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Peggy Noonan to Silicon Valley: cut out the silly names

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At the end of an otherwise reasonable column about the Iranian uprising Peggy Noonan went off the deep end again yesterday. First she unleashed her inner Edmund Burke, dialing the Wayback Machine to the 1790s to try to reimagine the excesses of the French Revolution ricocheting around the world via Twitter. She asks, “Would Thomas Jefferson have been able to continue his blithe indifference if reports of France grimly murdering France had been Twittered out each day?” Hey, Tom — forget about the allies who just helped you win independence. Never mind your own revolutionary experience. Disavow those tumbrels!

This spasm of Noonanity is immediately followed by another, even sillier one, an observation on the inconsiderate naming habits of technological innovators:

The great question is what modern technology can do not in the short term so much as the long. It is not the friend of entrenched tyranny. Connected to which, it would be nice if the technologies of the future were not given babyish names. Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc., have come to be crucial and historically consequential tools, and yet to refer to them is to talk baby talk. In the future could inventors please keep the weight and dignity of history in mind?

That’s right, Sergei and Larry, Ev and Biz, Zuckerberg et al: Listen to your old aunt Peggy. Stop making fools of yourselves. Every time you give one of your companies a wacky name, you are sabotaging the gravitas of pundits everywhere. Just stop it, kids, now: you’re making the talking heads look silly!

Iran and the ghost of history

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There’s a chorus on the right, including some GOP leaders, complaining that President Obama ought to be saying more or doing more to support the Iranian protesters. It is unclear what, exactly, they wish him to do about Iran. Now, perhaps, is not the time for bombing, although that was, until recently, considered a dandy option by many; to offer loose words about support for protests risks repeating past American leaders’ errors in such situations, who have sometimes made perceived promises of help to uprisings and then failed to follow through — or even betrayed the protesters.

I think Obama is playing a careful hand: he knows that if he embraces Moussavi too closely he is, perversely, helping Ahmadinejad, whose chief recruiting tool has always been the anti-American banner.

But I also think that few Americans, and sadly even too few in the American media, have a full understanding of the arc of history here and the twisted record of American involvement in Iranian “regime change.”

The formative, primal event in the history of modern Iranian politics took place in 1953, when the U.S. government, working clandestinely through the CIA, helped overthrow an elected Iranian government and install the Shah as a friendly dictator. (Read more on this beginning here and following up here.) Everything that has happened since in Iran has happened under that shadow. Most Americans simply don’t remember this, but you can bet that Iranians do.

So a U.S. president has a particularly poor platform to stand on and lecture Iranians about violations of the electoral process. Obama — who in his Cairo speech publicly admitted the American role in the 1953 Iran coup for the first time — seems to understand this reality and to be working from that understanding, rather than denying it. It’s time for his critics to learn a little of that history, too.

MediaBugs: a Knight News Challenge winner

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This qualifies as “woohoo!” level news: my entry in the Knight News Challenge is one of the winners this year (announced today).

The project is called MediaBugs. The plan is to build a Web service that’s like an open-source project’s bug tracker, but aimed at correcting errors and resolving problems with media coverage. You can read an FAQ about MediaBugs here.

It’s an idea I’ve been talking about for a long time. (I posted briefly about my application last fall.) I’m grateful to the Knight Foundation for giving us a chance to see how the idea will actually pan out. It’s a two-year grant; we’ll be starting a pilot project in the San Francisco Bay Area later this year.

I’m at Knight’s Future of News and Civic Media conference now and for the rest of this week. Much more on this before long. With this grant and the July 7 release date of Say Everything, this is turning out to be a very busy — and happy — time indeed.

All is flux

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I’m at the Oakland Airport waiting for a flight. They’re rebuilding the terminal here to accommodate fancier and doubtless more expensive concessions. The seating area near the gate for my flight was crowded, and I was early, so I moved to a less crowded area down the hall. Twenty minutes later, I looked up and saw that the flight’s gate had been changed: I was now sitting five feet from my plane’s departure doorway. I’d been stationary; the situation had just moved in my direction.

When I was studying software development, I learned that smart developers build products not for the market as it exists at the time but for where they think the market is going to be in the future. This wisdom recalls the famous hockey saying about skating not to where the puck is but where it’s going to be.

I’ve been thinking about these ideas as I watch the news industry struggle with changes that it could have (and should have) foreseen years ago. For me, making the transition from newsprint to digital in 1995 looked like the obvious thing to do — surely that was where the puck was heading, right? What surprises me today is not that the media-industry meltdown is happening but that it has taken so long to happen.

I recently discovered the wonderful game Fluxx, which I’ve been playing with my kids. It’s a simple card game with one profound concept: the rules and goals of the game are constantly shifting; the cards you play frequently alter both the process and the winning conditions.

Fluxx is enormously fun and entirely unpredictable. It’s also, I think, excellent training for life. It’s a crash-course in flexibility and agility. It teaches you to plan for change — but also to not get too attached to your plans.

Perhaps the next time news executives gather to ponder their options they should set aside a session for a few games.

Chronicle of an industry death foretold

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As a young man in love with the nuts and bolts of publishing, beginning in high school in the 1970s, I spent a lot of time in print shops. The industry had just undergone a wrenching transition from “hot type” to “cold type” — abandoning a venerable technology involving hulking machines and heavy metal slugs in favor of phototypesetting systems that input text digitally (usually clumsily, via paper-tape rolls) and churned out fast-drying galleys on thick paper. Many print shops of the time existed, like those used by both my high school and college papers, as small offices carved out of much-larger spaces that had been used for the hot-type machinery. Often, the big old rooms were dark and still littered with debris — linotype detritus, boxes of metal slugs. The homes for the cold-type machines were comparative oases, well-lit and air-conditioned to keep the expensive new equipment happy.

This technological transition seemed momentous for the newspaper industry at the time; it rendered an entire tradition of printing skills obsolete and led to wrenching labor battles. But of course it was only a preface.

sc00b5af28I was cleaning out my garage recently, combing through some old files, and stumbled on a research paper I wrote in 1981 as a senior in college. The title was “The Electronic Newsroom and the Video Display Terminal.” I was writing about the moment that the digital transition rolled out from the back shop to engulf the newsroom, as — almost overnight — the typewriters were put out to pasture and a generation of journalists learned to love cut/paste and the “delete” key. What would that mean for the future of news?

The paper isn’t a big deal; it was written for a course I’d taken mostly for its reputation as an easy way for humanities types like me to fulfill the science requirement. But I’d spent enough time as both a student journalist and a computer enthusiast to know that the changes taking place wouldn’t stop at the newsroom door. Here’s what I wrote:

In trailblazing information delivery uses for electronic technology, the newspapers have in a way introduced a Trojan horse into their midst: for in the coming decades newspapers may well find themselves supplanted by a combination of home video terminals, central information computers, and entrepreneurs in specialized information delivery systems.

Let’s see: “Home video terminals”? Check: that would be your PC. “Central information computers”? Check: the vast network of web servers that feed you your Google, YouTube and so on. “Entrepreneurs in specialized information delivery systems”? That would be your blogging multitude.

I make no claim for great prescience — quite the reverse. I was a college kid who had no particular inside knowledge or knack for future-gazing. Even so, it wasn’t hard to see where things were leading.

I’ll think of my little paper every time I hear news execs making the excuse that “no one could see” how things were going to play out between print and the online world. If a kid could see it nearly 30 years ago, maybe they should have tried a little harder.

Carr on reporting and roach motels

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Simon Dumenco of Advertising Age interviewed David Carr of the New York Times. They’re friends, so the interview has a little bit of a smarmy feel. But it’s worth reading for a couple of passages. Carr recently came out with a book of autobiographical reporting on his own violent, addiction-riddled past. He offered this comment about what it was like for him to be covered by other journalists:

Carr: There are two kinds of reporters that I experienced. One was people that just showed up, asked a lot of questions, wrote down what I said, and then went and wrote a story about my answers and what they knew. And then there was another version of reporter that showed up, made a speech about what my book was about, made a number of assumptions about why I wrote it, asked me a few questions and then went and wrote what they thought. And I’ve always, I think, had tendencies toward the second kind of reporter. The people who just came and asked questions, their stories were 10 times better, and I gotta say that had a profound effect on me. I don’t need to make a speech before I start in on a story. I don’t need to explain what I think. I need to find out what the other person knows and then write it up. I need to show more curiosity about the matter at hand, and less authority.

There are several ways to read this passage. One is to think, right, the reporter with the agenda or the angle is never going to give you as open-minded or responsive a reading of reality than the reporter who just opens his eyes and ears. And you can’t really argue with that. Another reading is to notice that the moment the reporter becomes a subject (with a book to promote), he suddenly sees the value of the reporter-as-stenographer and discounts the journalism of perspective and interpretation and challenge.

Of course, it’s also possible that Carr is simply saying, “I’ve always been too interested in impressing my interviewees with how smart I am. Now I know why that’s a bad reporting technique.” And that is something we can all learn from.

Here is the other comment from Carr worth thinking about: He’s lamenting how quickly the pay scale for even the more successful New York journalists has plummeted, and then notes:

I feel as if media has become a kind of reverse roach motel, in that once you’re out, you’re probably not coming back in.

I read that and blinked at first — was this a misprint? The doors of today’s media world are wide open; it costs virtually nothing to publish yourself. There is more creation of media — more publishing of words, images, and video — than at any time before in human history. The roaches aren’t leaving the motel, never to return; it’s more like, the entire world has become a roach colony. We’re all roaches now! (Please note I am not addressing the question of roach quality here, simply the matter of roach identity.)

Then I realized, oh — when Carr says “media,” he isn’t thinking, “people publishing stuff for others to read.” He’s thinking, “the New York media business that I cover and am a part of.” When he says “media,” he means “well-paying media jobs” in a community where, apparently, a dollar a word is not enough to make ends meet.

That’s understandable, but it’s a habit we might as well break. Because we have no choice. “Media” as an industry providing a professional paycheck is rapidly becoming unmoored from “media” as a description of a human activity. It’s a disruptive transition, and it carries curses and blessings, and it’s going to keep on providing us with these moments of misunderstanding, these eye-blinkers.

Carr: What if the combination of secular and cyclical change that we have — what if this is normal? What if all the money that was sloshing around was in fact from the housing bubble, from easy credit, and that credit does not return? I think that’s a much more difficult and scary problem. I haven’t seen the money coming back yet.

Dumenco: Yeah, I don’t think it’s coming back.

I’m afraid I’m with Dumenco on that. And yes, it’s “scary,” but only in the way any economic disruption is — from the collapse of Wall Street to the imploding auto industry. Any time large numbers of jobs vanish it’s a “scary problem.” But in this vast, roachy media realm that’s emerging, at least journalists are much better positioned than, say, auto workers to find new opportunities.

Form and content: not separated at Web’s birth

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Looking for inspiration as I worked on my video for Say Everything, I went back and re-viewed Michael Wesch’s brilliant Web 2.0 video, “The Machine is Us/ing Us.” It’s had something like 10 million views on YouTube, so you probably saw it already, but if not, it really is worth your 4 minutes.

One of Wesch’s basic points is that it was the separation of form from content — of the software layer that presents content from the layer that stores the data — that made the entire boom of the user-contributed Web possible. In many ways this is inarguable. Such separation is a basic principle of good content-management software; the tool that publishes my blog (and millions of others) depends on code that keeps these realms pretty much in their respective corners, allowing us to alter at will how we dress up what we publish, and to flow the same material easily through different digital pipes.

But two things nag at me about this argument.

The first is a historical observation. The code we rely on today to produce Web sites and blogs, with its XML and XHTML and versatile but painfully complex CSS templates, is daunting to the uninitiated. When I built my first website in 1994 you could learn enough HTML to do so in an hour or so. You couldn’t do a fraction of what we can do today; but you could publish. As Justin Hall trumpeted on his how-to pages, “HTML is easy as hell!”

And it was that sort of ease that kickstarted the early Web and inspired the whole long train of development that has led to millions of blogs and Flickr and Facebook and Twitter and whatever’s coming next. It wasn’t essential to separate form and content to get this stuff going. Had HTML been more elegant, it would probably also have been more impenetrable and unforgiving. And we would all be the poorer for it.

Now today, of course, most of us don’t know or care about either HTML or the more complex layers behind it; our tools (mostly) succeed in hiding all that from us. But it’s important to remember that the vision of a fecund, collaborative, populist Web preceded the emergence of the tools that made it a mass reality. And the vision was in turn inspired by the “easy as hell” nature of the Web’s original authoring technology — which didn’t bother to separate form from content.

The second observation is an aesthetic one. Even as Wesch’s video is extolling the cordoning off of form from content, it is giving us a lesson in the intricate interweaving of content and form. Wesch tells his story in images and screen-grabs that embody the points he is making. The video’s own saga — in which a hitherto obscure young anthropology professor in Kansas cobbles together a video and reaches a global audience of millions — further reflects its themes.

This inseparability of form and content has always been a hallmark of artistic achievement. In successful creative work, form infuses content and content informs form and the two are joined at the hip in ways only a fool would ever wish to separate. That is something Wesch obviously understands. It’s important for the rest of us, in this era of streamlined content management and templated presentations, not to forget it.

Once more into the pay-wall breach: No gravedancing edition

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Rick Edmonds at Poynter offers a summary of a white paper that the American Press Institute provided to attendees of the recent newspaper execs’ conclave. (The paper doesn’t seem to be available on the API site. UPDATE: Nieman JLab has it.)

The overall thrust seems to be: time to make the customer pay up. Newspapers must “establish that news content online has value by charging for it.” If this is really the level of the paper’s economic reasoning, the industry is in even worse trouble than I thought. News flash: Pricing a product does not establish its value. What you have to do is find a price that people will pay.

Similarly, the report urges a new “Consumer Centric” strategy, which sounds dandy, until you realize that “Refocus on consumers and users” does not mean “serve the customer better” but rather “refocus” on their wallets instead of those of advertisers.

Reading this made me sigh. In the contours of this latest iteration of the argument over charging for content, I’ve recognized an unfortunate pattern. Those who advocate the “charge ’em” strategy cast themselves as hardheaded pragmatists and their opponents as wild-eyed Web idealists and anarchists.

Sadly, however, I submit that most of us in the “charging for content is a bad bet for newspapers” camp are coming at this from the perspective of bitter experience. We are grizzled veterans of this argument. We have Been There and Done That. We aren’t grave-dancing; we’re saying, “Maybe you don’t want to fall into that grave that almost swallowed us.”

During my time at Salon we tried every online revenue strategy you can imagine: Gate off some of the content. Gate off all of the content. Don’t gate any content but ask users for cash to join a premium program. Slate tried a subscription program well before us. Many others followed. Yes, there are differences between such sites and local newspapers. Yes, 2009 is different from 2000-2002. But the fundamental lesson remains: you can get some revenue from readers, and there’s nothing wrong with trying; but if in doing so you cut yourself off from the rest of the Web in any way, you are dooming yourself to irrelevance and financial decline. Don’t make your content less valuable at the instant you’re telling people it’s going to cost them more to get it.

The strongest confirmation of this fact (as I pointed out in an earlier post that was recently echoed by Silicon Alley Insider, and it’s nothing new either) comes from that poster-child for pay-wall advocates, the Wall Street Journal. The Journal has the longest-running and arguably most successful subscription program around, but it has smashed a giant hole in its pay wall and allowed anyone arriving from Google to read any article on its site. (That’s right: you don’t need a WSJ subscription. Just plug any WSJ headline into Google and walk on through the wall.)

The Journal execs can say, “Hey, we’re just being flexible, it’s a hybrid strategy,” and they’re correct, in a sense. What their strategy fails to take into account is how much traffic and mindshare they have lost from the perception that their articles aren’t a linkable part of the Web.

The Journal’s subscription model isn’t a crime or a disaster. It just isn’t the future. As the company’s own discovery that it needs to let Googlers in for free shows, this model is classic newspaper-industry short-term thinking. It’s backward-looking, and won’t help newspapers figure out where they need to be tomorrow.

iBank failure: reporting problems

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Besides Ecco, Quicken is really the last app that I still need Windows for. (Quicken for the Mac is way inferior.) So I thought I’d finally figure out which of the Mac personal-finance contenders would best suit my needs: simple budget and expense tracking on several checking accounts and a credit card or two. All evidence pointed to iBank. I downloaded the program on free trial and checked it out. The register worked nicely, the interface was smooth, and it seemed like importing my 12 years’ worth of Quicken data could be accomplished. So I plunked down the not inconsiderable charge for the program, spent an hour or two figuring out how to avoid having transfers appear twice after the import, and thought I’d solved my problem.

Then I tried to create a report. And the program that had until that moment seemed well-built and -designed turned to sand between my fingers. Report? iBank basically says. What’s that? Oh, you have to create a chart and then you can generate a report? That seems silly — I don’t need a pie chart, it doesn’t tell me what I need to know, but if I have to pay the pie chart tax before I can get to my report, OK! I’ll make some pies! So finally I click the button to make a report and wait for the program to ask me some questions about, you know, which categories and dates and accounts I want to include in the report. But there is no dialogue box. The program grinds through its data and a minute later it spits out a clumsily formatted PDF. Wait a minute; I can customize the chart, and that should then change the report, right? But no, that would be too logical. Whatever I do to the chart, the report is still the same useless, largely unreadable junk.

This is a problem, because, really, the only point to the tedium of entering all these transactions is that at the end of the labor you can click a few buttons and actually gain some insight into where and how you are spending your money. iBank is like a financial-software roach motel: you can get your data in easily enough, but just try getting useful information out the other side!

My guess is that coding up a useful report generator must’ve fallen off the developers’ feature list somewhere along the way and keeps dropping off the upgrades list. Obviously I’m hugely disappointed, particularly since the trial version of iBank doesn’t let you enter more than a handful of transactions, so you never really have the chance to test out the report quality.

I think the next step is to give up on this category altogether and experiment with the online/cloud-based alternatives. Of the available choices, Wesabe, which I’ve begun playing with, and Mint appear to be the likeliest contenders. I’ll let you know how it goes, and welcome any tips and experiences you may have.

Say Everything video: Who was the first blogger?

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Today, for your diversion and amusement, I offer you a little home video related to Say Everything, which is now just a bit over a month away from publication: Who was the first blogger?

While I was pondering whether to write a book about the story of blogging in 2007, there was a little flurry of stories claiming that blogging was now ten years old, since Jorn Barger had coined the word “weblog” in 1997. And I thought, hmmm, that’s a pretty debatable proposition. Mike Arrington asked, “Will Someone Who Actually Cares About Blogging Please Write the History Of It?,” I thought, yes: that’s going to be worth doing.