While the eyes of the nation are on a certain convention in Boston this week, I will be counter-programming: Tomorrow I’m heading up to Portland for the O’Reilly Open Source Convention. Although Salon started covering free/open source software back in 1997, when I was editing Andrew Leonard’s great pieces on Apache etc., I have never been to one of these fabled events, so I’m looking forward to it, and hope to do at least some posting from there.
Blogs, bosses and bucks
I had a good time yesterday at Supernova, but it seemed that one of the points I made on our panel caused some consternation among some listeners, so let’s look at it.
I had heard a certain amount of what I thought was wildly overoptimistic forecasting of the widespread adoption of blogging as a tool in corporate America. For instance, Tim Bray said: “Any corporation that doesn’t do this in the future is going to be playing catch-up. They can use the technology to make the enterprise provide a more human face to world.” (I copied this quote from a trade journal article on the conference and promptly lost the URL. Sorry. I wasn’t taking notes myself so if it’s wrong, apologies in advance.)
I agree with Tim and the other optimists that blogging can give enterprises a more human face. But will they let it? What I said yesterday is that I thought the successes to date in public blogging by software developers at places like Microsoft and Sun weren’t likely to be duplicated in other, more traditional corporations any time soon. Software professionals are relatively unique in feeling that (a) their talents are in demand and (b) if they get fired from one job they can probably (except maybe at the very bottom of an economic cycle) get another one pretty easily. In other words, they feel more empowered to spout off on their blogs without fearing for their livelihood than the typical American worker does.
I’m not sure why, but Tim seemed to take this comment to mean that I thought that people in other fields — I think he mentioned construction, it’s hard to remember — wouldn’t succeed as bloggers because they’re “not as interesting.” Of course, that’s not what I said, and it’s precisely the opposite of what I think. Everyone has stories to tell, and everyone’s stories are worth telling: that’s a credo of the digital storytelling movement that I’ve been involved with for a decade now.
The stories that programmers are telling in the current explosion of blogs have given their work a vital new visibility; as developers tell their stories to each other, creating a pool of technical, practical and philosophical knowledge, they are also giving the public a new and fascinating window onto their discipline. (I’m as aware of this as anyone — my work on my book is infinitely easier thanks to the profusion of programming blogs.)
Do I think it would be a Good Thing for this pattern to be duplicated in other fields? Of course — and it’s happening in some, predictably in those areas where individual professionals have a tradition of independence (the legal world, academia).
But the utopian vision of blogging somehow flattening corporate hierarchies and allowing Cluetrain-like voices of authenticity to trumpet forth from every Fortune 500 headquarters? Maybe it’s possible on the sort of time scale that Supernova keynoter Tom Malone talked about — from hunter-gatherers to agriculture, that sort of thing. But I don’t think it’s going to happen in our lifetimes.
I’m sorry to be the pessimist at the party. But for large numbers of workers in America, particularly those at big companies, the dominant fact of life remains don’t piss off your boss. And, in an era of health-insurance lock-in and easy outsourcing and offshoring, many U.S. workers remain doubtful that they can simply waltz into a new job should their activities displease the current hierarchy to which they report. So the odds of them feeling at ease publishing honest Web sites about their work lives are extremely poor. The blogs you’re going to see from within most traditional companies will be either uninformative snoozes or desperate attempts at butt-covering and -kissing. Not because people don’t have great stories to tell — but because telling the truth has too high a cost.
Someone at Supernova got up and said that he worked in investment banking and thought it was a field that was ripe for blogging. No doubt! I’m assuming that your typical investment banker has managed to sock away some private unemployment insurance cash (also known in some industries as “fuck you” money, something Dick Cheney apparently has in abundance).
For those with such resources, blog on! For those lucky enough to work for a company that says “blog on” and means it, cherish your luck. But for most of the rest of the working population, the blogging revolution will be happening in some other office.
Syndication city
I’m a late addition to a panel at the Supernova conference this Thursday, June 24: I’ll be joining some very interesting people (Technorati‘s David Sifry; blogger, XML leader and now Sun engineer Tim Bray; and Paul Boutin of Wired and Slate). We’re talking about syndication and RSS. The question the panel faces: “Is there more to syndication than reading 300 blogs at once?” What interesting, useful applications for RSS and RSS-like tools are out there or just around the corner?
I’ve got my own answer(s), but in the decentralized spirit of the conference, I’ll open the floor here in comments, and present anything you folks suggest, too.
Steve Jobs at ‘D’
Steve Jobs spoke here this morning and introduced a nifty new product, Airport Express — an all-white plug-in Wifi adapter that’s little bigger than a cigarette pack and doubles as a music bridge between your computer and your stereo. For $129. Available in July. “This doesn’t solve every problem in the world,” Jobs said. “But it’s very very simple, and it works.”
Here’s some of what Jobs had to say:
“Longhorn’s basically a copy of Mac OSX a year ago. Microsoft is chasing our tail again, and that’s kind of fun.”
“What Apple’s great at is inventing cool technology and making it easy to use.”
“A lot of traditional consumer electronics companies haven’t grokked software.”
Mossberg asked Jobs the same question he asked Gates — whether the computer will be displaced at the center of consumers’ digital worlds. Jobs had a similar answer: “Where are you going to put your 5000 digital photos? Or your 5000 songs? You’re not going to put them on your cell phone.”
“The hardest part of making smart products is figuring out something that people want to do.”
Jobs said he’d called the Kerry campaign up to “offer them help on advertising” and a week later he read that he was serving as an “economic adviser.” He wouldn’t comment further on politics: “It’s a personal thing, not an Apple thing.”
About the gulf between Hollywood and Silicon Valley: “Technology people don’t understand the process these creative companies go through to build the things they produce. And the creative people don’t appreciate how creative technology is.”
“The biggest threat to Hollywood is not the Internet but the DVD burners.”
Bill Gates at ‘D’
[Internet access here at D is really flaky, so I’ll see how much I can get posted here over the next day or so.]
The dinner at the Four Seasons Aviara Sunday night was accompanied by wines selected by the Wall Street Journal’s wine columnists, John Brecher and Dorothy Gaiter, so when Kara Swisher kicked off the Bill Gates interview with a serious question about security, Gates offered a crack about what a great question that was after three glasses of wine — and then delivered an anecdote about Warren Buffett, at a dinner where the costly wines had been seriously fussed over, covering his glass as the waiter came by to pour and remarking, “I’ll take the cash.”
Gates seemed far smoother and more relaxed than on previous occasions that I’ve heard him speak,and better able to parry challenges without getting that impatient, “why are you bothering my superior intelligence?” look of yore. Either age has mellowed him, or he’s just grown into the role of Richest Geek in the World. Here are some of the things he said:
“Longhorn [Microsoft’s next revamp of Windows] is about structured information. The world’s not just about text lookup. Longhorn brings the idea of an object-oriented database to the wayinformation is stored.”
“Already there’s a class of users who basically stay in e-mail. So when they go out of e-mail to the shell, they get disoriented.”
The Journal’s Walt Mossberg asked whether Longhorn was more radical a change than Windows XP or Windows 95: “Radical sounds negative. It’s just way more of a switch in terms of the model of how you think about data.”
Eventually, “Search will be based on semantics, not just keyword matching.”
Users will benefit from the “galvanizing effect” of Microsoft’s competition with Google in search.
About digital music, the Ipod and ITunes: Mossberg asked, “Can you succeed in music without a hot device?”
Gates: “We’ll have dozens of hot devices… We just have a different model.”
Mossberg: “That’s fine, but it’s a failed model at the moment.”
Mossberg: As digital devices proliferate, will they remove the PC from the center of things?
Gates: “Where else are you going to organize your memories?”
Gates said he devotes 10 hours a week to his foundation work. “That’s the time other people are mowing the lawn.”
Mossberg: “So you just let it grow?”
Gates: “Somebody comes and does it, I don’t know how. Maybe it’s astroturf.”
John Battelle has a fuller report on Gates’ comments on Google here.
I’m here at the Wall Street Journal “D” Conference, where I finally got the Internet connection in my room working after an hour of fiddling (problem turned out to be — no joke — a loose cable, but not a loose ethernet cable; rather, a loose connection from the mini-hub to the wall-jack– sheesh!). So I’ll have to post notes on Bill Gates’ talk tomorrow.
But first, a note on the passing of Ronald Reagan. This conference began with a moment of silence in memory of the 40th president. (It is, after all, a Wall Street Journal event.) I’m sorry for his relatives and friends that he’s dead; I had a relative who suffered from Alzheimer’s, and I know how painful that is.
But can we stop with the canonization, please? Maybe too many Americans are now too young to remember, or maybe Reagan looks good by comparison with the current occupant of the White House, or maybe the passage of time just makes us all forgetful.
But Reagan — however “nice” a man he was — was no saint, and in fact in most ways he was a terrible president. I know, de mortui nil nisi bonum and all that, but there is a great whitewashing going on in the media, and I can’t stand it.
I was a senior in college when Reagan was elected — in a very close election which he’d probably have lost had it not been for the participation of a third party candidate (John Anderson) — and that moment was like the start of a dark age. As a fiery young writer of editorials for my college paper I’d railed against Carter for his compromises with conservatism, and proudly chose to cast my first vote for an American president not for Carter against Reagan but for Barry Commoner.
It was a stubborn gesture, and in retrospect a dumb one. Too much was at stake to throw my vote away just so I could feel consistent. (Naderites, take heed.) America would have been a lot better off if Ronald Reagan had never been president. This was true while he was alive, and it is no less true now that he is gone.
Upcoming events of note
June is always a time that’s slightly crazed for me (in a good way): it’s the month when I celebrate both my birthday and my wedding anniversary; plus it’s solstice time, when the days are longest and (for light-seeking souls like me) spirits highest. It’s also the period, in the trough between Memorial Day and the start of high vacation season, when lots of events get planned. Here’s some that are on my horizon:
This Sunday I’m heading off to the Wall Street Journal’s “D” Conference, run by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg — featuring, among others, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Last year, I understand they shared a stage (I wasn’t there to confirm the executive convergence). We’ll see if that tradition continues.
Next Friday, the same Long Now Foundation series that hosted Brian Eno’s amazing talk last fall will present Bruce Sterling, at Fort Mason in San Francisco. If you’ve ever heard Sterling’s seemingly free-associational — but really, I’m convinced, carefully choreographed — riffing, you know it’s a treat. The topic? “The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole.”
Last year, the Digital Storytelling Festival in Sedona was a blast. I can’t make it to this year’s event — June 10-12, in Sedona once more — but it promises to be even better, with J.D. Lasica talking about his “DarkNet” project and lots of other folks presenting their work.
Finally, Supernova returns to the Bay Area June 24-25. A year and a half ago, Kevin Werbach’s first conference served as a great intro to the issues around Wi-Fi, Web services, and other grassroots-driven, geek-centered technologies whose adoption has begun to fuel a new wave of Silicon Valley buzz. It’ll be interesting to see where Werbach takes these subjects now that it has begun to move from the edge to the mainstream.
Technorati: 2.4 million and counting
Yesterday evening I visited Technorati‘s first “developers’ Salon,” an event at which non-developer bloggers and “content producer” types like me were made to feel quite welcome. You can find blog notes about the event from JD Lasica and Christian Crumlish.
Dave Sifry and Kevin Marks presented the latest stats from the “cosmos” of blogs that Technorati tracks: 11-12,000 new blogs are added each day. (Roughly 45 percent are abandoned over time.) Over 200,000 new blog postings per day. 2.4 million blogs total tracked.
That’s some serious volume — though it pales compared to the total size of the Web that, say, Google surveys Technorati specializes in tracking, and keeping up with, the part of the Web that’s constantly being updated. The blogs it follows provide a collective editorial filter on the news and the Web (see for instance the Technorati “Current Events” page).
Among the most interesting graphs were those that demonstrated the size and dynamic importance of blogging’s “tail end of the curve.” There’s a vast number of blogs that don’t have thousands of readers or links; maybe they only have ten or a hundred people reading them and linking to them. But, both individually and aggregated into small relational groupings, they provide a wealth of data about what people care about and what’s on their minds. Sifry said that Technorati is trying to figure out better ways to “expose the really interesting stuff that’s going on in relatively small communities.”
The room was packed with three or four dozen developers and blog enthusiasts filled with pizza and beer and the unquenchable notion that their code could make a difference. Technorati is a small startup company (eight on staff now, Sifry said) with a clear and honestly communicated notion that it will at some point need to bring revenue in via advertising and subscription services. But right now it’s at that happy moment when its programmers can just explore new ways of making their users’ worlds more interesting.
Gene genie
There was considerable sense and occasional nonsense on tap last night at a panel discussion at UC/Berkeley inspired by a new essay collection titled “Living with the Genie: Technology and the Quest for Human Mastery.” (One of the book’s editors, Christina Desser, moderated.) The premise, as presented by panel introducer Michael Pollan, is that “we are on the threshold of vast technological changes” — in areas such as genetic engineering, nanotechnology and advanced computing — that will alter “what it means to be alive and to be human.”
Our reactions to the prospect of these changes tend to fall into two categories, Pollan said: Either “it’s never gonna happen” or “it’s inevitable, it’s just a matter of time and the market.” Both reactions foster a passive stance; instead of the “ossified debate between techno-utopians and neoluddites,” can we “take the dialectic someplace new?”
Pollan’s challenge was a useful one. Howard Rheingold took it up by reminding us that the Internet as an open platform isn’t something we can or should take for granted: it needs to be actively defended, as digital rights management schemes and “trusted computing” checks begin to be baked into the hardware that we rely on to access the network.
Investigative reporter (and longtime Salon friend and contributor) Mark Schapiro suggested that as genetic manipulation becomes more widespread, it is outstripping our existing legal and political institutions — for instance, a maritime system that evolved to deal with 18th-century needs leaves us today in the position where no one bears responsibility when a ship full of deadly cargo founders.
Denise Caruso, who has spent recent years building the Hybrid Vigor Institute, said that as we “increase the complexity of our environment exponentially,” “innovation at any cost” is no longer defensible. She called for a new focus on active risk assessment. The appalling status quo is that most biotech innovations are released into the natural world with little care or forethought: Caruso cited the example of bioengineered, Monsanto-produced Bt Corn, which received government approval without any studies considering its impact on “non-target species” (like Monarch butterflies).
“This is not just hysterical Luddism,” she said. But it’s an uphill battle, because “government and industry like things the way they are right now.”
I found Caruso’s rigor and Rheingold’s speculative imagination provocative and helpful — particularly in contrast to the Panglossian presence of inventor and author Ray Kurzweil, the final panelist. Kurzweil was actually videoconferenced in from his Massachusetts home, and his larger-than-life image hung peculiarly over the proceedings, disembodied and disengaged. (Christian Crumlish has blogged a photo so you can see what I mean.)
Kurzweil’s speech was laden with statements like “Human knowledge in general is doubling every year” and “The rate of progress itself is doubling every decade.” Like some blinkered throwback to high-Victorian cockiness, Kurzweil blithely assured us that “continued progress is inevitable.” I understood he was referring to empirical measurements of processor speed, storage, telecommunications bandwidth and the like. (You can read a detailed exposition of Kurzweil’s notions of the coming “singularity,” in which artificial intelligence will surpass the human brain, here.)
But there’s a deep chasm between the notion of precisely-measured technical advancement and the subjective concept of qualitative “progress.” Evidently, Kurzweil — like some Bugs Bunny character who’s charged off the edge of a cliff but hasn’t yet realized there’s air under his feet — has failed to notice this divide. That leaves his vision of the future as disconnected from the messy, intractable realities of human behavior as the speaker himself was from the ebb and flow of last night’s conversation, by virtue of his own virtuality.
When someone coming from such a rhetorical perspective starts talking about “expanding our knowledge” through “intimate merger with our technology,” you want to run to the wash room and toss water on your face. In such company, the clarity of skeptical optimists like Caruso and Rheingold helps keep us sane.
Missing CFP
I was at another conference most of this week and am thus missing this year’s Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference, right here in Berkeley. So I’m glad that Bruce Umbaugh and Wendy Grossman are blogging it here, with interesting stuff about electronic voting machine issues, the ethics of technology transfer, computerized credit scoring and more.