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Archives for June 2007

Dick Cheney, constitutional Transformer

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By now you’ve no doubt heard this amusing tidbit from the Bush administration bunker: Vice president Cheney is now arguing that his office is, has been, and should be exempt from normal executive-branch oversight of its handling of classified documents because…the vice president is not part of the executive branch!

This latest in a long line of Bush administration legal doctrines of nullification and exceptionalism is based on a hair-slender reed of constitutional fact: the vice president gets to preside over the Senate and break ties there, so he does have an odd presence in the legislative branch. But saying that the entire office is simply not part of the executive is desperate madness.

Democrats in Congress sound like they’re ready to call Cheney on his bluff. Atrios posts an email reporting Rahm Emanuel’s response:

“The Vice President has a choice to make. If he believes his legal case, his office has no business being funded as part of the executive branch. However, if he demands executive branch funding he cannot ignore executive branch rules…”

That’s got some teeth. But beyond this immediate parry-and-riposte, surely we are at a jump-the-shark moment for the Bush administration’s tortuous legal arguments defending secrecy, deception and torture.

The GOP spent many years mocking Bush’s predecessor for his lawyerly tactics during the Lewinsky affair. But a U.S. vice president claiming that he is not part of the executive branch? That makes quarrels over “what the meaning of ‘is’ is” look like the soul of reason. Does the vice-presidency exist in its own special branch? Does the office mutate by the moment from “executive” to “legislative” depending on who Cheney is fighting? Ahh — the Bush administration’s very own Transformer from Cybertron!

All his life, from his Vietnam era draft avoidance (“I had other priorities”) to this latest shenanigans, Cheney has held himself at an imperious remove from the demands our society and legal system place on mere mortals. It is past time to call him out on such behavior. De-fund the clown!
[tags]dick cheney, vice presidency, constitution[/tags]

Are advertorials “blog-ready”?

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In the murky annals of “advertorial” — the blurring of clear lines between independent editorial matter and advertising — the dustup over Federated Media’s campaign on behalf of Microsoft’s “People Ready” slogan will rank as a minor affair. But it’s a useful flashpoint for looking at a central divergence in perspectives on blogging.

Federated Media, John Battelle’s ad network for high-traffic blogs, gathered a constellation of star tech-and-biz pundits who are part of its network, got them to offer comments on the theme of Microsoft’s campaign, and assembled those quotes on a Web site. Valleywag cried foul. FM refers to the technique as a “conversational marketing campaign”; the approach is really the Web equivalent of a magazine advertorial. Advertorials — including advertorials that involve a publication’s editorial staff — have been around a long time, and while they can be abused, they are hardly cause for deep moral indignation, as long as they are clearly labeled (FM’s is) and not trying to confuse readers.

On the other hand, if you run advertorials, I think you make it much harder to present yourself as the leader of any kind of business revolution. When advertisers ask for an advertorial, they typically want to confuse readers; they’re admitting that traditional ads aren’t working for them, and they’re asking for the editors or bloggers to lend an ad a bit of the content producers’ credibility — or at least ability to attract readers’ attention. This is fundamentally an old-media game.

FM and others working at the edge of new-media business models argue that they’re helping advertisers and marketers “join a conversation.” Maybe so. But the best conversations aren’t plotted by ad buyers; they’re spontaneous.

Ironically, of course, it’s the conversation about this ad campaign (Mike Arrington defends the ad, Om Malik retreats from it, Dave Winer says the bloggers may be “clouding their integrity”) that is attracting multiple posts –including, yeah, this one — and landing the controversy at the top of sites like Techmeme. So maybe FM and Microsoft knew exactly what they were doing. Maybe Nick Denton and Valleywag are in on the deal, too! (No, no, of course not: joke.)

What I find interesting in this debate is that there remains, nearly a decade into the history of blogging, a philosophical divide: Some see blogging as simply a young format for media business — and, like Federated Media or Valleywag’s owner Gawker Media, building ad-based publications on blogging platforms. Others stubbornly continue to see blogging as a uniquely new creative endeavor that puts bloggers in direct touch with readers, cutting out media-biz middle-manning. Anyone in the latter camp is going to squawk at the arrival of the blog-advertorial — not only because it’s corrupt to them, but because it’s old hat.

The people at Federated Media are smart, and I’ll give them credit for trying out new ad approaches in a not-obviously-corrupt way. If this one doesn’t work, I’m sure they’ll keep trying. But I’m skeptical of the introduction of what are, essentially, magazine-biz norms into the blogosphere. Because eventually that road ends with blogs becoming independent online magazines, and I’ve been at that game long enough to know how hard it is.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis — whose blog is repped by Federated Media — weighs in at length, concluding:

It’s the bloggers who must make these calls. That’s because advertisers will be advertisers; they will try to push for more integration with us (and we should beware taking that as flattery). And sales people will be sales people; they will try hard to get the sale. So we bloggers are left, inevitably, with the need to say no.

[tags]federated media, advertorial, microsoft, people powered, blogging[/tags]

Links for June 20th

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  • John Heilemann, in New York, has written a grand, sharp profile of Steve Jobs on the threshold of the iPhone release. One notable footnote to the piece is that — great as it is — it is forced to do a little tapdancing around the obvious fact that Jobs would not talk to Heilemann (or, at the very least, Heilemann did not interview Jobs for this piece, though he extracts key quotes from Jobs’ onstage talks at the recent D conference).

    I may be a little hyper-aware of this because, almost a decade ago — as Jobs reassumed his post at the head of Apple — I, too, tried to write a definitive portrait of Jobs without having the chance to actually sit down and talk to him. Heilemann’s piece is, I think, the better of the two, and it’s also obviously a lot more timely. Nonetheless, mine still holds up pretty well.

  • PowerPoint turns 20: Lee Gomes has a good column in the Wall Street Journal (free this week at this address, later on available for subscribers here) focusing on the creators of Powerpoint — their pride in providing the world with a popular tool, and their misgivings at how it is so often misused:

    Mr. Gaskins reminds his questioner that a PowerPoint presentation was never supposed to be the entire proposal, just a quick summary of something longer and better thought out. He cites as an example his original business plan for the program: 53 densely argued pages long. The dozen or so slides that accompanied it were but the highlights.

    Since then, he complains, “a lot of people in business have given up writing the documents. They just write the presentations, which are summaries without the detail, without the backup. A lot of people don’t like the intellectual rigor of actually doing the work.”

    More at Robert Gaskins’ web site.

  • Essential reading: Julian Dibbell’s fascinating and touching New York Times Magazine piece about Chinese gold farmers (workers who perform drudgework in game worlds to earn game money that can be resold for real-world cash).
  • Also from the Times: in the wake of the “Sopranos” finale, Charles McGrath looks at the long tradition of in medias res endings, a topic in which I have an abiding personal interest.

[tags]steve jobs, john heilemann, lee gomes, powerpoint, robert gaskins, julian dibbell, chinese gold farming, charles mcgrath[/tags]

Semel, Yahoo, and the bet on media

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I have little to add to the flurry of coverage of Terry Semel’s departure (or should we say semi-departure) from Yahoo but this bit of historical perspective. (Apologies in advance for a certain amount of over-simplification! I’m writing today in between family events…)

Semel took over Yahoo during the worst of the dotcom downturn, an era largely forgotten in today’s Web 2.0 euphoria. His hiring there needs to be understood in parallel with the AOL/Time Warner saga. During the same time that Semel was retooling Yahoo in Hollywood’s direction, the Time Warner brass were conducting their counter-revolution against the AOL upstarts who’d seemed to have snookered their shareholders.

At that moment in industry history, everyone was making the same bet: the Web as a technology platform was a money-loser. Cash was king. You had to charge for services if you could, and keep selling ads if you could; if you could do either, you’d be OK, and if you could do both, you could prosper. The future, in other words, lay with those who bet on media, not on technology.

For Time Warner, it was patently clear that, as the dotcom debris gathered and the Web seemed to be something that could be blissfully forgotten, media represented the only future that mattered. (Since AOL was never a great technology company — its triumph was marketing — it would be hard to quarrel with that call.)

For Yahoo, born of the Web, the choice was tougher: Yahoo’s was always an ad business, but the company was justly proud of its technology, too. Semel’s background and focus sent the message that the Web was calming down into an online version of broadcast: gather eyeballs and sell them. That worked, up to a point; Semel did help rescue Yahoo from the bubble-bust, and the company survived to become one of the industry’s leaders.

On the other hand, it also missed the boat on the biggest change that was incubating throughout that era. Google’s extraordinary new business was entirely technology-based. The bet Semel failed to make on the technology side proved to be the one that mattered most. And the smart but relatively small moves Yahoo would later make to try to catch up — investments in Flickr and so on — couldn’t make up for that big miscall.

The boom-bust cycle that governs the Net world enforces a short-term amnesia: When a bubble is on, everyone thinks technology is all that matters, and when a bust is on, everyone thinks cash is all that matters. As in any market, the best returns are captured by those who make smart (and smartly timed) counter-cyclic bets.

To this outsider, Semel doesn’t appear to have been the Hollywood idiot some now see. But he steered Yahoo with the cycle. And that just wasn’t unconventional enough to produce the biggest sort of win.
[tags]yahoo, terry semel, web industry[/tags]

Next up for Code Reads: “Notes on Postmodern Programming”

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I’m on the road this week with my family, and posting will be light.

Thanks to everyone who weighed in on the Code Reads discussion of Guy Steele’s “Growing a Language.”

For the next Code Reads I’m going to continue down the slightly more literary path we trod with Steele and have a look at “Notes on Postmodern Programming,” a paper by James Noble and Robert Biddle from 2002. (The link provides further links to a PDF or Postscript version of the paper.)

It’s both more recent and considerably more offbeat than some of the other stuff we’ve read. I heard the authors present work at OOPSLA in 2004, and I think their in-person style of delivery — well-timed to a rich slide-set and loaded with carefully calibrated ironies — isn’t fully captured in plain text. Nonetheless, it’s a provocative read, and one that offers a good counterpoint to some of the discussions we’ve been having on the woes of the programming field.

I’m now trying to work on about a two-week schedule for these readings, so I plan to post on the “Postmodern” essay some time next week. Happy solstice!

The blog-dimmed tide is loosed!

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The backlash against Web 2.0 in all its manifestations — blogging, Wikipedia, “user-generated content,” citizen journalism and so on — seems to be hitting full tilt.

At the front of this parade, debating anyone he can persuade to share a podium, is Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur. Keen’s critique has already raised mountains of ire, from people including Dan Gillmor, Dave Winer, and Terry Heaton (who calls it “a whining, outrageous and defensive fantasy based on sweeping generalizations, falsehoods, paranoia and a form of condescension so pissy that it blinds the author to anything resembling reality”). I’m still planning to read the book soon and I’ll let you know whether I agree.

Next comes Nick Carr, who’s got a new book heading our way titled The Big Switch: Our New Digital Destiny. Carr is a contrarian by nature who often takes a cynical view of Web 2.0 phenomena a la Keen, but from what I can tell his book intends a more high-altitude portrait of the transformation of computing from a desktop-centric world to the Web-based universe.

Then there is Michael Gorman, the American Library Association honcho known for his broadsides against “the Blog People.” Gorman turns up this week in a “Web 2.0 Forum” organized by the Encyclopedia Britannica, which has been wrestling with the challenges it faces — intellectual, financial and institutional — in the wake of Wikipedia’s success. Gorman sees the rise of Web 2.0-style interaction ushering in a new dark ages, a “Sleep of Reason” –which, Goya fans know, “begets monsters.”

Keen and Carr are both participating in this forum as well. It couldn’t be that Britannica is stacking its expert deck, now, could it? Perhaps they should invite Kevin Kelly, whose civil but devastating retorts to Keen in this dialogue deserve wider currency. (Clay Shirky is in there, at any rate, handily dismantling Gorman’s self-contradictions.)

In any case, this is an important debate, worth mulling over — however crude some of the original contributions may be — and it’s not going to end any time soon. Early next year, for instance, we’ll get a new book on a similar theme from my Salon colleague Farhad Manjoo (now blogging as Salon’s Machinist). Farhad’s book examines similar questions of authority, trust and credibility in new media as Keen, but he does so less as a culture critic than through the lens of social science and psychology. (I’ve had the pleasure of reading an early manuscript, and though I don’t agree with everything in it, it’s a wonderful read, full of insight and valuable nuggets of research.)

Regardless of how you feel about all these issues, it’s hard to miss one meta-elephant in the room: The members of this phalanx of Web 2.0 cynics have all chosen to deliver their critiques via the very form that their rhetoric detests. Keen promotes his book from his blog. Carr weaves his ideas on his blog. Gorman explains what’s wrong with the “Blog People,” where? On a blog hosted by Britannica.

What’s the thinking here: First join them, then beat them?

However dangerous to the polity the tools of Web 2.0 may be, it seems that they are perfectly well-suited to providing a platform for assaults upon themselves. Which tells me that they may be considerably more resilient, and socially salutary, than their critics allow.
[tags]web 2.0, andrew keen, cult of the amateur, nicholas carr, michael gorman, encyclopedia britannica[/tags]

Code Reads #10: Guy Steele, “Growing a Language”

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Code ReadsThis is the tenth edition of Code Reads, a series of discussions of some of the central essays, documents and texts in the history of software. You can go straight to the comments and post something if you like. Here’s the full Code Reads archive.

You don’t have to read too far into Guy Steele’s “Growing a Language” to figure out what he’s up to. In this 1998 talk on the nature of programming-language design, Steele writes under a set of constraints: he may use any word of one syllable, but if he wishes to use longer words, he must define them first — using only words of one syllable.

Steele aimed to illustrate how awkward and confining it can be to try to express yourself when you don’t have access to an extensive vocabulary: “I wanted to show you want it is like to use a language that is much too small.” (By this point in the talk, he has already defined “language.”) His larger purpose is to advocate a philosophy of programming-language development that aims for neither a small nor a large language, but rather for one that is “designed to grow.”

Such growth is to be propelled not by a closed cadre of gurus but by the language’s users, who have been given an appropriate set of tools to extend the language. The shape of the language is such that these user-generated additions do not look or behave any differently from the “original” elements of the language provided by its initial creators. Nearly a decade later, this argument — which parallels similar ideas that have become popular in the open-source software community as well as in the “user-generated” enthusiasms of Web 2.0 — sounds neither arcane nor controversial.
[Read more…]

Google Reader gets amnesia

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I switched to Google Reader a couple of months ago when I got tired of Bloglines’ habit of forgetting my “unread” posts. Mostly I’ve been happy with it, after the brief period of culture shock.

Today, though, Google Reader suddenly lost my entire list of 100+ feeds. The only feed it still shows is one I added in the last 48 hours or so.

That’s the bad news. A bunch of other posts in the user forum make it sound like the problem is at least widespread, if not universal. The good news is that the Reader team got a post up immediately in the same forum, saying that they’re aware of and working on the problem.

Crossing my fingers…

UPDATE: That was fast. Appears to be fixed now. (Somebody plugged in the power cord — er, database!)

Nice speedy response, anyway. Ironically, this follows a recent post by Scoble about how lame the Bloglines plumber is, and how Google doesn’t need one because Reader never breaks…

[tags]google reader, rss[/tags]

“Intertwingled” quote, nabbed

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In the context of Chandler’s effort to escape the confinement of tree-based models of information organization, I quoted Ted Nelson‘s famous line about “intertwingularity” in Dreaming in Code:

People keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can’t. Everything is deeply intertwingled.

This quotation can be found on many Web pages, bbut when I went to source it for the endnotes, I couldn’t locate the authoritative original statement. I found the same quote in David Weinberger‘s Everything is Miscellaneous, and — knowing that Weinberger is a scrupulous attributor — I asked him if he knew its original source. He, too, found it hard to pin down, but now reports a definitive answer (courtesy Frank Frank Hecker — more details on Weinberger’s errata page).

It turns out it’s exactly where I first looked for it, in Nelson’s book Dream Machines, the 1987 revision, on page 31. (Nelson only used “deeply” once, the second time; the word doesn’t appear before “hierarchical” in the original — it must have crept in across multiple reuses.)

I spent hours hunting through Nelson’s volume — a reissue of both Dream Machines and Computer Lib in one book, with one starting from the front and the other from the “back”, upside down. I guess I should have looked harder.

On the other hand, my failure to locate the quote might also have been the result of thei books’ unconventional format. These books are true miscellanies, examples of the havoc a fertile mind and a page-layout program (or an X-acto knife) could wreak on the conventions of book design in those heady early days of desktop publishing. (Think of the old Whole Earth Catalog, if you’ve seen that.) Chunks of text are scattered in different typefaces, mixed up with graphs and hand-drawn flowcharts and ALL-CAPS EMPHASIZED TEXT. It is a format designed to frustrate the simple linear quest to attribute a quotation.

This whole tiny story is, in its way, a tribute to the “intertwingularity” of Nelson’s work itself. You have to give the man credit for finding a form that matched the content of his digital-liberation ideas — even when he was stuck using paper.
[tags]ted nelson, intertwingularity, david weinberger, everything is miscellaneous, dreaming in code[/tags]

There is no end

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Since my decision to wrap up Dreaming in Code without a conclusive ending to the Chandler saga left me dealing with complaints (unfair! not true!) that I’d “bailed out,” I have become inordinately obsessed with tracking examples of successful creative works that lack a traditional conclusion.

Students of the epic understand that the classic form of that tradition begins in medias res — and ends that way, too.

Mitch Kapor and Tony Soprano could never be tagged as “separated at birth.” But I’m proud that my little book now has something in common with America’s highest-regarded TV series.

UPDATE: On the other hand, the Sopranos ending left Dave Winer with Post-Traumatic Sopranos Stress Disorder.
[tags]dreaming in code, sopranos[/tags]