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“Perfecting Sound Forever”: great book on history of recording

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I’ve written a bit here about the curse of over-compression in recorded music:

For those of us already unhappy with the music industry’s bungling of the transition to digital distribution, here’s another thing we can blame them for. Seeking to have their products “stand out,” they entered a sonic race to the bottom… The irony is that we can only perceive loudness through contrast, so the contemporary recordings sound miasmic, not punchy. When you crank up all the dials to, as Spinal Tap would say, 11, everything sounds the same, your ears get tired, and you wonder why music doesn’t sound as good as it did when you were younger.

So when I discovered, belatedly, that Greg Milner has written an entire book about the birth, history and present plight of recording, I grabbed it. It’s called Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music.
If, like me, you have always cared about sound quality but never had much of a vocabulary or structure for discussing or understanding it, it’s a wonderful read.

Milner’s tale starts with Edison’s famous “sound tests” (where they’d pit live vs. recording in front of an audience) and carries through to our MP3-muddled present. It’s fascinating to see how certain threads follow us from the days of sound cylinders up to the iPod era. Each successive generation of technology promises — and, for everyday listeners, seems to deliver — the utopia of perfect, life-like sound, sound captured so well that you cannot distinguish the recording from reality. But you soon realize a truth that Milner elegantly excavates: this “reality” is a chimera — an unobtainium of the ear. Our norms for “realistic sound” are hopelessly subjective. If Victrola recordings that crackle in our ears today sounded like “reality” to 1920s listeners, what will music-lovers of the 2120s think about the over-compressed recordings our culture is now producing?

There’s so much that’s fun and unexpected in Perfecting Sound Forever: the early religious wars between the proponents of acoustic recording and believers in the electrical approach that won out (presaging today’s analog vs. digital argument); how the advent of recording tape began to move us from the notion of sound reproduction to the idea of composing in the studio; how competition between radio stations upped the compression ante until we reached the point where the Red Hot Chili Peppers became “the band that clipped itself to death”; and much more.

Music criticism has fallen on hard times today, what with the fragmentation of the audience and the collapse of the industry. But Milner’s book is one case where writing about music most certainly isn’t like dancing about architecture — it’s more like dancing with ideas. Here’s a taste:

We never fully agree on what perfect sound is, so we keep trying, defining our sonic ideals against those of others, playing the game to the best of our abilities, in whatever position we occupy on the field. We add more reverb, we pump up the bass, we boost the treble, we compress dynamic range, we send the band back into the studio because we don’t hear a single — and we then remix that single, we press the song on vinyl, on disc, as a ghostly collection of ones and zeros that we send around the world. We do what we can to make it sound right and then we hear the sound flow from the speakers and we call it perfect.

With this post I intend to begin more regularly reviewing the books I’m reading, right here on Wordyard. Because, as my friend Laura Miller keeps reminding us, readers are scarcer than writers — or, as Gary Shteyngart was just saying on Fresh Air, “Nobody wants to read but everybody wants to write.”

Well, I intend to keep doing both! And, just so you know, I will also be wiring up my links to Amazon with partner codes; these will funnel a tiny bit of change back to me so I can keep buying those books.

Change is good, but show your work: Here’s a WordPress revisions plugin

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A couple of weeks ago I posted a manifesto. I said Web publishers should let themselves change published articles and posts whenever they need to — and make each superseded version accessible to readers, the way Wikipedians and software developers do.

This one simple addition to the content-management arsenal, known as versioning, would allow us to use the Web as the flexible medium it ought to be, without worrying about confusing or deceiving readers.

Why not adopt [versioning] for every story we publish? Let readers see the older versions of stories. Let them see the diffs. Toss no text down the memory hole, and trigger no Orwell alarms.

Then I asked for help creating a WordPress plugin so I could show people what I was talking about. Now, thanks to some great work by Scott Carpenter, we have it. It’s working on this blog. (You can get it here.) Just go to the single-page form of any post here (the one that’s at its permalink URL, where you can see the comments), and if the post has been revised in any way since I published it, you can click back and see the earlier versions. You can also see the differences — diffs — highlighted, so you don’t have to hunt for them.

The less than two weeks since my post have given us several examples of problems that this “show your work” approach would solve. One of them can be found in the story of this New York Times error report over at MediaBugs.

An anonymous bug filer noticed that the Times seemed to have changed a statistic in the online version of a front-page story about where California’s African Americans stood on pot legalization. As first published, the story said blacks made up “only” or “about 6 percent” of the state population; soon after it was posted, the number changed to “less than 10 percent.” There’s a full explanation of what happened over at MediaBugs; apparently, the reporter got additional information after the story went live, and it was conflicting information, so reporter and editor together decided to alter the story to reflect the new information.

There is nothing wrong with this. In fact, it’s good — the story isn’t etched in stone, and if it can be improved, hooray. The only problem is the poor confused reader, who saw a story that read one way before and now reads another way. The problem isn’t the change; it’s the failure to note it. Showing versions would solve that.

Another Times issue arose yesterday when the paper changed a headline on a published story. The original version of a piece about Tumblr, the blogging service, was headlined “Facebook and Twitter’s new rival.” Some observers felt this headline was hype. (Tumblr is successful but in a very different league from the vastness of Facebook and Twitter.) At some point the headline was rewritten to read “Media Companies Try Getting Social With Tumblr.” Though the article does sport a correction now fixing some other errors, it makes no note of the headline change.

I don’t know what official Times policy is on headline substitution. Certainly, Web publications often modify headlines, and online headlines often differ from print headlines. Still, any time there’s an issue about the substance of a headline, and the headline is changed, a responsible news organization should be forthright about noting the change. Versioning would let editors tinker with headlines all they want.

I do not mean to single out the Times, which is one of the most scrupulous newsrooms around when it comes to corrections. Practices are in a state of flux today. News organizations don’t want to append elaborate correction notices each time they make a small adjustment to a story. And if we expect them to, we rob ourselves of the chance to have them continuously improve their stories.

The versioning solution takes care of all of this. It frees writers and editors to keep making their work better, without seeming to be pulling a fast one on their readers. It’s a simple, concrete way to get beyond the old print-borne notion of news stories as immutable text. It moves us one decent-sized step toward the possibilities the Web opens up for “continuing stories,” iterative news, and open-ended journalism.

How the plugin happened: I got some initial help from Stephen Paul Weber, who responded to my initial request to modify the existing “post revision display” plugin so as to only list revisions made since publication. Weber modified the plugin for me soon thereafter (thank you!). Unfortunately, I failed to realize that that plugin, created by D’Arcy Norman, only provided access to version texts to site administrators, not regular site visitors.

Scott Carpenter, the developer who’d originally pointed out the existing plugin to me, stepped up to the plate, helped me work up a short set of requirements for the plugin I wanted, and set to work to create it. Here’s his full post on the subject, along with the download link for the plugin. We went back and forth a few times. He thought of some issues I hadn’t — and took care of them. I kept adding new little requirements and he knocked them off one by one. I think we both view the end-product as still “experimentally usable” rather than a polished product, but it’s working pretty well for me here.

As the author of a whole book on why making software is hard, I’m always stunned when things go really fast and well, as they did here. Thanks for making this real, Scott!

If you run WordPress and like the idea of showing your work, let us know how it goes.

You are not an eyeball: Why tracking is the ad biz’s last gasp

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Marketers are following you around on the Internet. They don’t know your name but they know what you do, what you buy, where you buy it, what you’re interested in, and more. The sites you visit collect this information on behalf of networks that then roll you up with other like-minded people in packages, as if you were a subprime mortgage, and sell your eyeballs to advertisers.

People inside the Web industry generally know all this and take it for granted. People outside mostly don’t. That explains some of the wide variation in reaction to a big package the Wall Street Journal published Saturday that chronicles how advertisers track users online.

I found it fascinating that two of the smarter Web veterans I know — Jeff Jarvis and Doc Searls — arrived at opposite perspectives on the Journal coverage. How did that happen? Let’s climb what I’ll call the ladder of reaction to this story, and we can see.

At the bottom rung, we have a simple everyday reader’s freakout. OMG They’re spying on us! This, it seems to me, is the level at which the Journal’s coverage was pitched. It’s full of loaded language: A headline that refers to “your secrets.” References to “surveillance” and “surreptitious” practices. Repeated use of the phrase “sophisticated software” to describe run-of-the-mill stuff that we’ve lived with for years, like the cookie files invented at the dawn of the Web by Lou Montulli (and that anyone can easily delete from their browser).

On the next rung up the ladder we have what I predict will be the response of the punditocracy, the editorial page writers and columnists. They will weigh in early this week, shake their heads in disapproval and demand that the government step in and pile more privacy regulations on the Internet advertising industry.

This will drive the Web industry insiders — up on the ladder’s third rung — even crazier than the Journal feature itself did. For them, the activities the Journal describes are simply old news. This is where we find Jeff Jarvis, who described the Journal feature as “the Reefer Madness of the digital age”: “I don’t understand how the Journal could be so breathlessly naive, unsophisticated, and anachronistic about the basics of the modern media business.” Similarly, Terry Heaton found the Journal’s coverage biased and behind the curve: “It’s like somebody at the paper had been sleeping for ten years and woke up to discover it’s the year 2010!”

Insiders will worry that an anti-tracking backlash might throttle the Web advertising industry at just the moment when big media institutions are praying that online ad revenue might help them make up for all the ad income they’re losing in their offline businesses.

Even more important, they will argue that tracking isn’t an invasion of privacy at all, since the advertisers mostly don’t know you by name or personal identity. Instead, they see you as a bundle of demographic traits and acquisitive tendencies. We owe the maintenance of this important distinction to an ad-tracking scare of a previous era, the great DoubleClick/Abacus controversy of 1999. Yes, this issue has been with us since 1999, which does make you wonder about the Journal’s breathless tone today.

The most important argument the insiders make is the very simple one that tracking, done right, actually performs a useful service: It helps reduce your exposure to ads you don’t care about and shows you more ads that you actually want to see.

This brings us up high to rung number four, where we meet Doc Searls, who is sitting on his own little platform that he’s built over the years, and inviting us to sit down with him and listen.

And he’s saying to the Web insiders: You guys are missing two points. The first is that “most real people are creeped out by this stuff,” even if it is old hat to you. The second is that you aren’t thinking big enough if you think that tracking users’ behavior is the best the Web can do.

You think the Web is all about making inefficient advertising more efficient, when it’s really about eliminating advertising as we have known it entirely, by giving us “better ways for demand and supply to meet — ways that don’t involve tracking or the guesswork called advertising.”

Searls has been elaborating this argument from the early days of the Cluetrain Manifesto to his current work at Project VRM. He’s saying: We know ourselves and our needs better than any third party’s guesswork. The Internet can enable us to speak directly to the marketplace about what we want. We can have a direct conversation with vendors of the things we are thinking about purchasing:

if I had exposed every possible action in my life this past week, including every word I wrote, every click I made, everything I ate and smelled and heard and looked at, the guesswork engine has not been built that can tell any seller the next thing I’ll actually want… Meanwhile I have money ready to spend on about eight things, right now, that I’d be glad to let the right sellers know, provided that information is confined to my relationship with those sellers, and that it doesn’t feed into anybody’s guesswork mill.

I find Searls’ vision appealing, even as I recognize the disruption it portends. The end of advertising also means the end of the business of delivering eyeballs to advertisers. It means that creative people and journalists and other “content creators” will need to abandon the old media’s compromised triangle trade (with creators ferrying consumers to advertisers) and learn how to fill public needs directly. That means we’ll need new ways to fund public-good information (foreign news, accountability journalism, investigations) once we can no longer pay for it with the overflow from advertising-monopoly profits.

That’s the future. Today, I actually think the Journal is doing a public service by writing about stuff industry insiders already know about — even if the paper went over the top in its intimations of dark marketing conspiracies. But it would be so much more of a service to look beyond the desperate thrashings of the badly wounded ad industry — and toward the better model that is struggling to be born.

Szechuan Meat Sauce Noodles a la Yenching

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For the seven years of my life I spent in Cambridge, Mass., a significant portion of the calories I consumed came from the kitchen at the Yenching Restaurant by Holyoke Center in Harvard Square. A high perecentage of those calories came from one dish served there: Szechuan Meat Sauce Noodles. (The picture below is from my visit to Cambridge last month — the dish is still on the menu, almost unchanged, though the spice-fire seems weaker than I remember.)

For $4 (almost twice as much today!) you got a small mountain of big noodles topped with a spicy shredded pork, celery and carrot mixture. The gravy would collect in the bottom of the bowl (or take-out carton) to replenish the coating on the pasta.

I loved it, and when I moved to the West Coast I missed it. So as I became more adept at Sichuan cooking — schooled by my masters, Mrs. Chiang and Fuchsia Dunlop — I began to experiment with duplicating the great Yenching Meat Sauce Noodles experience. After much experimentation, I think I’ve perfected it.

Full recipe after the jump. Have a great weekend!

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Heffernan vs the SciBloggers: when community becomes commodity

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As you may have read, a group of high-profile and high-quality science bloggers recently left the network that had long housed them because the parent company had done a deal with Pepsi to create a nutrition blog in their midst.

Now we have a high-handed column from the New York Times’ Virginia Heffernan, which basically tells these bloggers: Grow up. Get real. This is the way the world works!

Most writers for “legacy” media like newspapers, magazines and TV see brush fires over business-editorial crossings as an occupational hazard. They don’t quit anytime there’s an ad that looks so much like an article it has to be marked “this is an advertisement.”

That may be because they have editors who (when they’re good) fight to defend standards against the encroachment of the business side. These bloggers had no choice but to represent themselves.

Heffernan goes on to fume about the bloggers’ “eek-a-mouse posturing” and mines their work for quotes that make them look silly or small-minded. I’ve read a lot of these blogs over the years and don’t recognize them in her portrait.

But she misses the bigger story here, so let me lay it out for you. The ScienceBlogs saga is a version of a tale that keeps repeating itself in our online culture — the one where a group of people who (correctly or not) thought of themselves as a community discover that they are being treated as a commodity.

This has been happening from the very beginning of human congregation online. It happened when AOL got sued by its moderators; it happened when the WELL’s pioneers lost their trust in the businessman who bought the service in the mid-’90s. I’m sure it will keep happening, so let’s try to understand it a little better than Heffernan does.

The ScienceBlogs affair is not a case of a bunch of reporters in a newsroom crying foul because a church/state line was crossed. This is a group of writers who believed they were collaborating in their own little space on the Web, a meritocracy of sorts built on their own labor. Then they woke up to the rude realization that somebody else owned their real estate — and was going to sell some of the space without their having any say in the matter.

As I understand it, the Pepsi blog was not an advertorial; it was a blog manned by Pepsico-salaried nutritional scientists. It might have been a good blog, for all we know. But it represented a change in the rules. The bloggers weren’t consulted. They thought of themselves as party hosts, and discovered that management though of them as “a source of revenue” (in the words of Bora Zivkovic, a SciBlogger who wrote the definitive post on the controversy).

For Heffernan, it might be better to try to imagine that her Times employers had sold the office or cubicle next to hers to some sponsor’s hand-picked writer, who would henceforth fill the magazine page opposite hers: “Here’s a sponsored journalist — have fun together!”

But, really, it’s not the details of the Pepsi blog that are important. After all, ScienceBlogs’ owner, Seed, withdrew the scheme once the bloggers raised a ruckus. It was too late. The bloggers had lost the illusion that they were involved in a community; they saw the businessman behind the curtain. There was no going back.

This loss of innocence is, I think, a nearly universal experience online. It occurs when one’s initial surge of idealistic delight at the freedom and opportunities of boundless self-expression slams into the realities of the media business online.

People who have experienced this will thereafter keep their antenna out and much more finely tuned to questions of ownership and governance and autonomy. They will not use the word “community” without thinking about it. They will also never again feel quite the same unqualified delight in sharing their writing online.

Should the science bloggers have known what was coming? Should they have been less innocent? Probably. But then they might not have been as exuberantly good at what they did.

I don’t think the outcome is a tragedy. The former ScienceBloggers will continue to be science bloggers, producing great posts and forming new communities. I think they’ll just handle the business-and-independence issues a little more carefully next time around. They are learning from their experience; I wish Heffernan had done so too.

BONUS LINKS: Ex-SciBlogger David Dobbs has a thoughtful response on his Neuron Culture blog.

And Jason Goldman, still on SciBlogs, helps point Heffernan to where the “real science” can be found there.

LATE UPDATE: Heffernan has posted a response at Dobbs’ blog.

Wikileaks: when it’s not a scoop but it’s still news

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In the chorus of critical reaction to the Wikileaks Afghanistan documents we heard two strains of criticism: One suggested that the material would harm the U.S. war effort and endanger people working for it. The other suggested that, because no earth-shattering headline could be mined from the mountain of documents, the whole thing was a waste of time.

I’m not in a position to offer strong views on the first criticism — except that, as a journalist, I always lean toward disclosure unless there’s clear likelihood of immediate harm to specific individuals. But the second criticism needs some review.

News organizations have always competed on the basis of scoops. The Wikileaks documents haven’t offered them anything that they can recognize as a scoop. You can picture the conversation:

Editor: What’d you find?
Reporter: Well, there’s a ton of fascinating detail about a lot of incidents. A little more detail about the problems with Pakistani intelligence. And a whole lot of local color…
Editor: Just give me the top line. What’s the headline?
Reporter: Uh, “Afghan war going as badly as everyone thought”?
Editor: Go find a fire somewhere, wouldja?

The journalistic ecosystem runs on scoops — pieces of information, not already public, that one news organization has and others don’t. The public cares less about this competition for scoops; it simply desires news — information it needs and wants to know, and that it didn’t previously have.

Not all scoops are real news. And now, with Wikileaks’ Afghan docs, we have a big example of real news that isn’t a scoop. I call it real news because it is a body of previously unavailable-to-the-public information about a matter that ought to be of deep concern to the public (an ongoing war). The absence of a single headline-able revelation makes this news harder for the news ecosystem to digest — but doesn’t make it any less “news,” or any less valuable.

The digestion may take considerably more time than journalists have patience for. The significance of the documents may emerge in the work of magazine writers or book authors. It may emerge in the hands of historians working long after we’re all dead — in which case we may well think, “Is that news?” Of course it is — we just can’t see it yet.
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Bloomberg circles the wagons on misleading Gulf spill poll coverage

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News organizations’ default response to criticism is to circle the wagons.

“We stand by our story!” is a stirring thing to say, and sometimes it’s even the right thing. But in the web world of 2010, where everyone has a public platform, ignoring critics can also squander a news outlet’s credibility and alienate its audience.

The basic premise of MediaBugs — which I laid out in this video — is that news organizations can begin winning back the public trust they have lost by engaging civilly, in public, with people who criticize them about specific errors. Whoever is right in the end, and whether the newsroom decides to run a correction or not, the editors are better off explaining their thinking than slamming the door on dialogue.

For an example of precisely the wrong way of handling legitimate questions about coverage, consider the controversy over a recent Bloomberg opinion poll.
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“Blogging is like auto-save for our entire culture”

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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!]

Dissing Facebook’s like

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At the Hacks and Hackers event last night, two Facebook representatives took the stage and talked about stuff Facebook can do for news organizations and journalists. But the journalists in attendance had only one thing on their minds: Dislike.

You see, Facebook now lets you “like” things you find online. Facebook wants you to like lots of stuff! But if you don’t like something, it asks you to walk on by, without tossing any brickbats. Journalists, based on last night’s crowd, are unhappy with this limitation. They badly want Facebook to let them actively, explicitly “dislike” things, too.

This suggests that we journalists are a negative bunch who dislike a whole lot of things. We wants to tell the world about them, we do. Nassty Facebook won’t let us!

The problem with “Like” and news content, of course, is that a lot of news is heartbreaking, and if you say you “liked” it you come off callous. This was evident from one of the Facebook presentation’s own slides.

It turns out that, on Facebook as everywhere else, people really respond to “touching emotional stories.” Facebook’s Justin Osofsky and Matt Kelly provided an example of such a tale: a headline that read “US Border Patrol shot a 14-year-old at the Mexican border.” Who wants to “like” that? In such instances, Facebook suggests users be given the option of “recommending” or “sharing” the story instead.

That covers the “bad news” case. But there’s also the “articles I disagree with” case, where you’re outraged by something and you want to share that outrage. “Like,” again, won’t do. But neither will “recommend.” This is the case for which “dislike” might make sense. But based on the rote response of the Facebook people to repeated, increasingly agitated questions on the subject, I don’t think Facebook will ever offer this choice.

The conclusion a lot of people drew was that Facebook was afraid of offending advertisers. That’s quite likely. But I also think Facebook is being smart: It’s avoiding torrents of trollery, negativity, and bullying that a “dislike” button would unleash. Some journalists might be happier in a world full of dislikeness, but I think most everyone else would be bummed.

UPDATE: Patrick Beeson points out in a comment, “I find it ironic that journalists want a dislike button, but detest negative comments posted on the websites that publish their stories.”

Chris O’Brien took great notes from the event — if you want the basics on what Facebook recommends this is highly useful.

Breitbart and the story-withdrawal litmus test

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I hesitate to add any more verbiage to the Breitbart/Sherrod post mortem, but there’s one lesson I’m extracting that may be useful.

I do not hold it against Breitbart that he is a partisan. Most of the information I get online about politics today comes from partisans. My problem with Breitbart is that he is a partisan I do not trust, based on his track record with ACORN and other stories.

For me, the Sherrod video reduces Breitbart’s credibility to zero. This is not because he published a story that was later discredited — after all, so did many other media outlets. It is because, in the wake of overwhelming evidence that his original version of the story was inaccurate, misleading and irresponsible, he has done nothing to withdraw or disavow it.

This, to me, is the litmus test for good-faith journalism. Everyone makes mistakes, and every publication seeks scoops and exclusives, and today every news outlet is racing against the clock. Bad decisions are going to be made. If you expect to retain any shred of trust, though, you’d better cop to them and make amends when you mess up.

At Salon we once withdrew a major cover story because we came to realize that the freelance reporter we’d worked with wasn’t leveling with us. (In a later memoir, he confessed to a variety of substance abuse problems, which explained a lot in retrospect.) This was no fun, but our self-respect as journalists demanded that we take the fall.

Breitbart claims that at the time he posted the Sherrod video he didn’t know what was on the rest of it. I find that hard to believe. But if it were true, he would have only one option now that he does: fall on his sword. Withdraw and apologize. Instead, he ran a laughably narrow correction and has continued to make defensive excuses. This is why he has lost all credibility: he lacks the menschlichkeit to clean up his own mess.

One final thought: The most pernicious tactic in Breitbart’s arsenal is his habit of declaring that the little snippet he is posting is the tip of an iceberg, that he’s got way more where that came from. This gambit is straight out of the Sen. Joe McCarthy playbook, and should be called each time it surfaces.

Greg Sargent says all this in a different way:

it’s true that “both sides,” to one degree or another, let their ideological and political preferences dictate some editorial decisions, such as what stories to pursue, how to approach them, who to interview, etc. But what’s underappreciated is the degree to which the Breitbart-Fox axis goes far beyond this, openly employing techniques of political opposition researchers and operatives to drive the media narrative.

This simply has no equivalent on the left. The leading lefty media organizations have teams of reporters who — even if they are to some degree ideologically motivated — work to determine whether their material is accurate, fair, and generally based in reality before sharing it with readers and viewers. They just don’t push info — with no regard to whether it’s true or not — for the sole purpose of having maximum political impact.