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Dan Gillmor’s new venture

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Congratulations to Dan Gillmor on his announcement that he’s leaving the San Jose Mercury News to launch a new venture in the field of grassroots journalism/citizen reporting. Whatever Dan comes up with will be worth watching. Gillmor writes:

  A friend who knew about this ahead of time asked the question I’m sure some others will ask: “Are you nuts?”

That is precisely the question people asked me and my colleagues from the San Francisco Examiner when we left nine years ago to start Salon. I’d been at the Examiner roughly a decade, the same amount of time Gillmor’s been at the Merc. I haven’t regretted the leap into a more entrepreneurial fray, and I don’t think Dan will either. Perhaps being nuts is, you know, underrated.

Spolsky in Salon

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I’ve been an admirer of Joel Spolsky’s writing on software since I started reading it several years ago. Last month when I was in New York I sat down with Joel and had a good long talk about software development, partly for the purpose of my book research and partly because I knew he’d be entertaining and thoughtful. Today’s Salon features a write-up of the interview, pegged in part to the publication of a book collection of Spolsky’s essays.

Spitzer in bloggerland

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Eliot Spitzer, a guy I went to high school with, has been making headlines for a few years now. In a decade that has seen a retreat from progressive politics across the board, he’s picked up the tools available to him as New York State attorney general and used them creatively and effectively to represent the interests of ordinary citizens. His investigations and prosecutions in the securities, mutual funds and insurance industries have exposed longstanding practices by which insiders profit at the expense of the public they ostensibly serve.

In a better world, the bodies that are supposed to be the watchdogs in these areas would be doing their jobs. Since they haven’t been, Spitzer’s investigations have represented the public’s last line of defense.

I haven’t agreed with every position Eliot has taken in his career (for instance, I don’t support the death penalty), but there isn’t any other Democratic politician out there right now who has been more effective at fighting the self-dealing, cronyism and plundering of the public good that characterize Bush-era business.

Today, in what was a long-expected move, Spitzer announced that he’s running for governor of New York in 2006. And he announced it on a page labeled “Eliot’s Blog” — that appears to be a real, functional weblog. Welcome to the blogosphere, Eliot — I think you’ll like it.

Mike Pence profiles me for Kuro5hin

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Mike Pence, who used to run a Salon blog here and now maintains Digital Grotto and contributes to Kuro5hin, interviewed me a while back. He has now posted the writeup: more than you probably ever wanted to know about my teenage exploits as a mimeographer and other matters, but also thoughts on Salon’s saga and the future of digital media.

IBM PC: RIP

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IBM is putting its PC business on the block, according to the front page of today’s New York Times.

I can still remember getting my hands on an early model IBM PC in the offices of the American Lawyer magazine in 1982 or so. A chunky gray box, it ran a version of Basic just similar enough to the one I’d learned as a teenager that I could write programs for it to process survey results. It used perhaps the world’s worst text editor, a hilariously clumsy thing called EDLIN. (Hey, it’s still there buried in the lizard brain of the Windows 2000 system I currently use —just open a command-line box and see for yourself! But only on a file that you can mangle without fear.)

There were many things about that computer that, like EDLIN, made no sense. But it had enough going for it that you could make it do useful things. And that helped me pay my bills at a time when freelance writing was not doing the trick.

The history of those early PC days is well known: IBM let Microsoft control the operating system and gave away the store. IBM’s choice of an open architecture allowed it to swamp Apple in the marketplace but let Compaq, Dell and other lower-cost vendors steal the hardware business out from under it.

Most of the choices that led IBM to this point today were made in those early-’80s years. But it’s still too bad to see IBM give up.

I’ve relied on IBM laptops for most of the last decade. The company’s hardware standards remain high: The lightweight “X” series, with the integrated pointer (I far prefer this to the more common trackpad) and a great keyboard, is still the best portable machine out there, in my opinion. (Before you Mac fanatics weigh in: Yes, I know, Macs are great, OSX is mostly wonderful, but Apple’s laptop hardware has had its share of trouble through the years.)

Across many years and several models, I’ve relied on IBM Thinkpads to keep my data safe, and I have never lost an ounce of my work to hard drive failure or other hardware problems. I know the manufacturing of these products long ago moved overseas, but it still seemed to make a difference that IBM had a tradition of people maintaining some quality standards. They did, after all, have a reputation to maintain. Let’s hope whoever buys the business thinks the same way.

Phone a gauche

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So at long last we have upgraded our home phone system to a multiple-handset cordless thingie (5.8 gigahertz so it doesn’t interfere with the Wifi), and so far I’m generally pleased. Except for one annoyance.

But let me start at the beginning. I’m left-handed, so the button arrangement on my Motorola cell phone has always been a problem: the green “on” button that you have to hit to answer a call is on the right side of the phone, where a right-handed person’s thumb naturally falls; but my thumb just wants to push the red “hangup” button instead. I had to train myself when I first started using this phone to override my natural tendency — or, really, the interface design’s nudge — to hit that button and hang up on the call I was trying to answer.

Ah well — I got over it. Only now, I’m dealing with the nifty cell-phone-like handset of my new cordless phone, and, what do you know, it places its “hangup” button over on the right side of the handset — at the very spot I have forcibly trained my uncooperative left-handed thumb to hit to pick up the phone. (The “pick up the call” button is in the middle of the phone.)

All my life as a left-hander I’ve been willing to adapt. But we sinister types deserve a little consistency from the world!

Book break

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Earlier this year I wrote about the book project I’ve been working on. For the past six months I’ve been splitting my time between Salon and work on the book. That’s been great but, as you might imagine, at times I’ve felt my world to be a little…bifurcated. (Since I’m a father of twins, this is not an unfamiliar sensation.) And there’s no way to write a book — none that I know of, anyway — without putting your back into it, 100 percent.

So beginning this week, I’m stepping aside from my job at Salon. It’s a highly orderly transition: I’ve planned it for some time, my colleagues and friends at Salon have been great about giving me the freedom to do it, and I expect to return when I’m done — but for now, the book is my work. After nine years (I left the San Francisco Examiner for Salon at the beginning of October, 1995, and we went live on the Web on Nov. 13 of that year), I’m ready for a creative sabbatical.

This blog will continue pretty much in its current form, with the usual spasms and lapses in posting, but the mix of entries may change a bit — in this post-election period, I’ll probably be posting less on politics (hey, the War Room is still on the case!) and more on the subject of the book: the nature of computer programming and software development. Why it’s still so hard to build the stuff that runs our world. And what interesting ideas are out there to make things better.

I won’t be writing the book in public here on the blog. I’m in awe of those people who seem able to blog full-time about the subjects of their books-in-progress, and I admire experiments in wiki-style open editing like J.D. Lasica’s. But I’m still a linear sort of guy at heart; if I’m able to do what I plan on doing, this book will be something more than the sum of its parts, and I can’t imagine how to roll it out piecemeal without altering its nature. I also don’t see how I’ll ever get the writing done if I put too much of my energy into blogging about it. But I certainly expect to be opening up some of the topics as I tackle them. And I know I’m gathering for more material than I will ever be able to include in the final text.

I’m profoundly lucky to be exploring this subject at a moment in history when throngs of thoughtful programmers have adopted the Web as a public space to talk about their work. It makes my work almost too easy.

Except that some time soon I have to stop collecting great notes and URLs and interviews and start, uh, writing.

Bloggercon, belatedly

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Bloggercon III was great. I barely had time to digest everything I took in because I was flying off on a long-planned trip the next morning. Here are some notes.

My session was on Journalism: I talked for about ten minutes, outlining some basic things that I think bloggers can learn from professional journalists and vice versa.

What bloggers can teach the pros:
*How to blur the line between the personal and the professional — creatively
*How to improvise in real time
*How to have a conversation with the “people formerly known as readers”
*How to be humble — you don’t know everything!

What bloggers can learn from traditional journalists:
*the value of legwork
*the nature of accountability
*The positive aspects of editing
*How to be humble — you don’t know everything!

Then I just opened the mike, which is the custom at Bloggercon, where there are no speakers — just “discussion leaders.” We didn’t get trapped in the “Is blogging journalism?” rathole, thankfully; and I think we are now well past the stage of simply re-fighting the old holy war between bloggers and pros, which was never as heated as press accounts had it, anyway. Journalists cast every new phenomenon in horse-race terms — who wins? who loses? — because that’s such a fundamental news template. But I think the smarter participants in both camps, and the many of us who have feet in both camps, or wear hats with multiple insignia, now well understand that this ought to be a win/win game.

I was too busy moderating to take decent notes, but the entire audio for the session is now online (along with other Bloggercon sessions) at Doug Kaye’s excellent ITConversations site, and there’s tons of others who did take notes.

Staci Kramer wrote it up for OJR (those are my bullet points quoted anonymously). There are also good posts about the event from Rebecca McKinnon, Claude Muncey, Barnaby, and Colin Brayton, who posted a a big picture of me that shows just how tired I was… (Note to Colin: if I was edging away from you after our brief conversation it’s because it was late in the day, I was trying to hit the road — my kids were waiting at home!)

Most interesting idea aired at the session (and apologies that I can’t remember whose idea it was — step forth and remind me so I can give you credit): Perform a controlled experiment in which readers take in the work of a number of journalists covering a controversial issue or election who are striving to be “objective” but who actually have a point of view that they do not disclose (i.e., they are normal human beings). The readers will try to guess the writers’ sympathies based on the “objective” work. Can journalists really hide their views? Or, as some critics maintain, can we always tell which side they’re on, anyway?

It is, as Dan Gillmor suggested, a great idea for a thesis. Only you’d also somehow have to control for the biases and sympathies of the readers making the calls. This “objectivity is impossible” thing cuts in all directions. There is no alternative to being human. (Unless you’re, er, a marsupial or something. But then you’re probably not worrying about the nature of journalism.)

UPDATE LATER: That was indeed conference host and organizer Dave Winer who proposed the great “controlled experiment” idea. Thanks for that. Could someone — Poynter? Columbia Journalism School? NYU Journalism School (Jay?) — now put up a little money, or assign it to a class, to make it happen?

Also — more good notes from the session over at John Adams’ blog.

Voting

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I voted this morning with a big crowd of my fellow citizens of Berkeley. Tonight, I’ll be working in the newsroom, as I have on each election night from 1980 on (with the exception of 1984, when I worked for a weekly). (We’re citizens! We’re journalists! There’s no conflict — imagine that!)

None of those contests has remotely compared to this year’s — not just in the level of partisan emotion, something that has caused so much tsk-tsking from the punditry, but in the sheer level of involvement. (My Berkeley neighbor and colleague Andrew Leonard feels the same way.)

And it’s not just that an unusual number of my friends and colleagues are out volunteering in get-out-the-vote efforts; it’s that everyone I talk to says the same thing — they’re amazed at the number of their friends and acquaintances who are out volunteering.

“Getting out the vote” has always been a bipartisan goal in theory but, sadly, a highly partisan issue in fact. You’ll note that nearly all of the election-day disputes center on Democrats trying to boost turnout and Republicans trying to reduce participation. You can draw your own conclusions.

The Net is, of course, one big element in this election’s high level of involvement. Here on this little blog I’m quite pleased and proud that, though my own strong preferences in this election have long been clear, those of you who’ve chosen to participate in the comments have for the most part presented honest and vigorous arguments from both sides. When I hear people complain about the blogosphere promoting a one-sided echo chamber, this debate stands as a simple counterargument. Thanks to all who have tossed in their words — particularly, thanks to those who’ve challenged my views.

Five years

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I don’t blog too much about my family, but this weekend marked my twin sons’ fifth birthday, and some milestones — we’re still standing! — simply must be commemorated. We partied at Tilden Park. The theme, as often for these October boys, was Halloween. There were sack races. (That’s Matthew on the left and Jack on the right.)

Matthew sack-racing
Jack sack-racing