amazing to hear how people — among the crowd at D and the Journal people covering it (like Alan Murray, here), and even the conference hosts, Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher — responded to Gore’s discussion of the history of media. What I found a familiar but valuable review of how we got into the media-political mess we’re in today was, apparently, unbearable to many others.

Let’s put this in perspective: Gore wanted to explain the motivation behind Current.tv, and to put today’s Internet-shaped changes in a historical context stretching back to the middle ages. He talked about how literally cloistered monastery libraries were, and how Gutenberg changed all that, making books and ideas accessible to a much wider slice of society, setting the groundwork for the great public arguments of late-18th century America that shaped the founding of this nation. He pointed out that the rise of broadcast TV in the mid-20th century limited the political conversation to a stifling, one-way communication, and described how the Internet — and, in a related way, Current.tv — offers some hope of getting more people involved once more in public dialogue and self-expression.

In other words, Gore spent maybe five minutes of a 90-minute conversation reviewing a little history. It wasn’t unique or earth-shattering, but neither was it inordinately detailed or arcane; it wasn’t that different from what you might hear from bloggers like Jeff Jarvis or Dan Gillmor. Maybe the manner was a little professorial, but so what?

And this, apparently, was taxing. This was intolerably dull. To Alan Murray, a writer whose normal beat involves the scintillating fluctuation of interest rates and stock averages, this was cause for “stacking Zs.” This was more, it seems, than the brains of the D crowd — an unabashedly elite concentration of the corporate and media class — should be asked to bear.

I don’t get it. Maybe we’ve grown so accustomed to brain-dead leaders, anti-intellectualism in high places and the assiduous scouring of historical knowledge from the corridors of power that when a public figure dares to display some actual perspective and tries to communicate it, we respond with a barrage of sarcasm and cynicism. Mocking politicians who talk about history may give some of us a little jolt of solidarity with the people we imagine as “regular folk” — and that commodity may be precious at a conference where an unusually high percentage of attendees arrived by private jet. But it doesn’t help us improve the quality of national leadership.

I, for one, would have felt a lot better, for instance, if a president who tried to lead us into a war in Iraq had been able to talk, extemporaneously, for five or ten minutes about the history of past interventions in Iraq, and how, exactly, ours was going to be different. History isn’t dead knowledge — it’s the best foundation we have for peering into the future. Making fun of Gore, or any other leader who tries to bring history to bear on our problems today, isn’t just unfair; it’s head-in-the-sand dumb.

Gore for president? He should aim higher

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The most interesting aspect of hearing Al Gore talk tonight here at the D Conference is that I went into the hour-and-a-half session hoping that Gore would run in 2008, and by the end I was hoping he wouldn’t.

Oh, he’s definitely in good form — impassioned and funny. Kara Swisher kicked off by asking him “Are you not not running?” and he parried, “That completely dismantles my defenses. I guess I have to resort to full candor now.”

He talked, of course, about global warming. He also talked at length about Current.tv, the cable network he started that focuses on videos submitted by the public. He delivered a mini-lecture about “information ecology and the structure of the marketplace of ideas” from the medieval monastery through Gutenberg and on to Tom Paine and the Founding Fathers, and argued that the broadcast TV era was an aberration, a throwback to a one-way media universe in which “the individual could not join the conversation,” and then pointed to the Internet as the next turn of the wheel, back towards the individual.

Of course it would be a refreshing, even astonishing thing to elect a president who actually understood all this and was capable of explaining it to people.

But as Gore talked more and began answering questions from the crowd it became clear that his analysis of today’s political mediascape is even deeper and angrier. Someone asked him why we couldn’t just kill the canard that “there’s still scientific debate about global warming” by getting the science faculties at 100 universities to sign a letter expressing their consensus. With weary determination, Gore explained that there have been lots of letters, including one signed by dozens of Nobel Prize winners, but few in the room would have heard of them, because they didn’t get covered. They didn’t matter — because truth (or what we might call consensus reality) in the Bush era has ceased to be a product of rational discourse and instead come under the sway of political propaganda.

Gore went on: On the eve of the Iraq war, something like 70 percent of American voters believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. And when Sen. Byrd delivered his jeremiad on the Senate floor at that time, few of his colleagues were even in the chamber. Why? Because, Gore declared, no one pays attention any more to what’s said on the floor of the Senate — except for each senator’s political opponents, who might find some quotation to use against the incumbent. Meanwhile, the senators were out at cocktail parties raising checks to build war chests so they could purchase TV commercials during the next election cycle. Our reality is then shaped not by the deliberations of our elected officials, but by these TV barrages — “short emotional messages that are repeated over and over again by those who have enough money to purchase the time.”

I found Gore’s acid-sharp anatomy of this devastation of the political landscape even more terrifying than his now-familiar arguments about the environment. Because it’s this legislative paralysis and political bankruptcy that has left us utterly unable to respond to the warming crisis. How can we make smart choices when reality itself is a target of political subversion? What’s the point in repeating that there is overwhelming scientific consensus about global warming when we remain stuck with a media that’s still willing to publish nonsense like today’s Holman Jenkins column in the Wall Street Journal?

Jenkins says “it wouldn’t be too surprising if tomorrow’s consensus were that CO2 is cooling, or neutral, or warming here and cooling there.” That, Gore said, is like saying, “Gravity may repel us from the earth’s surface; it may repel us in some places and hold us down in other places. It’s an open question.”

Gore argues that the challenge of responding to global warming is this generation’s version of the World War II generation’s challenge of defeating fascism — and that we can, as they did, earn moral authority and find our strength by meeting it. “What I have on my side here is reality,” he said. In our denial of the evidence on warming, “we have been living in a bubble of unreality.”

Gore’s fierce dedication to his quest, which he rightly defines as a moral and spiritual issue rather than a political one, left me thinking that a run for president on his part would be a waste. Gore should take his anger and his understanding and dedicate it not just to the specific, overwhelmingly important environmental cause he has chosen to champion, but also to changing the very structure of our media landscape so that it can support a “reality-based community” once more. He’ll need to do the latter, anyway, if he is to get anywhere with the former.

D: Howard Stringer, Terry Semel and Martha Stewart

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Wednesday highlights and tidbits from the D conference:

Sony CEO Howard Stringer was the hit of the show so far — funny, disarmingly modest, and willing to talk forthrightly about his company’s (many) past mistakes. He says his goal is to move Sony from operating primarily as a hardware producer to thinking of itself more as a software outfit. In Japan, though, the software guys are all the younger generation, and the older generation calls the shots. He’s trying, carefully, to change that culture: “We’re going to transform Sony quite radically in the next 12 months.”

He defended the new Playstation 3’s $500 price tag, saying that the company intends for it to serve as a digital hub: “It’s got more bells and whistles than a 747 cockpit.” (I’m not sure that sounds like a plus to me; today, I’d rather hear that a product is thoughtfully designed to do a few things well.)

He’s also putting his energy behind a new e-book reader that was later demoed here: It’s about the size of a trade paperback, weighs under two pounds, will sell for $2-300, and uses a new “digital ink” technology that’s super clear and uses very little power (but it’s only black and white). Looks like Sony hopes to do for e-books what Apple did for digital music. But it’s unclear that the publishing industry will cooperate by lowering prices the way the record labels did for Steve Jobs. Sony says that the new ebooks will sell for anywhere from “a few dollars” to “$15-20,” which sounds like an awful lot to me.

At the end of Stringer’s talk, Martha Stewart stepped to the question-line mike with a tote bag and, after a deadpan routine pulling out one power cable and battery charger after another — for digital camera, cellphone, laptop, Blackberry and so on — challenged Stringer to find a solution. He admitted that the components division is Sony’s most profitable, then promised that better power management was “on the list of priorities.”

Comcast’s COO Stephen Burke says he supports net neutrality — “Once you start screwing around with things, slowing things down or speeding them up, the consumer will hand you your head.” But he’s leery of legislation mandating net neutrality for fear of late-night lawmaking and unintended consequences.

Yahoo’s Terry Semel offered a pair of justifications for Yahoo’s delivering user information to the Chinese government that it has used to prosecute citizens for dissident behavior. Semel says Yahoo has no choice but to obey the law in countries where it does business, and that by sticking around in China and providing the people there with good information services, Yahoo is helping change China for the better. But in response to Dan Gillmor‘s question about why Yahoo keeps its mail servers inside China (it could run them from somewhere else in order to avoid having to comply with government demands), he also disowned responsibility for Yahoo in China since the operation is now a joint venture with Alibaba, a Chinese company.

I’m afraid Semel wants to have it both ways: Yahoo’s saying, on the one hand, “We’re influential enough to do good in China so we should stay there even if it means we have to compromise,” but then he’s also saying, “We’re not really calling the shots with our Chinese operation any more.” He should get his rationalizations straight.

Semel also claimed that Yahoo had cooperated with Justice Department demands for large amounts of user data in the COPA case because he was helping fight child pornography. (Google fought back against the government’s fishing expedition.) During the Q&A, I pointed out that, no, in fact, COPA has virtually nothing to do with child pornography — it’s about prosecuting publishers for “indecent” content unless they can verify the age of all visitors to their sites.

I asked Semel how he and Yahoo would feel about being prosecuted unless they made sure every single person who viewed a risque photo on Flickr was over 18. I’m afraid he didn’t really answer, except to say that he was satisfied with Yahoo’s actions and didn’t feel the government had asked for anything unreasonable.

Others blogging D: Dan Farber, Eric Savitz, Jason Calacanis, and an official Wall Street Journal blog.

D Conference: Notes from Gates

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I think the defining moment of Bill Gates’ onstage interview at the D conference tonight came near the end, when the Microsoft chairman pulled a Windows Mobile device out of his pocket and declared, “This is really going to be your reality acquisition device.”

It turned out he was talking about how a good networked mobile device would help you plug into information about your physical location and the status of other people in your network (i.e., your friends, relatives and colleagues).

But the phrase was just pregnant with other meanings. It wrapped together in one phrase the two great forces of Gates’ career — voracious capitalism and awkward geekishness. Others might dream of altering reality (or, as the phrase goes, “changing the world”); for Gates, what really matters is “acquisition.” Once it’s acquired? Then, I suppose, it can be…assimilated.

So when will Windows Vista ship, anyway? “We’re quite confident in the January date.” But with the beta 2 version just out, “we’ll see what we get from that.” So, er, it sounds like, maybe January, maybe not.

Walt Mossberg asked whether Vista will be the last monster version of Windows, with five years and millions of lines of code in one big (and slow-to-arrive) package. Gates didn’t really answer, instead talking about new features of future Microsoft OSes involving “speech, ink and vision.” (So it sounds like the next edition of Windows will be planned for 2010 and will originally promise to include speech recognition, handwriting recognition and face recognition. But as the schedule slips to 2012 and beyond those new features will all be dropped and instead we’ll get a more secure, less buggy version of Vista.)

Gates showed off the new interface for Microsoft Office 2007, in which the entire mechanism of drop-down menus has been eliminated, replaced with an array of tabs that activate toolbars. Hard to evaluate from a quick demo, but I’m thinking that a lot of people are going to hang onto the bloated devil they know rather than risk mucking around with this potentially confusing new paradigm.

Admitting that Google still leaves Microsoft in the dust in search, Gates still knocked his competition for doing “less in the way of innovation than I would have expected a year ago.” For Microsoft in search, he added, with shameless bravado, “there’s more upside than downside at this point.”

Asked about the excitement surrounding Web-based applications and, specifically, Google’s acquisition of Writely, Gates sniffed,
“The text control in Asp.net has more features than that. Or even Wordpad.” Web apps are too limited in responsiveness, Gates said; “You want to take advantage of the fact that it’s not time-sharing” and use the power of your local CPU. “The cloud” — the stuff out there on the Web servers your browsers talk to — is more useful for storage and backup.

Finally, Gates talked in very broad terms about TV/Internet convergence and Microsoft’s “IPTV” initiative. What, Kara Swisher asked, does that do to the broadcast model? Gates “It’s gone. It was a hack. People want to watch what they want to watch.”

Blogs: threat or menace?

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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.

Communities of interest

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Other stuff at that was interesting:

Brian Dear of EVDB and Eventful, a site for posting and finding event information, introduced Eventful Demand, which allows people to band together and ask for “speakers” — musical performers, authors, anyone who might have a fan base or interested crowd — to come make an appearance, put on a show, give a talk in their area. Dear hopes that creating a common space for this sort of demand-side networking will reduce the reliance on middlemen and allow artists and other “speakers” to connect directly with their audiences. For instance, a band that had a good number of people asking for an appearance in their town could then take that info to a club as evidence of ticket-sales draw — or, more ambitiously, the “demanders” could organize the event themselves. You’ve heard of the “wisdom of crowds”; this is more like the “wishlist of crowds.” At the moment, the hottest “Demand” on Eventful is for “The impeachment of George W. Bush – Washington metro area.” Other than that, an awful lot of people seem to want Wil Wheaton to come to their towns.

Derek Powazek provided an update of the principles he expounded five years ago in his book Design for Community. “Web 1.0”-style communities, were, he said “company towns.” As examples, he included Salon’s Table Talk, which I think is reasonable; his own Fray.com similarly qualifies. In the “Web 2.0” world, he says, we’re more like individual homesteaders, and that gives us potentially much more power and control. He’s right, but I think he may, just a little bit, underplay the downside: once you own the house, you’re stuck dealing with the insurance and taxes, the leaks, the grafitti and the natural disasters. Still, given the choice, most people — at least most Americans — seem to prefer the homeowner model. Derek’s slides are here.

Other interesting talks at Etech about community, much-blogged elsewhere, included Clay Shirky’s chronicle of “patterns” in online moderation, “Shut Up! No, You Shut Up!” (summary here). Shirky has set up a wiki to record these patterns, modeled on Ward Cunningham’s original Pattern Language wiki for software developers.

Meanwhile, Danah Boyd offered a sociological perspective on recent models of successful communities — Craigslist, Flickr and Myspace. My decade at Salon certainly made this passage ring true:

  Passionate designers are hard to come by. The people in charge of Craigslist, Flickr and MySpace breathe their sites. They don’t go home at night and forget about the site. They are online at 4AM because something went wrong. They are talking to users at midnight just because. You cannot force this kind of passion – it’s not just a job, it’s a belief system.

Unfortunately, it is not clear that even the most passionate people can keep doing it forever. This type of true embeddedness is utterly exhausting. It plays a heavy toll on the lives of the designers. Even in smaller communities, creators grow tired.