As in “away from blog.”
I spent much of this past week at Etech but the blog posts from the conference have gotten way backlogged, and now I’m off for a family vacation marking the annual rite of spring break at my kids’ school.
So everything will have to…wait.
Jay Rosen and his team at NewAssignment.net, a sort of citizen-journalism or “open source reporting” lab, have unveiled their first project: Assignment Zero, a coproduction between Rosen’s group and Wired News. The focus of the work is an attempt to create a comprehensive study of the phenomenon known variously as “crowdsourcing” or distributed peer-production. This is precisely the form NewAssignment.net’s journalism takes. So, depending on whether you’re a glass-half-full or -empty type, there’s either a lovely form-follows-function dynamic happening, or the whole undertaking is hopelessly involuted and self-referential.
I’m betting that Jay’s idea is worth pursuing. There’s stuff to be learned here. Eventually this technique needs to be cut loose from introspection and trained on topics that are less “meta.” That, of course, is already taking place informally — most vigorously and impressively, to me, over at Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo. But I can see the value for NewAssignment to get its feet wet with one immersive overview of the field before it takes a deeper plunge.
I’ve been on the site’s advisory board from early on, and now I’ve volunteered to take on one of the literally hundreds of assignments the project has been broken down into — manageable morsels of reporting that will eventually be assembled into a tapestry of information. There’s lots of work for NewAssignment still in making its site easier to use; that will come in time. In the meantime, Rosen’s looking for more volunteers — pros and amateurs, people who want to do reporting and people who want to help organize the project.
I am proud to announce that Dreaming in Code is now in its third printing.
No, it’s not on any bestseller lists. (That I know of!) As a hit, it is of the slow-burn kind. But it’s selling well enough to give me a gentle feeling of vindication towards those observers who, at various stages of the project, doubted that a detailed chronicle of a software project with no world-changing heroic outcome or billion-dollar payoff could attract many more readers than you could count on the fingers of one RSI-addled hand.
Like any introspective and at least marginally neurotic writer, I of course had a voice in my own head saying similar things. So it gives me some calm satisfaction to note the book’s success and to continue to read the generous flow of comments, kudos and criticisms flowing back at me from the blogosphere and the media.
In recent coverage, Glenn Fleishman (in the Seattle Times) said that — since I ended up “adrift with an intrepid crew, a host of dogs and an ample food supply” yet found that “After three years, no land was in sight” — I should be humming the Gilligan’s Island theme. (Okay, but only in one of the punk cover versions!)
In the Chicago Tribune, Mark Coatney said that “Rosenberg clearly knows what he’s talking about and knows how to tell a story.”
Still, my favorite pro-media review to date appeared in the Irish Times (alas, behind a pay wall) — perhaps because, despite the mainstream venue, the author is the estimable geekographer Danny O’Brien, creator of the NTK newsletter, progenitor of the Life Hacks movement and (I think) currently a staffer at the EFF. Here’s a bit of the review:
Books like Rosenberg’s do a great job at allowing us to step away from the keyboard and see our foibles as others might see them. His skill in portrayal lies not just in explaining the tribulations of the software project to the layman, it also lies in explaining them afresh to the seasoned — and therefore oblivious — hacker.
His mastery in picking just the right metaphor to pull an obscure coding controversy into the common world is unparalleled: I’ve never seen the difference between software’s “back-end” and “front-end” portrayed better than in Rosenberg’s analogy between the incomprehensible R2D2 and its fey, deferential interpreter, C3PO.
But even more impressive (at least, to me) is his ability to uncover anecdotes and connections that even the most oversurfing geek would not have heard. Even for me, an obsessive follower of the trivia of tech culture, there were genuine surprises in every chapter…
…It’s perhaps forgivable that such great literature on programming should happen so rarely: the mix of tech skills, explanatory abilities, and sheer determination to trail and document what from the outside looks as exciting as an accountant’s meditation retreat, is rare among writers of Rosenberg’s calibre. But we badly need those books to be written.
Last night’s Berkeley CyberSalon panel was great fun — thanks to Eric Allman, Chad Dickerson, Lisa Dusseault and Jaron Lanier for sharing their thoughts, and to everyone else who showed up with their time, their questions and their trenchant comments. (I had not known that both Jaron and Lisa have very recently become parents, and if I had I might not have presumed to ask them on the panel, but I’m very glad I did, and grateful that they put aside their parental duties long enough to participate.)
One of many highlights for me was the moment when Eric hauled some old inch-thick booklets out of his briefcase — one contained the entire set of Internet (then Arpanet) protocols from the late ’70s, bound in a mere single volume; the other was a complete list of the network’s users. My, things have changed.
There’s a downloadable podcast/MP3 file of the whole event if you’re curious.
One of the most drudge-like tasks of writing a book is assembling the endnotes, but if there is anything even more tedious, it is converting those endnotes into HTML. But I promised readers of Dreaming in Code that I would do so — so many of the references are Web-based, it makes a lot of sense to provide them with working hyperlinks.
I’d hoped to have this done before the book was published, but I’ve only just finished. Ed Yourdon wanted me to do it; how could I let him down?
But in posting this material, I discovered something very odd. Sometimes WordPress simply did not want to upload a page (I’m using WordPress’s static page feature for the whole Dreaming in Code site). At first I thought I’d hit some undocumented limit on the number of characters, or maybe number of links, on the page; or, I thought, there’s so many links on these pages, maybe it’s overloading the cool WordPress pinging/trackback stuff, so I just turned all that off.
No go. Certain pages just would not save properly, the browser would just hang. By removing chunks of text I slowly zeroed in on the problem: three notes that contained the word “Python,” as in the programming language, were causing the trouble. If I removed them, no problem!
I just tried to post one of them here as an example and this instance of WordPress won’t allow it either — it generates a “file not found” message, oddly. A quick hunt through WordPress’s documentation “codex” offered no clue. Anyone have an idea? Is WordPress’s dedication to php so intense that it will not even allow a mention of the competition?
I couldn’t even use the word “Python” in the headline of this post — it caused the same error! I had to misspell the forbidden name in order to get this post to publish properly. Very odd.
UPDATE: Thanks to the commenters who pointed me to apache’s mod_security, which is plainly to blame, and not wordpress itself. A little creative escaping of the “P” in “Python” and I now have restored the previously unpostable endnotes. Live and learn…
Salon is where Dreaming in Code started, and so it’s fitting — and wonderful — that my colleagues are featuring the book there now. There’s a Q&A with me by Andrew Leonard (with beautiful art by Mignon Khargie, another one of Salon’s founding gang) and a brief excerpt from the book as well.
Tonight I returned from Portland from the final trip of my two-and-a-half-week quasi-pseudo book tour. I moderated a panel on “new media” at the American Booksellers’ Association Winter Institute, which gathers the people who run independent bookstores and tries to equip them better to deal with increasingly volatile times in their biz.
As I told the crowd, I found it funny that we’re still calling this stuff “new media” — a term that first came into vogue 15 years ago, when it typically referred to CD-ROMs. It was great to try to peer into the crystal ball with the other panelists — Amanda Edmonds of Google, Madeline McIntosh of Random House and C.J. Rayhill of O’Reilly.
I was to be introduced by a gentleman who is the CIO of Ingram Book Co., the mega book distributor based in Tennessee who supplies many of those book stores with their stock. He quite nicely asked me if I had a copy of Dreaming in Code that he could hold up to the crowd; foolishly, I was not carrying one. Unwilling to sacrifice this tiny opportunity for promoting the book, I dashed across the street to a humongous mall that contained a branch of a certain giant chain bookstore — and there, somewhere behind giant stacks of Bob Woodward bestsellers and the “Cosmo Kama Sutra,” I found one precious copy of my book, which I purchased and carried triumphantly back to the hotel.
When I handed the volume to the Ingram exec, he noticed the reference to The Soul of a New Machine among the blurbs on the back. “That’s one of my favorite books!,” he declared, and asked me if he could keep Dreaming in Code. The coals-to-Newcastlishness of the proposition struck me as amusing — Ingram is, as its site says, “the world’s largest wholesale distributor of book product” — yet what could I say but “Of course”?
More soon. Tonight, I sleep.
While I was stuck with my family at an airport for hours today waiting for the airline to figure out how to start the plane’s engines (no kidding), elves were at work extending my national sway. Or at least, I could say, work I had previously finished was making its way toward the public.
The Marketplace interview is online now, here. And I’ve got an op-ed in tomorrow’s Washington Post. Both of these are pegged to the occasion of Windows Vista finally heaving itself across the finish line.
In the past several days I’ve been talking nonstop about Dreaming in Code to radio hosts and bookstore crowds and a roomful of people at Microsoft Research in Redmond.
I am continually delighted by the interest people are showing in the book and its subject. Most wonderfully, I am finding that the radio folks are actually reading the book (or, you know, some of it, anyway!). I know how crazed their work schedules are, so that tells me that either (a) there are a lot of closet programming geeks out there in the radio world or (b) maybe I achieved some of my goal of taking this dauntingly arcane subject and making it approachable for people outside the field.
Tomorrow it’s Google for me, then I’ve got a long-planned family vacation over an extended weekend. But I’ve also got a backlog of stuff to post — so I’ll try to get to it all soon.
Thanks to all the people who showed up at Kepler’s Thursday night to hear me talk about Dreaming in Code. It was my very first event as a published author, and it was great to see so many interested faces and hear so many intelligent responses. I’m even getting the hang of signing books as a left-handed person (binding gets in the way, ink smudges, etc.). In the Murphy’s Law category, my car battery died on University Ave. in Palo Alto where I’d stopped for coffee beforehand; fortunately, I knew my way around well enough to hike to Kepler’s in time to make an only slightly sweaty appearance. (Triple A took care of getting the car started for the trip home to Berkeley.)
Yesterday I had a similarly invigorating event at Yahoo — what seemed like more than 100 Yahoo folks brought in their lunches and heard my talk. I’ve got several former colleagues and longtime blogger acquaintances at Yahoo, and I was glad to have the chance to talk about the book, and software, to such a knowledgeable, and attentive, crowd.
Tomorrow (Sunday) I’m out at the Pleasanton Library at 2 p.m. in an event sponsored by Towne Center Books, so if you’re in the (farther) East Bay and interested, come on by!
The Dreaming in Code 2007 World Tour (of the Greater Bay Area) is kicking off tonight (Thursday). At 7:30 p.m. I’ll be at the legendary Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, talking about Dreaming in Code, reading a bit from it and — I hope — hearing from some of you about your experiences in the mire of software time.
Other events are listed here.
