Wordyard

Hand-forged posts since 2002

Archives

About

Greatest hits

Working press

by

I started working with Andrew Leonard at Salon when he joined us in early 1997, and for several years I happily served as editor for his inspired technology reporting. At the height of the Internet boom I helped him conceive and execute a book project that we unfolded, chapter by chapter, online, in an early instance of a practice that has now become positively trendy. The Free Software Project had to be scuttled as Salon’s business went south, but even in its incomplete form I think it represents some of the best writing anywhere on the history of open source software development.

Today Andrew and Salon unveil the latest effort of this technology writer par excellence — a blog called How the World Works, in which Andrew will dig into some of the thorniest, gnarliest and most complex stories that reveal the strangely mutating dynamics of early 21st-century global capitalism. You can read Andrew’s introduction here. Or read about the strange saga of the run on polysilicon. The How the World Works RSS feed is here (or will be very soon!).

Time flies when your writing’s fun

by

Well, I’ve researched and researched, and written and written, and now I must revise and revise. When I actually have a manuscript turned in to my editor — before Thanksgiving, for sure! — I will exhale and write a bit here about the process, and how things have turned out. I should also be blogging a bit more henceforth. Thanks for bearing with me through this hiatus.

In the meantime, I should mention that Salon is celebrating its 10th anniversary this week. It’s hard for me to believe that ten years ago I was a disaffected ex-theater critic, technology columnist and fledgling HTML adept making the jump from print to online. I knew it was risky, and the fact that our money-making plans were strictly theoretical made me think, okay, this will be fun for a year or two, then Salon’s likely to go down the tubes and I’ll make a living freelancing.

After a fun year became two, then three, then four, I moved over from my job as technology editor to managing editor, taking on a lot of responsibility for things like budgets and site management. And I began to think, hey, this thing might actually last! Whoops — cue the bursting of the dot-com bubble. The moment I started getting confident, suddenly it really did look for a while like Salon might go down.

But by then I was hooked. I was determined to see it through, as was everyone else who stuck it out, and I put my back into a lot of difficult and creatively unfulfilling work to do my part to help Salon survive. It was only last year that I felt comfortable enough about the company’s stability that I could think about taking a book leave this year without feeling like I was abandoning ship. Things are definitely on the upswing, but, you know, I’m a little wary of feeling too confident. Old wounds and all.

By now you may have seen Gary Kamiya’s history of the site — it’s hilarious, deftly captures much of the heart and soul of Salon through the years, and brought back a torrent of memories for me. My angle on some of the history might have been different: Gary’s less focused than I’d have been on Salon’s place in the evolution of the nascent field of Web publishing; he’s more immersed in consideration of Salon’s place in the general milieu of political and literary journalism. I always worked one step closer than him to the business side of things, and many steps closer to the technical side of things. My version of those aspects of the story may be a little less Stranger in a Strange Land and a little more In the Belly of the Beast.

When I’m a little less written out I may trot out some of those tales. Or maybe I’ll just wait till Salon’s 20th.

For now, as I near my own milestone of a finished book, I toast all my current and former Salon colleagues, and look forward to rejoining them in January. More on that, soon, too.

Salon’s new look

by

I should take a brief break from the hurlyburly here at Web 2.0 to point whatever tiny handful of my blog readers over to Salon proper, where my colleagues have, as of last night, unveiled the central piece of the site’s continuing redesign. It’s the first Salon redesign that I have mostly sat out of, from my on-leave perch this year. It is, naturally, a collaboration by many great people. But if those of you with longer memories detect a certain feeling of connection with previous Salon designs of the mid and late ’90s — elegance and openness — that’s the hand of Mignon Khargie, Salon’s original design director, who returned to lend her sharp talents to the project.

There are, inevitably, kinks to work out, and some features that still need to be rolled in. But it’s great to see Salon beginning to evolve again. For a few years in the early part of this decade, we devoted a lot of energy simply to survival. Now we’re able to change and grow again.

[having trouble posting this remotely…flaky network here at Web 2.0 — let’s see if this works….]

Force to farce

by

I’m keeping my head down to work on my book, most of the time, but Kerry Lauerman asked for contributions to a package about “Star Wars,” and, well, I couldn’t resist. You can read my thoughts on why I, as a passionate teenage science fiction fan in the 1970s, was never a fan of George Lucas’s epic, here.

On a related subject, I watched “Spaceballs” for the first time during my last vacation, in the company of my family, and while it was as, well, slight as I expected, there was something about the notion of “The Schwartz” (Mel Brooks’ answer to the Force) that really seemed to charm my five-year-old boys, who took up the concept as a rallying cry and did not let it go.

No reader is an island

by

You can’t open your RSS reader these days without finding another thoughtful essay or exhaustive report on the troubles confronting the news business and profession.

These critiques are valuable and necessary. Still, sometimes I think the situation is much simpler. Reading Larry Lessig’s pained response to New York Times coverage of a recent panel he shared with Jeff Tweedy (of Wilco) and Steven Johnson (of Feed and several great books, including the forthcoming “Everything Bad is Good For You“) reminded me of why.

Lessig read the Times piece and, despite the number of people who told him they thought it was great, reported his disappointment in David Carr’s coverage — specifically, Carr’s failure to offer his readers a full understanding of the issues in the copyright controversy, which are far more complex (and interesting) than the dull-brained dichotomy of “I support piracy” vs. “I think artists should get paid” that the Hollywood content cartel promotes, and to which, Lessig felt, Carr’s piece reduced Tweedy’s position.

This disillusionment happens every day, even with publications at the top of the heap, like the Times, the Post and the Journal. (Our expectations for broadcast journalism are so minuscule that there’s less room for disappointment — we assume the worst going in.) We’re happy with what we read in the paper until we’re reading about something we know really well. Then, too often, with all but the very sharpest and most conscientious reporters, we see all the small errors, distortions, omissions and problems that are daily journalism’s epidemic affliction.

Of course we experienced our share of this over the years at Salon, during the period when every little sneeze and twitch of our business — as well, to be sure, as some more significant seizures — seemed to call forth an avalanche of coverage. If you bothered to complain about problems in coverage, the common reaction of most journalists followed a sort of Kubler-Rossian sequence of stages that rarely cycled all the way through to the end:

  • Denial: There’s nothing wrong with our story. You’re blaming the messenger.
  • Anger: Ingrate! You should be glad you’re getting any coverage at all.
  • Bargaining: Okay, we did mis-spell that name, but does anyone really care about the distinction between “losses” and “debt”?
  • Acceptance: The correction will run when we get around to it. (And we’ll remember what a pain in the butt you are the next time around.)

When our own stories were challenged, I always tried to remind our staff of how they felt when we were on the receiving end of sloppy coverage, and to work past the inevitable human reaction of defensiveness toward a more disinterested stance: if we got something wrong, we should be the most eager to find out what “right” is and fix the record. (This is one of those discussions where it remains useful to try to uphold the fast-eroding distinction in the language between “disinterest” — meaning, you can be neutral because you don’t hold any interest in the matter — and “uninterest,” meaning you’re bored.)

Of course, many complaints about coverage aren’t about simple facts but rather about emphasis, scope and slant, and the correction process doesn’t really help there, anyway. Lessig’s issue is probably in this category.

The problem is that writing on deadline is hard to begin with. Writing on deadline about a subject you’re only modestly knowledgeable about is even harder. The newsroom is a place of generalist bravado, in which most reporters feel perfectly qualified to write about anything, even if they’re flying blind. They’d better feel that way, since their editors ask them to do so all the time.

Until recently, each reader who saw the holes in the occasional story he knew well was, in essence, an island; and most of those readers rested in some confidence that, even though that occasional story was problematic, the rest of the paper was, really, pretty good. Only now, the Net — and in particular the explosion of blogs, with their outpouring of expertise in so many fields — has connected those islands, bringing into view entire continents of inadequate, hole-ridden coverage. The lawyer blogs are poking holes in the legal coverage, while the tech blogs are poking holes in the tech coverage, the librarian blogs are poking holes in the library coverage — and the political blogs, of course, are ripping apart the political coverage in a grand tug of war from the left and the right. Within a very short time we’ve gone from seeing the newspaper as a product that occasionally fails to live up to its own standards to viewing it as one that has a structural inability to get most things right.

Blogging potentially allows CEOs and politicians, companies and institutions to tell their own stories in their own words, and that’s dandy, but I’d never trust it as the only record. Coverage of important news by smart generalists — disinterested generalists — remains of great public value. But too many practitioners of this venerable art have grown (figuratively) fat and lazy from their monopoly position. They’re not used to being challenged, they don’t like being challenged, and too often their first reflex when challenged is to question the motive of the challenger.

Now the monopoly is fraying, the challenges are coming on in a wave, and the entire field is at a crossroads. As a profession, journalism has a choice: It can persist in a defensive, circle-the-wagons stance, pretending that nothing has changed. (The public has spontaneously and inexplicably decided to withdraw its trust from journalists! How strange! Let’s wring our hands and wait for the madness to pass.) Or it can accept the presence of millions of teeming critical voices as a challenge to shape up and do a better job.

It’s hard work, and it requires a level of humility that is not yet in wide enough supply in the newsrooms I’ve known. But most journalists are, or once were, idealists, and I think enough of them still wake up in the morning wanting to seek out and tell the truth that there’s hope they’ll come to understand that the Internet can be their ally in that quest, and not just a channel for random noise and personal invective. (It helps to have a thick skin and a functioning “ignore” filter for such invective when it’s encountered.)

As a business, journalism has a choice, too: It can ride out the monopoly’s sunset, delivering the dregs of a once-profitable position to investors until the business sputters out, replaced by a whole new system with new opportunities, problems — and owners. Or it can get entrepreneurial, invest in some new experiments, knowing that many will fail, but that the few successes could point a way out of today’s cul-de-sac.

Almost inevitably, incumbent business franchises choose door number one, the cul-de-sac. There are just too many reasons to say “no” to change, and too few guarantees of a payoff if you say “yes.” So, while I’m hopeful for the choice that the journalism profession will make, I’m skeptical that the business management of most media corporations today will will hear the alarms through their profit-drugged stupor and rouse themselves to do the unexpected.

After all, if they did, it would mean admitting that some of those ragtag bloggers might have been, you know, right.

David Talbot moves on

by

In 1994, the Internet grabbed me by the lapels and said, “Come here, kid.” I learned all about HTML and TCP/IP but I knew nothing about raising money or starting a company. It was David Talbot who had the totally unshakeable belief that it would be possible, not only creatively but financially, to start an independent Web site where he and a group of writers and editors from the San Francisco Examiner, including me, could try to do their best work.

Since the news of his stepping down as editor of Salon broke today, it seems the right time to tip my hat to his ingenuity and tenacity and guts over the years of starting Salon, shaping it, and keeping it afloat in high tides and low ebbs.

I’m getting asked a bit about what the transitions at Salon mean for me, so I’ll mention what I’ve said in this space before: I’m thrilled to be working on my book, but I would never have felt right about taking a break from Salon in the first place if I didn’t have deep trust and confidence in the people who are now in charge. Joan Walsh and Betsy Hambrecht are smart and energetic and creative, and they will, I’m sure, keep Salon moving in good directions. I’ll be continuing to enjoy my new status as a reader of the site who doesn’t know everything that’s going to be published beforehand. And when my own project is done I hope to return to Salon and contribute to its next chapters.

The folk tag game

by

There’s a useful and engaging discussion unfolding about “folksonomies” — emergent, user-shaped taxonomies of metadata like those in Flickr and Delicious (Adam Mathes’ thorough and detailed paper is here, Lou Rosenfeld offers measured dissent here, Clay Shirky fires back here). This topic reminds me of discussions we had back in 1999 and 2000, when we were building the Salon Directory.

We needed a tagging scheme for Salon articles, and some of the software developers felt that we should just generate a list of categories and build drop-down menus into the content management system. We had hired a smart consultant who argued that we should instead just let our editors add tags to stories in a free-form way, and allow the resulting categories to shape the “back catalog” of stories. As long as we occasionally did some gardening of the resulting keyword list — combining duplicate categories and handling complex issues (which “president bush”, exactly?) as they arose — we’d have a flexible, expandable schema naturally emerging from our daily work flow.

Our consultant was plainly right, and whatever problems the Salon Directory has had over the years have been more the result of limited software development resources on our part than of any fundamental mistakes in its conception. So within the confines of the Salon staff we had our own little “folksonomy” growing.

The biggest problems have not been those of organization, classification or structure but the simpler ones of time and effort. We made it relatively easy on our staff to add keywords, and some are added automatically, but it’s still a constant struggle to make sure every story is well keyworded. Some editors are more conscientious than others; all are on deadline much of the time; and the pressures of an “all-the-time” publishing schedule mean that today’s good intention of going back and fixing yesterday’s metadata failure usually falls prey to the demands of tomorrow’s stories.

I think this is what Shirky is getting at when he talks about how expensive it is to “build, maintain and enforce a controlled vocabulary.” Here’s in-the-field evidence that it’s not so cheap or easy to “build, maintain and enforce” even a within-the-firewall folksonomy. And so, much as I love the approaches of Flickr and Delicious, I also worry that the value of the tagging ecosystems emerging on those services will grow for a while and then, sadly, decline. Early adopters are enthusiastic and willing to take the time to tag; as the services grow, people are less likely to devote that time and care.

Which of course does not mean that these aren’t great projects — I agree with Shirky that they are far better than the alternative because the alternative, most often, is nothing at all. But when Rosenfeld and others wonder about the scalability of folksonomies, I think the issue may be less the scale of individual tags (50 billion “cat” photos!) than the scale of human enthusiasm for doing the slog-work of classification. Geeks love tidying up their personal dataspaces because, obviously, they’re geeks. For the rest of the world, my hunch is that — even when they’re only classifying the tiny sliver of stuff that’s their own — most people would rather do almost anything else.

Spolsky in Salon

by

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.

The Iranian information blockade

by

I read this New York Times op-ed by Iranian Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi with great interest. Ebadi complains about the absurd U.S. Treasury Department rules that prevent American publishers from commissioning or editing work by people in Iran:

  Despite federal laws that say that American trade embargoes may not restrict the free flow of information, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control continues to regulate the import of books from Iran, Cuba and other countries. In order to skirt the laws protecting the flow of information, the government prohibits publishing “materials not fully created and in existence.” Therefore, I could publish my memoir in the United States, but it would be illegal for an American literary agent, publisher, editor or translator to help me.

We encountered this ridiculous regulation here at Salon a couple of years ago in trying to pay a reporter who was spending time in Iran. Applying the rules of trade embargos to informational products is not only silly, it’s counterproductive to the United States’ larger global effort. We should be working hard to open up the flow of information into and out of these so-called axis-of-evil nations — not behaving like petty dictators eager to clamp down on the free reporting of news and expression of ideas.

Oh, wait, that is the order of the day for our new, improved, “mandate”-driven democracy. I guess it all makes sense.

COPA coverage

by

Here’s the AP on the COPA ruling. Says it was a 5-4. Court upheld the original injunction against putting the law into effect. Could conceivably go back to lower court for full trial if the Ashcroft Justice Department chooses to — then we’ll be fighting this poorly conceived and written law for another five years. Another area where a change in administration might be salutary — though Clinton signed the original COPA, it’s not at all clear whether a less porn-obsessed Justice Department would have pursued the case as avidly as Ashcroft has.