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Scott Rosenberg

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Saying everything in Albany

October 31, 2010 by Scott Rosenberg 1 Comment

A week ago Wednesday I traveled to Albany, N.Y. at the kind invitation of some professors at the College of St. Rose. (Thanks, Cailin Brown and Dan Nester!)

Turns out that Say Everything is being used as a text in a half-dozen classes at that school. As part of the college’s participation in the National Council of Teachers of English’s National Day on Writing, and also part of a cool writer’s series called Frequency North, St. Rose asked me to come talk about blogging and writing. Which I always love to do.

The poster for the talk, reproduced above, caused me to do a doubletake, which I’m sure was the point. I’m slow, sometimes, so it took me a minute before I registered the “hanging your laundry in public” concept. Nice work, and probably the one and only time my name will share a billboard with panties.

Anyway, I had a great day at St. Rose talking with students and faculty and chatting on the local public radio affiliate.

The college has posted a complete video of the talk. (Or here’s just a three-minute taste of the audio, with some optimistic observations on the concept of information overload.) Also, I worked from pretty extensive notes, and I’ve cleaned them up, filled them out a bit and posted them on a separate page. Here it is — Large Blocks of Uninterrupted Text: A Talk on Blogging and ‘Say Everything.’

This is a pretty extensive update on the blogging talk that I was giving back when Say Everything first came out. I start with the Onion, proceed to the death of culture, and discuss the rise of blogging just a bit. Then I use the remarkable saga of Joey DeVilla the Accordion Guy and his New Girl — a story that didn’t make it into Say Everything — as a way to discuss a whole series of critiques of blogging and online discourse along some familiar vectors: truth and trust; anonymity and civility; serendipity; narcissism; shallowness and substance; attention and overload.

Filed Under: Blogging, Events, Say Everything

“Blogging is like auto-save for our entire culture”

July 29, 2010 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

A couple months ago I gave a talk at WordCamp San Francisco, attempting to put WordPress in historical perspective. Those who know the subject know that WordPress’s adoption of the relatively strict GPL free-software licensing is central to its story. (This is the background to the recent dustup between WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and the creator of the popular Thesis theme over the licensing of that theme.) Ironically, my talk was directly opposite one being given by free-software godfather Richard Stallman, the “Father of the GPL.” It was great so many people still chose to listen to me!

This is a variation on the talks I’ve been giving about Say Everything, with some additional material on WordPress, and some thoughts about the value of blogging to our collective history: “Blogging is like auto-save for our entire culture.”

[This video lives over here at WordPress.tv. Thanks to everyone at WordCamp for having me!]

Filed Under: Blogging, Events, Say Everything, Technology

For the media biz, iPad 2010 = CDROM 1994

March 26, 2010 by Scott Rosenberg 225 Comments

I’m having flashbacks these days, and they’re not from drugs, they’re from the rising chorus of media-industry froth about how Apple’s forthcoming iPad is going to save the business of selling content.

Let me be clear: I love what I’ve seen of the iPad and I’ll probably end up with one. It’s a likely game-changer for the device market, a rethinking of the lightweight mobile platform that makes sense in many ways. I think it will be a big hit. In the realm of hardware design, interface design and hardware -software integration, Apple remains unmatched today. (The company’s single-point-of-failure approach to content and application distribution is another story — and this problem that will only grow more acute the more successful the iPad becomes.)

But these flashbacks I’m getting as I read about the media business’s iPad excitement — man, they’re intense. Stories like this and this, about the magazine industry’s excitement over the iPad, or videos like these Wired iPad demos, take me back to the early ’90s — when media companies saw their future on a shiny aluminum disc.

If you weren’t following the tech news back then, let me offer you a quick recap. CD-ROMS were going to serve as the media industry’s digital lifeboat. A whole “multimedia industry” emerged around them, complete with high-end niche publishers and mass-market plays. In this world, “interactivity” meant the ability to click on hyperlinks and hybridize your information intake with text, images, sound and video. Yow!

There were, it’s true, a few problems. People weren’t actually that keen on buying CD-ROMs in any quantity. Partly this was because they didn’t work that well. But mostly it was because neither users nor producers ever had a solid handle on what the form was for. They plowed everything from encyclopedias to games to magazines onto the little discs, in a desperate effort to figure it out. They consoled themselves by reminding the world that every new medium goes through an infancy during which nobody really knows what they’re doing and everyone just reproduces the shape and style of existing media forms on the new platform.

You can hear exactly the same excuses in these iPad observations by Time editor Richard Stengel. Stengel says we’re still in the point-the-movie-camera-at-the-proscenium stage. We’re waiting for the new form’s Orson Welles. But we’re charging forward anyway! This future is too bright to be missed.

But it turned out the digital future didn’t need CD-ROM’s Orson Welles. It needed something else, something no disc could offer: an easy way for everyone to contribute their own voices. The moment the Web browser showed up on people’s desktops, somewhing weird happened: people just stopped talking about CD-ROMs. An entire next-big-thing industry vanished with little trace. Today we recall the CD-ROM publishing era as at best a fascinating dead-end, a sandbox in which some talented people began to wrestle with digital change before moving on to the Internet.

It’s easy to see this today, but at the time it was very hard to accept. (My first personal Web project, in January 1995, was an online magazine to, er, review CD-ROMs.)

The Web triumphed over CD-ROM for a slew of reasons, not least its openness. But the central lesson of this most central media transition of our era, one whose implications we’re still digesting, is this: People like to interact with one another more than they like to engage with static information. Every step in the Web’s evolution demonstrates that connecting people with other people trumps giving them flashy, showy interfaces to flat data.

It’s no mystery why so many publishing companies are revved up about the iPad: they’re hoping the new gizmo will turn back the clock on their business model, allowing them to make consumers pay while delivering their eyeballs directly to advertisers via costly, eye-catching displays. Here’s consultant Ken Doctor, speaking on Marketplace yesterday:

DOCTOR: Essentially, it’s a do-over. With a new platform and a new way of thinking about it. Can you charge advertisers in a different way and can you say to readers, we’re going to need you to pay for it?

Many of the industry executives who are hyping iPad publishing are in the camp that views the decision publishers made in the early days of the Web not to charge for their publications as an original sin. The iPad, they imagine, will restore prelapsarian profit margins.

Good luck with that! The reason it’s tough to charge for content today is that there’s just too much of it. People are having a blast talking with each other online. And as long as the iPad has a good Web browser, it’s hard to imagine how gated content and costly content apps will beat that.

You ask, “What about the example of iPhone apps? Don’t they prove people will pay for convenience on a mobile device?” Maybe. To me they prove that the iPhone’s screen is still too small to really enjoy a standard browser experience. So users pay to avoid the navigation tax that browser use on the iPhone incurs. This is the chief value of the iPad: it brings the ease and power of the iPhone OS’s touch interface to a full-size Web-browser window.

I can’t wait to play around with this. But I don’t see myself rushing to pay for repurposed paper magazines and newspapers sprinkled with a few audio-visual doodads. That didn’t fly with CD-ROMs and it won’t fly on the iPad.

Apple’s new device may well prove an interesting market for a new generation of full-length creative works — books, movies, music, mashups of all of the above — works that people are likely to want to consume more than once. But for anything with a shelf-life half-life — news and information and commentary — the iPad is unlikely to serve as a savior. For anyone who thinks otherwise, can I interest you in a carton of unopened CD-ROM magazines?

Filed Under: Blogging, Business, Media, Say Everything, Technology

Levy: “Say Everything” 2009’s “best technology-related business book”

November 24, 2009 by Scott Rosenberg 2 Comments

Forgive this author a moment of own-horn-tooting.

It was always flattering and humbling to me to hear Dreaming in Code spoken of in the same breath as The Soul of a New Machine. With Say Everything I also had a model in mind: Hackers, Steven Levy’s groundbreaking and still-valuable account of the pioneering mavericks of hacker culture — which first taught me, back in the early ’80s, that there was a fascinating and important cultural story brewing in the computer rooms I’d haunted as a high-school student. In fact, we considered titling the book Bloggers, partly as homage to Levy’s work.

So you can imagine my delight at reading what Levy had to say about Say Everything in an article on the year’s notable technology books in Strategy and Business:

Say Everything is not only a delightful history of the form but a surprisingly broad account that touches on a number of major issues of the past decade, quietly making a case that blogs now play an indispensable role….

Rosenberg’s approach is to tell the stories of the storytellers, constructing his brief history of blogging by way of the bloggers themselves. He does this so well that it appears almost serendipitous that each aspect of his subject is almost perfectly embodied by the story of one or two individuals….

Rosenberg is a mensch, resisting cheap shots even when his subjects behave badly. But he is quick to puncture pretense, whether it comes from the self-importance of bloggers suddenly thrust into the public eye, or the snobbery of mainstream media dismissing citizen postings because their authors lack the training or credentials to participate in a national discussion…

Ironically, Rosenberg’s extended encomium of blogging also turns out to be an implicit defense of another allegedly endangered form: the book. Only by such an extended and well-organized presentation can Rosenberg both give us a comprehensive account of blogging and successfully argue for its importance. The pages of Say Everything provide not only an expertly curated burst of information, but also entertainment for several evenings. The book provides thought and provocation. It illuminates the deep economic challenges of the Internet. And, as is the case with blog postings, Rosenberg speaks with the clarity and wit of an authentic voice — even after the highly filtered, far-from-real-time processing of a major publisher. That’s why I think Say Everything is the best technology-related business book of the year.

OK, </blush>. And thanks!

Filed Under: Personal, Say Everything, Uncategorized

My UC Berkeley Journalism School talk: This Wednesday

November 2, 2009 by Scott Rosenberg 1 Comment

Just a note for those of you in the area: Come on down to the UC Berkeley School of Journalism this Wednesday, Nov. 4, at 6 p.m. if you’d like to hear me give a talk about blogging, journalism, and MediaBugs.

There will be only a little overlap with the talks I’ve been giving about Say Everything and the history of blogging (like my Hillside Club presentation over the summer).

This time, as befits the forum, I’ll be looking at the roots and nature of the long history of confrontation between professional journalists and bloggers, pointing out some positive directions that may lead us beyond the now well-worn grooves of that conflict, and offering some introductory perspectives about MediaBugs and how it fits in to that larger narrative.

I hope to see lots of you there! Details here.

Filed Under: Blogging, Events, Mediabugs, Personal, Say Everything

Some catchup links

October 27, 2009 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

Here are some highlights from the Say Everything front over the last couple of months:

  • Jeremy Hatch at the Rumpus put together an in-depth interview that covered a lot of interesting ground:

    There is this constant refrain in the journalism-blogging dialogue, about how we need to support the institutions of journalism because bloggers don’t have the resources that a real newsroom has. The classic example is the Baghdad Bureau of the New York Times, which costs millions of dollars a year, and reporters are putting their lives on the line to go there, and bloggers are less likely to do that.

    That’s all true, but you can also say that actually, newsrooms have very limited resources. I know this as a managing editor: you have X number of people, and X cubed number of stories: you’re constantly making difficult choices about what to cover and what not to cover; you’re constantly thinking about how you’re deploying your troops; you’re always thinking about how you’re spending your limited newshole.

    The news world is a world of constrained resources. That’s more so today, but it has always been like that. And the blogger who cares about some particular subject really doesn’t have the same constraints.

  • On the newspaper-review front, I’m proudest of this Boston Globe piece. Thanks, Carol Iaciofano! I also got an “Editors Choice” pick from the Chicago Tribune, and Berkeley’s Tom Goldstein covered the book for the San Francisco Chronicle.
  • BookTV came and taped my very first bookstore event back in July at Books Inc. in San Francisco. The whole thing is available here on their site, or you can see the first 10 minutes on YouTube.

Filed Under: Say Everything

Bowden on Sotomayor: Blame the bloggers, again

September 8, 2009 by Scott Rosenberg 7 Comments

Mark Bowden is a seriously good reporter, and his piece in the new Atlantic, “The Story Behind the Story,” is one that every student of today’s mutating media should read. Bowden traces the route by which the soundbite that came to define, though not derail, Sonia Sotomayor’s Supreme Court nomination entered the media bloodstream. I can wholeheartedly recommend the reporting in Bowden’s piece, but I must take issue with some of his interpretation.

The “wise Latina” clip, it turns out, was first unearthed by a conservative blogger named Morgen Richmond and published on his blog, called VerumSerum. And the problem with that, Bowden suggests, is that Richmond, being a partisan in search of ammunition rather than a journalist in search of truth, presented it to the world without making an effort to understand it or put it in context — to see that, in fact, Sotomayor wasn’t saying anything that outrageous at all: As Bowden puts it, “Her comment about a ‘wise Latina woman’ making a better judgment than a ‘white male who hasn’t lived that life’ referred specifically to cases involving racial and sexual discrimination.”

Bowden credits Richmond as “a bright and fair-minded fellow,” but argues that his “political bias made him tone-deaf to the context and import of Sotomayor’s remarks. Bear in mind that he was looking not simply to understand the judge, but to expose her supposed hidden agenda.”

…he makes no bones about his political convictions or the purpose of his research and blogging. He has some of the skills and instincts of a reporter but not the motivation or ethics. Any news organization that simply trusted and aired his editing of Sotomayor’s remarks, as every one of them did, was abdicating its responsibility to do its own reporting. It was airing propaganda. There is nothing wrong with reporting propaganda, per se, so long as it is labeled as such. None of the TV reports I saw on May 26 cited VerumSerum.com as the source of the material, which disappointed but did not surprise Richmond and Sexton.

The trouble with all this is that Bowden is focusing his ire on the wrong people. Richmond is not, as far as I know, claiming to be a journalist — and yet, as Bowden admits, he is actually “fair-minded” enough to feel that the Sotomayor quote was maybe not that big a deal. Surely the failure here is on the part of the TV news organizations that turned it into a marquee soundbite without looking more deeply into it. Wasn’t that their job, their process, their vetting — the safeguard that ostensibly distinguishes them from the unwashed blogging masses? Aren’t they the ones who are supposed to be after truth rather than scalps?

Blogs may have helped accelerated gotcha journalism, but hit pieces and skeletons-in-closets existed long before their advent. The partisan warfare around Clarence Thomas’s nomination far outdid the Sotomayor hearings, and Anita Hill’s charges — whatever your view of them — required no blog posts to ignite their conflagration. The Web has crowdsourced opposition research, but the conflicts that motivate it have been around for ages.

It is television that creates soundbites; the Web at least allows for far more context and nuance, though it does not always deliver them. I do not understand how Bowden could fail to see this. He writes (of Richmond and his co-bloggers):

I would describe their approach as post-journalistic. It sees democracy, by definition, as perpetual political battle. The blogger’s role is to help his side. Distortions and inaccuracies, lapses of judgment, the absence of context, all of these things matter only a little, because they are committed by both sides, and tend to come out a wash. Nobody is actually right about anything, no matter how certain they pretend to be. The truth is something that emerges from the cauldron of debate. No, not the truth: victory, because winning is way more important than being right. Power is the highest achievement. There is nothing new about this. But we never used to mistake it for journalism. Today it is rapidly replacing journalism, leading us toward a world where all information is spun, and where all “news” is unapologetically propaganda.

“The blogger’s role is to help his side.” This is sometimes true, but no more definitive than to say, “The TV newsperson’s role is to help his side.” It is a broad-brush dismissal of an entire class of writers who are actually far more diverse in their goals and techniques. It is no more accurate than the carping of the extremists (of both left and right) who tar all “MSM” journalists with the sins of a minority of hacks or ideologues. It’s disheartening to see a writer of Bowden’s stature placing himself on that level.

There are pundits and news-show hosts who earn our trust as straight shooters, and there are others for whom partisanship plainly trumps truth. There are reporters who aim to shoot straight, and others who hide their own blatant partisanship behind a scrim of ersatz objectivity. In the end, all we can do is find individuals and institutions who, based on their record and their willingness to show their process, seem to place truth ahead of “victory.” Such individuals and institutions are no rarer on the Web, and among bloggers, than among the old guard of journalism. If the public is being ill-served by echo-chamber coverage and shallow sound-bite gotcha clips, the cable news channels bear primary responsibility. Bowden’s own narrative of the Sotomayor “story behind the story” is just the latest demonstration.

BONUS LINK: Here’s Richmond’s thoughtful response to Bowden.

Filed Under: Blogging, Media, Say Everything

Blogger’s 10th birthday party

September 2, 2009 by Scott Rosenberg 4 Comments

The story of the rise of Blogger from the ashes of a dotcom startup to the largest blogging service in the world takes up a whole chapter in Say Everything. So when Rick Klau of Google’s Blogger team invited me to participate in a panel as part of Blogger’s 10th birthday celebration, I was happy to accept.

Last night I took a seat to talk about where blogging has been and where it’s going alongside Rick and his colleage Siobhan Quinn; prominent tech blogger (and Blogger user) Louis Gray; Blogher cofounder Jory des Jardins; Blogger and Twitter founder Evan Williams; and Twitter cofounder Biz Stone (who long ago worked at the early blog network Xanga and also worked on Blogger after it was acquired by Google).

Klau gave us some Blogger numbers to chew on:

  • Between 9 and 10 million “active contributors” (within past 30 days) to Blogger sites — this includes posts and comments. “7-day active contributors” have doubled over the last two years.
  • “Active readers (30-day)” (which I assume is some version of what we think of as “monthly uniques”) is now over 300 million.
  • 270,000 words written each minute on Blogger — 388 million words a day. About a quarter trillion words written on Blogger since its 1999 launch. (“Some of those,” Biz Stone deadpanned, “might have been cut-and-pasted.”)

He also announced a new partnership between Blogger and Socialvibe, which channels charitable contributions from web pages.

Jory Des Jardins shared some of the research from Blogher: bloggers on that network cite top motivations as “fun,” “self-expression,” and “networking.” Making money always takes last place on these lists, she said.

Klau talked about how Google itself uses blogs (more than 100 now), and now Twitter as well, to talk with its users. (I remember Google’s earliest days, when it really didn’t talk with anyone at all, beyond a handful of media folks.) He also discussed efforts to clean up the Blogspot hosted service, which a couple of years ago had developed the reputation of a spam-ridden “not nice neighborhood.” Today, he said, the percentage of spam page views on Blogspot has declined to “the low single digits.”

Williams recalled the moment, a year or two after the introduction of Blogger, when its creators began to imagine the possibility of a world in which every company and every politician would have their own blog: “At the time, these were crazy ideas.”

Stone pointed out the subtle transition in our understanding of blogging implicit in Blogger’s switch from the “Powered by Blogger” slogan at the bottom of users’ pages to “I power Blogger.”

I reminded people of the irony that, even though Blogger today is known as the sort of Everyman’s blog service, for its first year, it required that you host your own domain in order to use it. That made it tough for everyday people to use it, but perfect for the early-adopter blog-geek crowd — people who already had their own domains, didn’t want to give them up, but appreciated the convenience of Blogger’s publishing tool. This approach — enthrall the in-crowd first, then make it easy for everyone else to join in — turns out to be a very effective formula for startup growth, even if, in Blogger’s case, it was more stumbled upon than planned in advance.

None of this will do you any good, to be sure, unless what you’re offering has some intrinsic appeal and value. Blogger most certainly did, and does — along with all its progeny, including Movable Type and WordPress, all of which together have made posting your words on the Web a thing of once-impossible-to-imagine ease today.

UPDATE: Anthony Ha at VentureBeat posted about the event.

Filed Under: Blogging, Say Everything

Time to retire the term “blogger”?

August 18, 2009 by Scott Rosenberg 13 Comments

Has the word “blogger” become meaningless?

Consider this item (from Mediabistro’s Fishbowl LA):

We asked [Jay] Rosen what he thought of the term “blogger” and how there is not a word to distinguish a journalist who blogs and a numbnut who blogs.

“Blogger will become such a broad term it will lose all meaning,” he told FBLA.

Rosen later elaborated on Twitter:

We don’t say “Emailer James Fallows,” even though he uses email. Eventually, it will be the same with the term “blogger.”

Let’s unpack this.

“Blogger” confuses us today because we’ve conflated two different meanings of “blogging.” There is the formal definition: personal website, reverse chronological order, lots of links. Then there is what I would call the ideological definition: a bundle of associations many observers made with blogs in their formative years, having to do with DIY authenticity, amateur self-expression, defiant “disintermediation” (cutting out the media middleman), and so on.

Today professional journalism has embraced the blog form, since it is a versatile and effective Web-native format for posting news. But once you have dozens of bloggers at the New York Times, or entire media companies built around blogs, the ideological trappings of blogging are only going to cause confusion.

Still — wary as I am of taking issue with Rosen, whose prescience is formidable — I don’t think we will see the term “blogger” fade away any time soon. There’s a difference between a term that’s so broad it’s lost all meaning and a term that has a couple of useful meanings that may conflict with each other.

After all, we still use the word “journalist,” even though it has cracked in two (“journalist” as professional label vs. “journalist” as descriptor of an activity). This is where human language (what programmers call “natural language”) differs from computer languages: our usage of individual words changes as it records our experience with their evolving meanings.

In other words, the multiple meanings of the word “blogger” may bedevil us, but they also tell a story.

Filed Under: Blogging, Media, Say Everything

Some Say Everything links

August 17, 2009 by Scott Rosenberg 1 Comment

Say Everything is getting around. Here’s some links to recent coverage and related stuff:

My two favorite speaking gigs about the book are now both online. Fora.tv was there at the Hillside Club in Berkeley a couple of weeks ago. Here’s the video, in which you can, among other things, hear my “Top Ten Myths About Blogging”:

Also online now is a slightly different version of the same talk, which I gave at Microsoft Research earlier in July. Microsoft does a neat trick with timing the video and the presentation slides — but, warning, it will only work in IE.

Todd Bishop of Seattle’s TechFlash did a nice in-depth Q&A with me:

Q: What have blogs meant in the evolution of the Internet?

Rosenberg: I identify blogging as the first mass experience of having a read-write web or a two-way web or a user-generated web – all these terms mean the same thing. They mean a web that we create ourselves. 1994, 1995 was when people first saw browsers and got excited, and it took a good five, seven, eight years from that point for blogs to show people, this is what that vision is about – this is what it looks like when anyone can contribute..

Other Q&As are at Time.com, by Dan Fletcher. (But, hey, Time, what’s with the little red links every couple of paragraphs? Pretty crude.) And over at the NewsHour’s Art Beat blog, by Chris Amico. Also in Reason, by Jesse Walker:

Reason: Of the ’90s pioneers you write about in the first section of the book, are there any that you feel haven’t really gotten their due?

Rosenberg: In a way, that whole era is unjustly forgotten. The tech industry and indeed the online world have very little memory of history. One of my purposes in writing the book was to get it down while it’s still fresh in my mind, everyone’s still around to interview, and the pages can still be hauled out of the Internet Archive.

The Web moves really quickly, and we’ve had several generations of excitement. Today we have Twitter and Facebook and all of that, and people are having experiences in which they feel that they’re doing things for the first time. But nearly all of these experiences are things that people went through in the ’90s or the early part of the 2000s, whether it was revealing too much of your life and getting in trouble, or dreaming of some sort of utopia where we can all express ourselves and never get into fights. Telling those stories just seemed important.

On the review front, we’ve been in Business Week (“Gracefully written and well researched, Say Everything captures the drama of blogging’s rapid-fire rise”), the Seattle Times, the Christian Science Monitor and the Wall St. Journal.

Then there is Andrew Keen’s review, in the Barnes and Noble Review:

Rosenberg criticizes mogul Barry Diller for suggesting that talent remains the one scarcity in today’s media. But this book is a glitteringly subversive argument against Rosenberg’s own thesis. It’s a beautifully written and meticulously fair narrative about the past, present, and future of the blog. Only somebody with Rosenberg’s incomparable ability could have written Say Everything. We are lucky to have his unique talent.

My point about Diller, of course, was never meant to suggest that talent is or has become widespread or universal. Rather, I took issue with the media exec’s smug attitude that the old world he inhabits already does a thorough job of locating and rewarding talent. But, er, I’d be foolish to argue too strenuously here!

I’m also grateful to all the bloggers who’ve posted about the book so far, including, but certainly not limited to, J.D. Lasica, Peter Merholz, Rafe Colburn, Paul Kedrosky (“funny, authoritative, full of great-great stories and anecdotes, and admirably even-handed”), Rogers Cadenhead, Ed Cone, Marylene Delbourg-Delphis, John McDaid, and Scott Carpenter (“An amazing job… It is a real joy to find a book like this one, where I can fall under its spell as I increasingly trust the author to tell a good tale”).

Filed Under: Blogging, Personal, Say Everything

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