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Archives for October 2003

Dark matters

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Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy is one of the very few works of fantasy I’ve read as an adult that moved and excited me the way I was moved and excited by the fantasies (Tolkien et al.) I read as a kid. I’m not sure whether I’d have loved it the same way had I first read it as a kid. I’ll never know, of course.

In any case, Pullman’s New York Times op-ed essay today is a marvelous meditation on the way the rational mind and the imagination coexist. How can a man spend much of his career creating fantasy tales when he doesn’t believe in ghosts and disembodied spirits? Here’s a taste of Pullman’s answer:

  The rational, daylight, functional, get-about-and-do-things part of my mind welcomes the broom of reason as it sweeps away the cobwebs of spookery. But I don’t write with that part of my mind, and the part that does the writing doesn’t like the place cleaned up and freshly painted and brightly lit.

Is there an aggregator in the house?

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I love the RSS aggregator in Radio Userland and I use it all the time. But it’s on a desktop computer that is not conveniently accessible outside the Salon network. So I’m looking for an aggregator that I can install on my laptop (it’s a Windows machine) to take my feeds with me wherever I go. I like the “all on one page” format of Radio rather than the multipane, RSS-headlines-like-emails-in-Outlook approach of so many popular aggregators. I found Amphetadesk, which seems to suit my needs.

However as far as I can tell it’s missing one critical feature of the Radio aggregator: in Radio, the aggregator presents you with a whole mess of items to read, and you can easily delete them with one click once you’ve read the page. Then you won’t waste time the next go-round looking at stuff you’ve already read. This adds a huge level of efficiency to the whole process.

Is there any other aggregator out there that pulls all your feeds onto a single browser page — and lets you delete-as-you-read?

Those who cannot remember the past…

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Today’s Wall Street Journal has a piece about the rush of venture capital money into social-software companies, triggered by the popularity of Friendster.

Viewed from the perspective of a technologist or an anthropologist, social software — tools that help people meet each other and work and play together online — is fascinating and hot. And maybe a handful of entrepreneurs will even figure out how to turn it into an actual profitable business.

In the meantime, though, it seems like tens of millions of dollars are being poured into businesses as a matter of blind faith. This is not bitter words from a grizzled veteran of the dot-com bubble; it’s what the venture investors are saying themselves. Robert Kagle of Benchmark Capital calls his investment in Friendster “a leap of faith” and says, “If you’ve got this level of engagement, and people spending upwards of an hour at a time [on the site], that will translate into a set of economics that will support this business model.”

Somewhere around the end of 2000 I thought we’d collectively given up the notion that site traffic, unique visitors, page views and “time on the site” were in themselves financially significant, even in the absence of a careful and sensible plan to derive revenue from said traffic. Of course, maybe such a plan is sitting within Friendster’s prospectus. But then it wouldn’t be a “leap of faith” at all.

Radio Radio

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If you are a Salon blogger (or any other kind of blogger) using Radio Userland as your blogging software you may want to know about Rogers Cadenhead‘s new book about the software, “Radio Userland Kickstart.”

Rogers is a smart guy who has been immersed in this stuff — both software and blogging — for a long time. If you want to get more out of this versatile but sometimes confusing software, I recommend the book (based on the three sample chapters Rogers has posted online, which are also highly useful in themselves).

An editor! An editor! My kingdom for an editor!

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My computer meltdown meant I wasn’t able to post in a timely fashion on the Gregg Easterbrook/anti-semitism dustup, and I’m not going to launch into a lengthy dissertation at this late date. Here’s a short one instead.

Easterbrook has always struck me as a facile writer with some interesting ideas and a penchant for contrarianism even when it carries him into ridiculous waters (as with his ludicrous and contrafactual defenses of the Bush environmental record). But it seems pretty obvious to me that he is not an anti-semite. There’s no way he could have maintained a long association with the New Republic, that bastion of the Israel lobby, if he were an actual hater of Jews.

He posted something stupid on his blog; he apologized; I’m not sure there’d be any more of a story here, except that he is plugged into the New Republic/Slate Axis of Kinsley, has friends in the media falling over themselves asserting his innocence of prejudice, and his ugly words resounded through the echo chamber of the Beltway intelligentsia like a particularly loud bodily eruption that no one could ignore. Should he have been fired from ESPN? I don’t think so. (Read King Kaufman on this for more.)

It is clear that Easterbrook will now go down in the books as object lesson A on the subject of why journalists who are used to working with editors should think twice before giving up that safety net. Any editor with half a brain would have read Easterbrook’s paragraph singling out the bosses of Disney and Miramax as Jews who “worship money,” pulled the writer over and said, “Uh, you don’t want to say this this way.” Without the advantage of a second reader, post-first-think-later writers like Easterbrook will be free to hang themselves. Which is fine for many or most bloggers out there; indeed, the spectacle is part of the fun of this new media form. But those — like Easterbrook — whose livelihoods depend on their reputation as writers may sensibly retreat to the safety of editors.

Life in hell

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After two days in hardware hell I’m finally back in business.

It began with an apparently dead motherboard on Monday morning. Since Radio Userland is a client-side tool I couldn’t just move to my laptop and not worry about things. I had to get this box fixed. The quest involved swapping out the motherboard; buying new memory because I failed to account for the fact that the new mobo used DDR memory (but thank god memory’s cheap these days); then throwing my hands up in despair as the new hardware exhibited the same apparent symptoms as the old (no video out, no BIOS “beep” on startup).

Thanks to the amazing support resources on the Net I eventually figured out that what I had to do was hold a paper clip to a pair of solder points on the motherboard in order to reset the CMOS. I am not kidding. It’s 2003 and we’re still poking paper clips into our computers to get them to work.

In any case the computer is up again, Radio is running once more, and all I have to do is spend hours now reinstalling the rest of my life onto this new computer (I had to reinstall the OS too — the hardware transition was too much for the old Win2K installation).

Blog vs. blog

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John Markoff of the New York Times is one of the smartest and most respected tech reporters around. He’s also seen a lot of trends boom and bust. I didn’t take his comments in an OJR interview to be as dismissive of the phenomenon of blogging as many of my fellow bloggers have. Markoff said:

  I certainly can see that scenario, where all these new technologies may only be good enough to destroy all the old standards but not create something better to replace them with. I think that’s certainly one scenario. The other possibility right now — it sometimes seems we have a world full of bloggers and that blogging is the future of journalism, or at least that’s what the bloggers argue, and to my mind, it’s not clear yet whether blogging is anything more than CB radio. And, you know, give it five or 10 years and see if any institutions emerge out of it. It’s possible that in the end there may be some small subset of people who find a livelihood out of it and that the rest of the people will find that, you know, keeping their diaries online is not the most useful thing to with their time. When I tell that to people … they get very angry with me. …

I think he’s right to suggest that it’s going to take 5 to 10 years before we know whether blogging will actually have a lasting impact on institutional journalism. Like most journalistic pros, though, he sets professional criteria: he assumes the yardstick is going to be, can anyone “find a livelihood” from blogging, and do “any institutions emerge out of it.”

But like so many other Web phenomena, blogging may prove significant despite a failure to prove itself as a business. Institutions and livelihoods is not the point here. We already have a class of professional journalists. It does certain things quite well. It fails to serve many other needs. Blogs are something different. They are not displacing professional journalism but rather complementing it.

In one of those great fortuitous juxtapositions of blog-postings that we sometimes witness, on the same day as Markoff’s interview hit the Web, Jay Rosen chose to unveil an extremely pithy and useful list of “Ten Things Radical about the Weblog Form in Journalism”.

The whole list is worth reading, but let’s zero in on point number one: “The weblog comes out of the gift economy, whereas most (not all) of today’s journalism comes out of the market economy.” Pros live in the market economy and have a very hard time with this concept. And American culture uses dollars as the only yardstick of seriousness and significance, so stuff that is not measurable by that yardstick tends to evoke puzzlement or dismissal.

This is one of the things I tried to emphasize in my comments at Bloggercon: Online phenomena do not have to make money to be of value to people. Blogs can change individual lives — and even, conceivably, the world, in some way — without needing business models and marketing machines. In fact, what makes them unusual to many who produce and consume them is precisely that they are not simply another retread of the media business.

So while I understand, and to some extent share, John Markoff’s sense of deja vu as he surveys the blogscape — yes, sometimes it really does sound a lot like 1993-1994 out there — I don’t think that blogs are doomed to recapitulate the early Web’s cycle of starry-eyed idealism fueling insane visions of wealth collapsing into financial wreckage. If we remember the past we should not be condemned to repeat it, right? This is why my hackles go up when I hear about schemes to turn blogs into Big Businesses. That way madness lies.

Farewell to Emusic

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I’ve written rapturously in the past about the Emusic service, for which I’ve willingly paid for many many months, based on its high quality of unusual music and its smart policy on downloads.

Well, all good things must pass, and now it seems that Emusic has been acquired by new owners who’ve decided that it should become just like all the other online music services, limiting the amount of music users get for their money. It’s not all bad news; it sounds like Emusic will continue to offer real MP3s rather than DRM-crippled files, for instance. But the real value of the service as a place where you could get turned on to musical obscurities in abundance looks like it will vanish.

It’s tough to run any sort of business online these days and I assume Emusic is doing what it has to do to stay afloat. But I’ll probably be canceling my subscription, and something tells me a whole lot of other people are going to do the same.