connecting*the*dots

+

=

(inspired by C&L)

You gotta love a net neutrality PSA produced with machinima.

(via Tara)

I guess Lance Dutson shouldn’t have challenged the Maine Office of Tourism’s strategy to overbid for the top “Maine” queries in their search optimization campaign, even though it drove up prices for both his and other local businesses attempting to bid on similar keywords. The state’s advertising firm sued him (pdf) for his public display of discontent for how tax-payer’s money was being spent.

Oh yeah, they’re also suing because he took this (taxpayer-paid) ad off their site to make a point about the number provided (hint: call it if you’re lonely).

If the State of Maine had any clue, they’d do themselves a favor and pause to learn about the nature of the web and the power of conversations across state lines before backing an agency over one of their own residents. But then again, this is reality.

So much for Northeast intellectuals.

Back to the campaign at hand; Increasing the visibility of the Maine Office of Tourism to Maine residents must be good for the state, right? Why exclude Maine web browsers from their optimization campaign to help residents find Maine businesses first and foremost? I mean, I don’t know about you, but I’m always looking to come across tourist attractions within my own home state.

Unbelievably dumb. If this was happening in my neck of the woods, I’d be equally upset.

(via BuzzMachine)

World 2.0 seems to have raised it’s periscope within our culture almost 5 years ago, in the immediate post-9/11 world. Who would’ve thunk it possible?

Brad Neuberg on October 21, 2001:

The world seems to be hungry for an ideological alternative to capitalism. I don’t know if this is a rational or simply emotional need for something to challenge what is now the dominant ideology of the age, but I predict that as soon as a semi-credible ideological alternative to capitalism arises that it will spread like wildfire and produce another Cold War type situation. Communism used to be it, but is now defunct and dead, while fundamentalist Islam semi-fills this need in parts of the world. I’ve noticed this need to challenge capitalism while traveling; I can even see it in myself.

I’ve never met Brad — as a matter of fact, I was only introduced to his blog tonight via Messina’s post — yet I dropped a similar perspective on the state of capitalism on the other side of the planet just two weeks later in the fall of 2001.

Coincidence or…?

The collective unconscious has always been a powerful concept, but before blogging, it wasn’t a tangible construct. It took the invention of the permalink and intra-day personal publishing to even begin to generate enough trails of human expression to expose Jung’s concept of unspoken, shared realities and archetypes.

While The Cluetrain gang introduced the concept of a global conversation to netizens back in 1999, what I find so interesting about the blogosphere since that time, is that the very notion of a conversation has the potential to become explicitly amplified and extracted to become findable across new dimensions of length and density.

The web is now chock full of meshed thoughts and dreams, connected explicitly by hyperlinks, loosely by tags and conceptually by discovery. With a shift in search result interface paradigms, the possibilities for more complete, immediate research queries are endless.

Topical themes — or memes — shift intra-day and can last as conversations either as sporadic and finite bunches (Jill Carroll’s abduction and release over a three month period) or prolonged variants (George Bush’s presidency). Imagine what types of conversational connections will become possible when interfaces, such as a Technorati search result, leaves the conservative constraints of separated permalink results based on latest entries or authority, and instead focuses on the clustering of such conversations through visual metaphors across other dimensions.

And no, I’m not talking about a folder paradigm.

I’m talking about dynamic, visual representations of conversations, with the ability to shift in real-time, using attributes such as tags and language co-occurance to drive groupings within oppositional variants such as the length and density of the conversation.

The day our thoughts and dreams stop getting lost in the cracks of time and authority, we’ll be one step closer to the knowledge revolution, leaving information in the dust with data. Then the decolonization of cyberspace can begin with earnest.

How rude of me… What’s up, Brad?

Spam Daily News
EFF: AT&T forwards all Internet traffic into NSA

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on Wednesday filed the legal briefs and evidence supporting its motion for a preliminary injunction in its class-action lawsuit against AT&T.

After asking EFF to hold back the documents so that it could review them, the Department of Justice consented to EFF’s filing them under seal — a well-established procedure that prohibits public access and permits only the judge and the litigants to see the evidence.

While not a party to the case, the government was concerned that even this procedure would not provide sufficient security and has represented to the Court that it is “presently considering whether and, if so, how it will participate in this case.”

“The evidence that we are filing supports our claim that AT&T is diverting Internet traffic into the hands of the NSA wholesale, in violation of federal wiretapping laws and the Fourth Amendment,” said EFF Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston.

“More than just threatening individuals’ privacy, AT&T’s apparent choice to give the government secret, direct access to millions of ordinary Americans’ Internet communications is a threat to the Constitution itself. We are asking the Court to put a stop to it now,” said Bankston.

EFF’s evidence regarding AT&T’s dragnet surveillance of its networks includes a declaration by Mark Klein, a retired AT&T telecommunications technician, and several internal AT&T documents. This evidence was bolstered and explained by the expert opinion of J. Scott Marcus, who served as Senior Technical Advisor for Internet Technology to the Federal Communications Commission from July 2001 until July 2005.

The internal AT&T documents and portions of the supporting declarations have been submitted to the Court under a tentative seal, a procedure that allows AT&T five court days to explain to the Court why the information should be kept from the public.

“The public deserves to know about AT&T’s illegal program,” said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. “In an abundance of caution, we are providing AT&T with an opportunity to explain itself before this material goes on the public docket, but we believe that justice will ultimately require full disclosure.”

The NSA program came to light in December, when the New York Times reported that the President had authorized the agency to intercept telephone and Internet communications inside the United States without the authorization of any court.

“Mark Klein is a true American hero,” said EFF Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl. “He has bravely come forward with information critical for proving AT&T’s involvement with the government’s invasive surveillance program.”

In the lawsuit, EFF is representing the class of all AT&T residential customers nationwide. Working with EFF in the lawsuit are the law firms Traber & Voorhees, Lerach Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins LLP and the Law Office of Richard R. Wiebe.

Does anyone actually choose to use AT&T anymore? If EFF is right, they’ve gone beyond clueless and entered the territory of dangerous. This is a perfect example of fat cat, old money corporations having control of major aspects of web infrastructure. Business as usual has no regard for the US Constitution unless it’s to protect their own collective asses.

IMHO of course.

I’ll play the broken record once again; go join EFF and donate as much as you can.

Nicholas Carr:
“…The whole reason businesses exist is to control forces that are hard to control.”
(hey Nicholas, try keeping the comment permalinks active so next time I can properly attribute your quote)

Busting out the HOWTO Corporate Blog post over a whole bunch of nothing…

UPDATE: I’m putting where my money where my mouth is and picking up the X-Box 360. I’ve been a PS2 guy forever, with more than 25 games and waiting patiently for the PS3, but you know what? Sony’s DRM / Rootkit stupidity compared to Scoble’s integrity has proved to be the tipping point for me.

And I’m Mac addict! (read = Microsoft hater)

C’mon Locutus, quantify this decision with a corporate metric.

The Consumerist
Ma Bell To Shut Down New Orleans WiFi

One of the surprising acts of compassion and competency that came out of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was that the city began providing a free WiFi service to business owners and residents whose phone service had been wiped out. The 512 kbps service allowed many business owners to begin struggling back to their feet and corporate sponsors like Yahoo and Google were in discussion to expand the service in the coming months.

Well, no longer. Telecommunication lobbyists from Bell South have put the lean on New Orleans, demanding that the free service be outlawed. Apparently, it violates a law that prevents the public sector from competing with the telecommunication sector. By law, then, cities can provide no more than a 128 kbps service to citizens.

“The vendors, the BellSouths of this world, are not only going to force us back, making our existing Wi-Fi illegal, but also they want to close a loophole for emergencies so that we would not do this again,� says Greg Meffert, New Orleans’ chief information officer. But Greg’s no lily-livered pansy. “If I have to go to jail, I guess I will,� he said. “If they really want to play that game, I guess they are right. But we simply cannot turn off these few lifelines we have to our city and businesses.�

[…]

More sources

• FactoryCity - BellSouth to New Orleans: Let Them Eat Cake
• Sploid - Telecoms out to kill NOLA’s free WiFi
• WebProNews - Telecoms Better Keep An Eye On The Big Easy
• Red Herring - WiFi Fight Brews In Big Easy

(via missrogue)

If you’re a blogger that watches TV not only for it’s unbelievably passive entertainment and programmed misinformation (heh), but to find video clips that just might reinforce your thesis in your next post, I’ve found a service that you need to keep on your radar.

My good friend, Jonathan Daniel, has been working diligently for the past few years as the VP of Product Development at Critical Mention. A few weeks ago he gave me a tour of their services, and a beta account to play with. Let me tell you, as a blogger, the functionality they’ve developed to date (and in the wings) completely blew me away.

From their web site:

Broadcast media is the number one force shaping public opinion and driving consumer decisions every day. Every company and organization with public relations, crisis management, investor relations, competitive intelligence and brand management initiatives must track critical mentions on broadcast TV in order to monitor public perception, respond to events and crises, and gather market intelligence.

In contrast to traditional broadcast monitoring services, Critical Mention employs technology to monitor broadcast television in real-time. Using Critical Mention’s CriticalTVSM search platform, customers can view their broadcast clips and transcripts within seconds of airing.

Yeah, you read that correctly: Instantaneous transcripts AND broadcast clips. Drooling yet?

CM’s service uses the practically ubiquitous implementation of closed-captioned satellite feeds as a source for full-text searches. The instant digitizing of each broadcast to their servers allows for instantaneous clipping of video surrounding the term or phrase being searched.

While the interface design is somewhat clunky, the functionality is superb. The above image shows the result of a search for the term “blogging.” As you roll over the results on the right, a vid-cap puppets on the left with the transcript of the one minute clip and the highlighted search query. Found a broadcast that you’d like to use? Simply click on the expand button to expand the clip to display up to seven, one-minute clips that surround the queried term.

Once expanded, the current version allows the user to save the selected clips to a working library, send an email of the video and transcript or order hard copies — very smart and useful services for CM’s current business model.

CM gained financing and grew over the last few years by partnering with broadcasters to enable partnered companies to track mentions of products, services, employees, intellectual property, etc. across the airwaves.

To a number of bloggers, this concept might sound very familiar.

Back in November, Daniel Lyons (Forbes.com) espoused a similar position on media monitoring, except Lyons’ position was steeped in venom, advising corporations to explicitly track posts from bloggers. Once published, he immediately drew the ire of bloggers for his ridiculous and stereotypical assertions of blogging in general and for his positioning of such monitoring as Fighting Back.

The customer conversation isn’t one to fight, it’s one to join.

So how can this proprietary service add to the richness of blogging? The advent of YouTube — with their free, unlimited storage of video and automatic generation of code that enables bloggers to present in-line video — has prepped the web publishing market for Critical Mention to open up their service model outside the walls of partnered corporations.

A few examples of how a professional / public version of CM might be used:

• An analyst site, such as TheStreet.com (disclosure: I’m consulting on the current redesign), could present inline media coverage of companies and news events to fortify the context of their assertions
• Media Matters, a conservative misinformation analyst site, would be able to greatly reduce their investment in tracking staff and hardware
• Blogumentaries, such as The War Tapes and The Echo Chamber Project could gather and post media clips as research and/or extensions to their narrative thesis
• Bloggers in general would go gonzo for such access to media clippings, as the service would replace the time consuming tasks of manually recording programs or scouring the internet for the chance of discovering a timely, linkable/postable file.

The usefulness of the service is practically endless and the various business models are just waiting to be developed.

In the realm of unbundled content, each re-post of video content is actually a form of advertising for both the original broadcast and the broadcasting network. Once a value proposition has been quantified by CM, I’d imagine that forward-thinking broadcasting ownership would be gung-ho to participate in such a far-reaching, viral broadcast model.

CM could then serve as the middle man, establishing both a professional fee-based service level and a free public blogging service level.

This service could truly “2.0″ media in one swooping move.

Blogger gal vs. Newspaper guy!

Well, not quite, but it makes a great lede, eh?

Sue, Lex and I met over lunch yesterday to discuss potential strategies for evolving the News & Record’s citizen journalism efforts. And no, we didn’t have a stare off.

Man… Lex is in a tough position; he’s completely open to forward-thinking ideas (I mean, his title is Citizen Journalism Coordinator), but he also seems to be up against a bottom line business that’s very adverse to risk. Apparently, changing the approach to meeting a historically profitable bottom line is a tough sell, even within an industry that’s on shaky ground.

It’s amazing how palpable sand can become to the heads of industry during innovative times.

That’s not to say that the N&R hasn’t been progressive with their citizen journalism efforts to date — they have — but Lex knows that in just a few years the N&R (both print and online) will have to directly compete with new forms of dynamic, community-based, participatory, online news applications (e.g. Newsvine), which will be free of legacy organizational overhead and be able to react with agility.

And you can’t forget those pesky bloggers.

The N&R needs to step up their game.

So we chatted. And ate. And chatted some more. And by the time our conversation came to a close, we had a number of interesting ideas on the table:

• Personal Relationships - Lex is looking to develop relationships with members of the Greensboro community, offering them the opportunity to use N&R resources (legal, photography, journalist feedback, etc.) to craft substantive citizen journalism. To me, this approach perfectly fits the future of print newspapers, as time-based news is dead on paper. They’ll have to compete as daily magazines (more depth, less coverage).

• Real-time Blogging Input - I suggested promoting a tagging schema that matched the classification structure of both the paper and the site:

  For example, identify and promote a unique set of “greensboro[xxxx]” tags, for anyone to use on blog posts, flickr images, etc. when generating Greensboro specific news, events, opinions, etc.

  Internally, the N&R editorial staff would then set up RSS aggregators with subscriptions of each tag search result.

  The real-time input of potential stories and assets would increase exponentially, while the N&R would continue to have editorial control, as the aggregator would serve as the queue into the publishing process

• Representation Across The Community - Sue focused on the concept of encouraging participation along the lines of community diversity (her connections with Uplifter is right along the lines of my focus with The People, Yes!). We talked about ideas ranging from developing blogging 101 material to share with a non-computer literate demographic to grass roots representation within sub-communities (e.g. school board meetings) to encourage live-blogging with the unique tag identifiers

An interesting start, but there’s still one major component that we’re skirting: Revenue incentives.

Lex made it clear that creating a participatory revenue model doesn’t fall under his charge, but the N&R is open to ideas. My perspective is that without incentive, participation will be lighter, with less quality and dedication. Any revenue generated out of these relationships should be viewed as found money, so share and share alike:

• To tap into the wisdom of the blogosphere by republishing the original post or an edited version, a buisness needs to develop a revenue model that fairly represents such a relationship.
• To partner with individuals from the community to generate community-based journalism, a business needs to develop a revenue model to encourage such a partnership.

It comes down to this: Pony up or we, the citizens, will simply get together and form collaborative blogs, creating relevant identities, gain a better footprint in Google over a 3 month period of time and, eventually, sign up with BlogAds to support our own voice.

That’s not a threat. ;-) I’m looking forward to our next conversation, folks.

UPDATE: Six months after the fact, in the NORG session at ConvergeSouth, Ed Cone backs up my philosophy regarding partnering with local bloggers/writers in a revenue share program.

The Guardian
Internet means end for media barons, says Murdoch
· Magnate hails second great age of discovery
· Power ‘moving from the old elite to bloggers’
Owen Gibson, media correspondent

Rupert Murdoch last night sounded the death knell for the era of the media baron, comparing today’s internet pioneers with explorers such as Christopher Columbus and John Cabot and hailing the arrival of a “second great age of discovery”.

The News Corp media magnate nurtures a long-held distaste for “the establishment” but last night confided to one of the few clubs to which he does belong - The Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers - that he may be among the last of a dying breed.

“Power is moving away from the old elite in our industry - the editors, the chief executives and, let’s face it, the proprietors,” said Mr Murdoch, having flown into London from New York after celebrating his 75th birthday on Saturday.

Far from mourning its passing, he evangelised about a digital future that would put that power in the hands of those already launching a blog every second, sharing photos and music online and downloading television programmes on demand. “A new generation of media consumers has risen demanding content delivered when they want it, how they want it, and very much as they want it,” he said. Indicating he had little desire to slow down despite his advancing years, he told the 603-year-old guild that he was looking forward, not back.

“It is difficult, indeed dangerous, to underestimate the huge changes this revolution will bring or the power of developing technologies to build and destroy - not just companies but whole countries.”

The owner of Fox News added: “Never has the flow of information and ideas, of hard news and reasoned comment, been more important. The force of our democratic beliefs is a key weapon in the war against religious fanaticism and the terrorism it breeds.”

[…]

Until Murdoch implodes the Fox News Channel and those religous propaganda nutso’s, Bill O’Reilly and John Gibson, I’ll continue to take everything he says with a grain of salt, but this degree of a proclamation — from the master of all mainstream media empires — *must* be a good sign to those of us who are already knee deep in this revolution.

Speaking of mainstream media empire builders, I wonder where Jason Calacanis sits on the future of the web…

The reviews are in: We, the people, are in the drivers seat.

Newspapers are already hemoraging readership, as the web has created an extremely rich bazaar, allowing us to shop for unbundled content at every turn, while unbundled advertising models begin to sprout up to support this evolution. Well, get ready for the online replicas of the print world to begin to sweat even more. Following on the heals of the mass appeal of social wisdom sites such as slashdot and digg comes a revolutionary hybrid of mainstream media, citizen journalism and participatory editing: Newsvine.

Taking the aggregation features of a Yahoo! News, the collaborative properties of a digg and the citizen media aspects of blogging, Newsvine is staged to completely redefine the news. Why? Because the common man now has stake in the game.

Old School

Top/down delivery of content, beginning with organized knowledge, is a modern construct. Since the advent of television, these organized silos of knowledge have been optimized over the years for advertising to take advantage of explicit media buys — matching business audience demographics, psychographics and geographics to channeled, programed, bundled content. Great for advertisers and the networks/publications, lousy for the “consumer,” as we end up consuming more messaging and less news or interests which match *our* needs and desires.

These constructed, mechanical relationships define false, explicit edges of our culture, which in turn raises the value proposition of media and news organizations simply by standardizing on such lexicon. This standardization of topical interests — unknowingly bought into by the public as what is *real* — enables a sussinct universe of sales and stories, broadcast on television news and pumped through newspapers, serving as the ying to the entertainment media’s yang.

A metaphor: Is it easier to entertain and pacify a child within a theme park or the natural environment of a forest?

Somewhere between the crafted, paced, 4/4 movement of greased industry palms rubbing against one another, lies our percept of reality, consistently bombarded by messaging and it’s representative experience. So while we struggle with this understanding of our surroundings, back in the news room, editors — the field managers of this construct — find themselves under the thumb of the financial steerings and pressures of this propped reality. Their indoctrinated intuition places reactionary constraints on the types of stories generated, the depth of coverage, even the language the writer chooses to employ.

The innovators and early adopters of the web… we’re basically saying, “Fuck that noise.”

New School

Bottom/up constructs, enabled by the personal publishing revolution, delivered with flexible subscription technology such as RSS, have empowered individuals to publish cheaply within our own crafted domains.

• RSS allows us to digest information passively (in a centralized location), instead of actively (surfing the decentalized web), which greatly increases our level of input and conversely, fine tunes our understanding of the world, which is represented by our output (blogging, conversations, actions, etc.)
• Those of us who publish our own information objects, apply meta-data to increase the potential of findability, both now and in future interfaces
• Many of us participate with folksonomies, helping make our POV of all information semantically rich and contextual to our neighbors interests, our future grandchildern’s recollections of us, even the desires of a family on the other side of the planet
• We create multimedia objects to compete with elite vehicles of capital, and fuel them through the same tactical approaches

This participatory environment is one aspect of the Web 2.0 phrase that gets tossed about. It’s enabling us humans to share our creative impulses with others, helping to constantly define and then redefine the world around us through our personal representations of both explicit and implicit lexicon.

This is an open paradigm, a transparent journey, based in accelerated trust and faith in one another.

So when these two worlds meet — old school vs. new school or modernism vs. post-modernism or proprietary vs. open source — the truth of hierarchy and the truth of individual POV’s collide. Guess what remains?

A truthier truth.

Newsvine has taken a position of mixing mainstream feeds with user submitted, tagged and collaboratively greenlit content. Even more revolutionary, they’re mixing the standardized embedded lexicon of our culture — topical categories — with the co-occurance generated wisdom of the people creating relevant content living within such silos (see below)

The secondary navigation points are all dynamic, altering over time as the co-occurance of tagged objects within a topical category shifts. This is how I think — how I search, discover, build my own archive in this blog — so in and of itself, the concept doesn’t blow me away. What does blow me away is that by simply placing this paradigm next to, say, The New York Times, Yahoo! News, my pseudo-innovative hometown Greensboro News & Record and a blog aggregator like Greensboro101 (disclosure: I’m on the advisory panel), none of these domains can compete if Newsvine gains a participatory, critical mass audience.

Think about it: Newsvine provides AP feeds (like a Yahoo! News), yet allows anyone to seed *any* story, from *any* site (like digging or del.icio.us tagging). Let me try to clearly paint how disruptive of a strategy this is.

• With only the AP feed, Newsvine could potentially evolve to become a successful News aggregator
• The addition of the digg and del.icio.us features completely change the game. Newsvine now becomes populated by the very content from the news sites (New York Times, News & Record, etc.) that it’s competing against for advertising
• The better the content, say, a New York Times produces, the more likely it’ll end up in Newsvine, but with more context (meta-data) and a thriving, participatory readership.
• Content will begin to be valued differently at a New York Times — as prices might become reduced at the domain, while new, shared models will be created at sites like Newsvine. Good for the Times, as they have a new market for revenue, but it will effect their organizational structure. The big advantage for Newsvine: they don’t have to completely readjust due to their recent entry into the arena and their nimble stature (compared to large news organizations)
• Community blog aggregators could possibly fall to the wayside, simply due to the fact that people can seed their own local posts, as well as their neighbors, and leverage unbundled advertising services. The very concept of “community” will be redefined on much more granular levels, moving towards a flickr existence, as explicit tags begin to define groups of interest

The Final Touch

Mike Davidson obviously knows what he has here; not only an opportunity to provide a rich, participatory environment for the redefinition of what news means to us as a collective, a community and as individuals, but this service could very well challenge the embedded constructs of media and the contradictions of Adam Smith capitalism.

Heavy.

In the final analysis, if Newswire succeeds, it’ll be because of the participatory nature of people. So if Davidson really wants to make his mark on this planet, he’ll not only decide to share advertising revenue with the organizations and the content creators themselves, but the swarms of participating editors — editors removed from the burden and balancing act of management, reduced simply to individual citizens focused on making our communities that much more aware, educated and inclusive. If an incentive program can be devised along these lines– some type of a micro-payment structure based on Karma points and click-throughs for both editors *and* authors– he’ll be responsible for creating the Mechanical Turk of the media world.

If he heads in this direction, or others evolve his concept down this line, media as we know it could absolutely cease to exist. Reputable journalists will become more enabled by freelance opportunities, as news organizations will need to drastically reduce their overhead because advertising money won’t be channeled into one out of six corporate funnels.

Then we’ll more easily find the opportunities to 2.0 the hell out of government.

———-

(Big ups to Kent Bye over at The Echo Chamber Project for refueling my tank last night on the way home. 5 hours of ECP podcasts will get you into this type of groove. Go check out his amazing project)

The Carlyle Group was covered extensively in Fahrenheit 9/11. For those of you who refused to see the film, but are extremely upset about this port deal, I suggest you swallow your pride for a few hours and watch it.

As for the Olberman interview; there are some very real reasons that Bush is pushing this deal through. Our Navy needs the Dubai company controlled ports in the Middle East to continue the “War on Terror, “which progressively lines the pockets of The Carlyle Group more and more (sick, eh?). I’m sure international business doesn’t want to have ideology such as Homeland Security become a deal stopper in the future, but that’s a secondary concern to this President and his family at this point.

I mean come on, the bucks are rolling in.

(originally uploaded by jdlasica)

If Andrew Keen is a believer in the old saying that even bad press is good press, well, he’ll be amped by his coverage in the blogosphere today and in the near future.

I had planned on deconstructing his pathetic ass-kissing of pure capitalism and his simultaneous propagandizing of Web 2.0 as communism, but after reading Jeff Jarvis’ post, “Snobs.com,” there really isn’t much left for me to say.

Well, that’s never true.

Keen theorizes on the future of blogging, podcasting, etc:

In the Web 2.0 world, however, the nightmare is not the scarcity, but the over-abundance of authors. Since everyone will use digital media to express themselves, the only decisive act will be to not mark the paper.

My favorite twist on Keen (which Jeff so aptly points out) is that he both blogs and has a podcast site. Hell, the guy was a player wannabe in the first go round of Web 1.0. I’m not sensing a perspective with merit, I’m sensing bitterness. Check out this quote from Keen’s year 2000 Digital Hollywood conference bio:

Andrew Keen, Founder and CEO, AudioCafe: Andrew Keen is a leading visionary in the audio business with almost ten years of experience as an entrepreneur, salesman and writer in the industry. Having single-handedly founded Audiocafe in 1997, Keen has driven the development of the site’s content and business development. His model of integrating commerce, community and content is now acknowledged as the most viable business model for building a successful Internet business model. From its origins in 1997, Keen has built an Internet site well branded and respected throughout the audio, music and Internet industries. As the Founder of the company, Keen has personally recruited the entire management team at Audiocafe — including Eric Hall (President), the founding COO/CFO at Yahoo! and an executive at a number of other successful Internet start-ups, and James S. Thompson (COO), an experienced senior executive and veteran entrepreneur with five start-ups under his belt. Keen has also [blah, blah, blah…]

Keen is “an entrepreneur, salesman and writer in the industry” who apparently created the “model of integrating commerce, community and content [which] is now acknowledged as the most viable business model for building a successful Internet business model.” The audacity of the claim isn’t the only thing that has me rolling; “commerce, community and content” are all foundational elements of the Web 2.0 that he disses.

Does the added voice of his neighbor scare him that much?

Maybe Andy’s simply afraid that he won’t be able to recruit from a world full of endless talent to prop his career; after all, we all can’t have such spiffy titles to chose from.

Just who are these fuckin’ guys anyway?

vnunet.com
RIAA aims to ban CD ripping
by Iain Thomson

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has reversed its position on CD ripping and now wants the practice outlawed.

In a filing to the US government concerning digital rights management the RIAA and other copyright industry associations said the fact that CD ripping is widespread does not make it legal.

“Nor does the fact that permission to make a copy in particular circumstances is often or even routinely granted necessarily establish that the copying is a fair use when the copyright owner withholds that authorization,” the filing stated.

“In this regard, the statement attributed to counsel for copyright owners in the MGM v. Grokster case is simply a statement about authorization, not about fair use.”

This is a complete reversal of the RIAA’s previous policy. In last year’s Supreme Court MGM v. Grokster case a representative of the RIAA described ripping a CD and putting it on an iPod as “perfectly lawful”.

“It is no secret that the entertainment ‘oligopolists’ are not happy about space-shifting and format-shifting,” said the Electronic Frontier Foundation in a statement. “But surely ripping your own CDs to your own iPod passes muster.”

Unbelievable. The RIAA is Exhibit A as to why I financially support the EFF. Didn’t we get past this litigious moment in time when we were passing mix tapes between friends in the early 80’s?

Unchanneled, unbundled, uncontrolled music distribution can tremendously benefit three out of the four constituents in the music industry — the fans, artists and labels — if the technology is enabled and monetized properly. Citizen media and file sharing software has already provided the inroads to extrapolating the concept of personal mix tapes by exponential factors, but since the RIAA is a cabal of thug lawyers, knee-deep in the politics of the power structure of the record industry and big business — busy hawking the propaganda of “musicians starving by the thousands” due to copyright infringement — artists are left out of the conversation surrounding their own work.

From the RIAA self-descrption on their About Us page (emphasis mine ):

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is the trade group that represents the U.S. recording industry. Its mission is to foster a business and legal climate that supports and promotes our members’ creative and financial vitality. Its members are the record companies that comprise the most vibrant national music industry in the world. RIAA members create, manufacture and/or distribute approximately 90% of all legitimate sound recordings produced and sold in the United States.

In support of this mission, the RIAA works to protect intellectual property rights worldwide and the First Amendment rights of artists; conduct consumer industry and technical research; and monitor and review - - state and federal laws, regulations and policies. The RIAA also certifies Gold®, Platinum®, Multi-Platinum™, and Diamond® sales awards, and recently launched Los Premios De Oro y Platino™, a new award celebrating Latin music sales.

The RIAA are suits providing a perceived value service for a constituency of labels. Innocuous transfers, such as cd-rom to iPod, shouldn’t even be a part of the conversation, but the legal hawks at the RIAA need to keep their battle alive, cash in their hours on the job and make further cases for battles in this war, one that is bound to fail.

Why?

When we reach the tipping point for successfully monetizing a post-modern world — where citizen media receives micro-payments for media views and not click-throughs or micro-purchases instead of bundled viewing through industry channels — this argument will simply become moot. As new technological systems for production and distribution are built, the creative talent inside and out of the development community will begin to leverage the services.

• It’s already happening at myspace.com
• Have you seen what you can do with iLife?
• Hell, even I’m a movie director in my spare time

The evolution of citizen production technologies, along with rich forms of free advertising, networking, marketing and sharing delivered by blogs, will not just simply come to a screeching halt.

And that’s why the RIAA is stepping up their “intelligently designed” game.

I tend to sit on the optimistic side of this battle. Explicit, absolute hierarchy expressed via controlled management will not survive this explosion of technological innovation. It simply can’t. For as much energy and resources it takes to create, manage and govern a structured, old-money universe with closed systems of infrastructure, it takes a fraction of such time, energy and resources to release expression into the newly networked ether.

But these facts won’t stop the lawyers of the world from doing their best from stopping it. Check out this snippet from the bio of one of their leaders:

Mitch Bainwol
Chairman And CEO
Recording Industry Association of America

Mitch Bainwol joined the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) as Chairman and CEO in September 2003. As a seasoned policymaker, he is one of the Washington’s most recognized and respected strategists and possesses a unique blend of political, legislative, and communications skills.

The Washington Post recently called Bainwol a “Top D.C. Lobbyist and Man in Demand.” Several years in a row, Capitol Hill’s Roll Call newspaper hailed Bainwol as one of the 50 most influential “politicos” in Washington. He was also named by Entertainment Weekly as one of the most powerful people in show business and Campaigns and Elections magazine named him a “Mover and Shaker.”

[…]

Bainwol is a “recognized and respected strategist” in Washington DC; he’s a lobbyist. Music is reinventing itself from too many directions for him or anyone else representing this controlled system to make it last long-term.

Fuck the RIAA!

Imperial Grand Strategy - Elite Concerns (pg. 39)

Within establishment circles, there has been considerable concerns that “America’s imperial ambition” is a serious threat even to its own population. Their alarm reached new heights as the Bush administration declared itself to be a “revisionist state” that intends to rule the world permanently, becoming, some felt, “a menace to itself and to mankind” under the leadership of “radical nationalists” aiming for “unilateral world domination through absolute military superiority.” Many others within the mainstream spectrum have been appalled by the adventurism and arrogance of the radical nationalists who have regained the power they wielded through the 1980s, but now operate with fewer external constraints.

The concerns are not entirely new. During the Clinton years, the prominent political analyst Samuel Huntington observed that for much of the world the US is “becoming the rogue superpower, [considered] the single greatest external threat to their societies.” Robert Jervis, then president of the American Political Science Association, warned that “in the eyes of much of the world, in fact, the prime rogue state today is the United States.” Like others, they anticipated that coalitions might arise to counterbalance the rogue superpower, with threatening implications.

Several leading figures of the foreign policy elite have pointed out that the potential targets of America’s imperial ambition are not likely to simply await destruction. They “know that the United States can be held at bay only by deterrence,” Kenneth Waltz has written, and that “weapons of mass destruction are the only means to deter the United States.” Washington’s policies are therefore leading to the proliferation of WMD, Waltz concludes, tendencies accelerated by its commitment to dismantle international mechanisms to control the resort to violence. These warnings were reiterated as Bush prepared to attack Iraq: one consequence, according to Steven Miller, is that others “are likely to draw the conclusion that weapons of mass destruction are necessary to deter American intervention.” Another well-known specialist warned that the “general strategy of preventive war” is likely to provide others with “overwhelming incentives to wield weapons of terror and mass destruction” as a deterrent to “the unbrideled use of American power.” Many have noted the likely impetus to Iranian nuclear weapons programs. And “there is no question that the lesson that the North Koreans have learned from Iraq is that it needs a nuclear deterrent,” Selig Harrison commented.

As the year 2002 drew to a close, Washington was teaching an ugly lesson to the world: if you want to defend yourself from us, you had better mimic North Korea and pose a credible military threat, in this case, conventional: artillary aimed at Seoul and at US troops near DMZ. We will enthusiastically march on to attack Iraq, because we know that it is devistated and defenseless; but North Korea, though an even worse tyranny and vastly more dangerous, is not an appropriate target as long as it can cause plenty of harm. The lesson could hardly be more vivid.

Still another concern is the “second superpower,” public opinion. Not only was the “revisionism” of the political leadership without precident; so too was the opposition to it. Comparisons are often drawn to Vietnam. The common query “What happened to the tradition of protest and dissent?” makes clear how effectively the historical record has been cleansed and how little sense there is, in many circles, of the changes in public consciousness over the past four decades. An accurate comparison is revealing: In 1962, public protest was nonexistent, despite the announcement that year that the Kennedy administration was sending the US Air Force to bomb South Vietnam, as well as initiating plans to drive millions of people into what ammounted to concentration camps and launching chemical warfare programs to destroy food crops and ground cover. Protest did not reach any meaningful level until years later, after hundreds of thousands of US troops had been dispatched, densely populated areas had been demolished by saturation bombing, and the aggression had spread to the rest of Indochina. By the time protest became significant, the bitterly anticommunist military historian and Indochina specialist Bernard Fall had warned that “Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity… is threatened with extinction” as “the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size.”

In 2002, fourty years later, in striking contrast, there was largescale, committed, and principled popular protest before the war had been officially launched. Absent the fear and illusion about Iraq that were unique to the US, prewar opposition would probably have reached much the same levels as elsewhere. That reflects a steady increase over these years in unwillingness to tolerate aggression and atrocities, one of many such changes.

The leadership is well aware of these developments. By 1968, fear of the public was so serious that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had to consider whether “sufficient forces would be available for civil disorder control” if more troops were sent to Vietnam. The Department of Defense feared that further troop deployments ran the risk of “provoking a domestic crisis of unprecedented proportions.” The Reagan administration at first tried to follow Kennedy’s South Vietnam model in Central America but backed down in the face of an unanticipated public reaction that threatened to undermine more important components of the policy agenda, turning instead to clandestine terror — clandestine in the sense that it could be more or less concealed from the general public. When Bush I took office in 1989, public reaction was again very much on the agenda. Incoming administrations typically commission a review of the world situation from the intelligence agencies. These reviews are secret, but in 1989 a passage was leaked concerning “cases where the US confronts much weaker enemies.” The analysts advised that the US must “defeat them decisively and rapidly.” Any other outcome would be “embarrassing” and might “undercut political support,” understood to be thin.

We are no longer in the 1960s, when the population would tolerate a murderous and destructive war for years without visible protest. The activist movements of the past forty years have had a significant civilizing effect in many domains. By now, the only way to attack a much weaker enemy is to construct a propaganda offensive depicting it as an imminent threat or perhaps engaged in genocide, with confidence that the military campaign will scarcely resemble an actual war.

Take a look around. People see the world as they experience it.

Welcome, fellers. I’m sure you’re going to be successful tilting that liberal network, CNN, back to the middle from their left-leaning ways.

Anything for ratings, eh?

UPDATE: Well, it didn’t take long for Beck to land on Keith Olberman’s World’s Worst Person segment:

It’s nothing new. Plain and simple, Sean Hannity is a tool for Fox News, complicit within the US/Saudi power plan.

I posted an example of his hypocrisies a few months back, covering his opaque speaking fees in Utah last year around voting time and how we, the thinking blogosphere, need to keep him and his ilk in check. Texastentialist corrected me by pointing out that his actions aren’t hypocritical; they’re part of a planned strategy.

Today, Think Progress covered Hannity berating colleges for taking money from Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal for their Islamic studies programs, also calling him a hypocrite. Quotes from Hannity:

"…Now, you may remember this Saudi prince from the days after September 11, when Rudy Giuliani turned down his so-called gift of $10 million, because he said that the U.S. needed to, quote, “reexamine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stance towards the Palestinian cause,â€? unquote.

“…This is a bad guy. Rudy was right to decline the money. Why would these universities take money from him?"

Think Progress brilliantly exposes Hannity and Fox News with this gem:

"Hannity conveniently forgot to mention that his own employer, Fox News, also accepts money from Talal; he owns 5.5% of Fox News. Not only is Talal “rewarding them [Fox News] financially for views they already have,â€? he’s also changing  their views.”

But where Think Progress ends their coverage, the story of the US/Saudi relationship continues to branch out in unaccountable directions. For those of you that like to read first-hand accounts of how we’ve gotten to the point we find ourselves in the Middle East — specifically, Saudi Arabia — pick-up a copy of Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins.

Sean Hannity isn’t just a hypocrite; he’s complicit.

Everything is everything… for real.

Go see it today and then do something positive.

Why I started my Chomsky indulgence with Understanding Power and not this digestible gem I’ll never know.

Uncle Sam is a brilliant pocket reference of Noam Chomsky’s world view, specifically his unflinching criticism of US foreign policy. His genius with linguistics provides him the means to absolutely tear apart the propaganda surrounding isms, bringing the conversation and arguments back to the table of reality. By comparing declassified government files, public policy and geopolitical events occurring between the early 1940’s to 1992, Chomsky cuts directly through the posturing of the US to frame cause and effect in the struggle for global power.

The man is fearless. He critically deconstructs policy from within the sovereign US to expose the post-WWII new world order policies of US planners — clearly describing how the Third World has been shaped to remain the peasant working class via neo-Nazi techniques of torture and intimidation, satisfying the needs of the US investor class.

His arguments are completely lucid and relevant in today’s world, even though it was published in the early nineties. Want an example? Keep an eye on the US propaganda regarding the “left-wing rhetoric” of Hugo Chavez. The BBC is already picking up the US talking points of Venezuela elections being rigged. Chomsky describes these US tactics in detail.

Chomsky’s take on US indoctrination of its citizens to contributing productively to pure capitalism is classic, as he tackles complicit participants from the mainstream media to academia. Just as stinging is his perspective on the marginalization of 80% of our population, which reminded me a bit of the 5% Nation, but without the optimism.

Here’s a section about the US in a Rent-A-Thug role (remember, this was written during the original Gulf War conflict with George H.W. Bush in charge):

[…]

“In any confrontation, each participant tries to shift the battle to a domain in which it’s most likely to succeed. You want to lead with your strength, play your strong card. The strong card of the United States is force—so if we can establish the principle that force rules the world, that’s a victory for us. If, on the other hand, a conflict is settled through peaceful means, that benefits us less, because our rivals are just as good or better in that domain.

Diplomacy is a particularly unwelcome option, unless it’s pursued under the gun. The US has very little popular support for its goals in the Third World. This isn’t surprising, since it’s trying to impose structures of domination and exploitation. A diplomatic settlement is bound to respond, at least to some degree, to the interests of the other participants in the negotiation, and that’s a problem when your positions aren’t very popular.

As a result, negotiations are something the US commonly tries to avoid. Contrary to much propaganda, that has been true in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Central America for many years.

Against this background, it’s natural that the Bush administration should regard military force as a major policy instrument, preferring it to sanctions and diplomacy (as in the Gulf crisis). But since the US now lacks the economic base to impose “order and stability� in the Third World, it must rely on others to pay for the exercise—a necessary one, it’s widely assumed, since someone must ensure a proper respect for the masters. The flow of profits from Gulf oil production helps, but Japan and German-led continental Europe must also pay their share as the US adopts the “mercenary role,� following the advice of the international business press.

The financial editor of the conservative Chicago Tribune has been stressing these themes with particular clarity (William Neikirk, “We are the World’s Guardian Angelsâ€? 9/9/90) We must be “willing mercenaries,â€? paid for our ample services by our rivals, using our “monopoly powerâ€? in the “security marketâ€? to maintain “our control over the world economic system.â€? We should run a global protection racket, he advises, selling “protectionâ€? to other wealthy powers who will pay us a “war premium.”

This is Chicago, where the words are understood: if someone bothers you, you call on the Mafia to break their bones. And if you fall behind in your premium, your health may suffer too.

To be sure, the use of force to control the Third World is only a last resort. The IMF is a more cost-effective instrument than the Marines and the CIA if it can do the job. But the “iron fist� must be poised in the background, available when needed.

Our rent-a-thug role also causes suffering at home. All of the successful industrial powers have relied on the state to protect and enhance powerful domestic economic interests, to direct public resources to the needs of investors, and so on—one reason why they are successful. Since 1950, the US has pursued these ends largely through the Pentagon System (including NASA and the Department of Energy, which produces nuclear weapons). By now we are locked into these devices for maintaining electronics, computers and high-tech industry generally.

Reaganite military Keynesian excesses added further problems. The transfer of resources to wealthy minorities and other government policies led to a vast wave of financial manipulations and a consumption binge. But there was little in the way of productive investment, and the country was saddled with huge debts: government, corporate, household and the calculable debt of unmet social needs as the society drifts towards a Third World pattern, with islands of great wealth and privilege in a sea of misery and suffering.

When a state is committed to such policies, it must somehow find a way to divert the population, to keep them from seeing what’s happening around them. There are not many ways to do this. The standard ones are to inspire fear of terrible enemies about to overwhelm us, and awe for our grand leaders who rescue us from disaster in the nick of time.

That has been the pattern right through the 1980’s, requiring no little ingenuity as the standard device, the Soviet threat, became harder to take seriously. So the threat to our existence has been Qaddafi and his hordes of international terrorists, Grenada and its ominous air base, Sandinistas marching on Texas, Hispanic narcotraffickers led by the arch-maniac Noriega, and crazed Arabs generally. Most recently it’s Saddam Hussein, after he committed his sole crime—the crime of disobedience—in August 1990. It has become more necessary to recognize what has always been true: that the prime enemy is the Third World, which threatens to get “out of control.�

These are not laws of nature. The processes, and the institutions that engender them, could be changed. But that will require cultural, social and institutional changes of no little movement, including democratic structures that go far beyond periodic selection of representatives of the business world to manage domestic and international affairs.”

[…]

Exactly.

Okay, I’m off to read Cluetrain again. I call this “gray matter iteration.” ;-)

Back in July, I found myself following one of my usual late night routines; browsing flickr late at night, hopping from one intense image to the next, pulling myself farther and farther into the late hours of the evening. The image that ended my discovery scenario that night was one which framed a masked protester holding a sign reading, "Dictatorial Democracy!" The composition and message created an extremely striking and provocative statement. I dropped into the discussion thread, left a comment, marked it as a favorite and retired for the evening.

Fast forward two weeks; I’m in the midst of some serious self-transformation—from a corporate design lead to a full-time freelance information architect and blogger actively participating in the information revolution. I had too many thoughts bouncing about my head and needed to get them down as an explicit, lasting statement. I began crafting a post about what had led me to begin my dedicated contribution to political and cultural discourse. The visceral image of the protester jumped into my mind as a perfect visual cue, so I hopped over to flickr, grabbed it (CC licensed) and included it within the post.

When QOOP partnered with flickr to provide printing capabilities a few weeks back, I found myself creating a poster of the protect image before the application could even cool off. Within a week, the print arrived at my door and I was blown away by the quality.

Now, when I glance at the image on my wall, I not only visualize the thought process of the photographer as he composed the shot, but the philosophical drivers of both Stewart Butterfield and the flickr team as well. True, this is a physical remainder of one man’s passionate expression, but the implicit philosophies of an open business model resonates just as much in the tactile form of a print, one that didn’t belong to me but was "let go into the ether" to be used and reused. Both the photographer and flickr share numerous traits: a deep seeded passion, the desire for open participation and the use of technology as a vehicle for change. The end result is that one man’s political perspective—without the benefits of a political platform—is now a tangible, refined component of my home experience.

That’s extremely powerful stuff.

But with this one print in particular, if I don’t deconstruct the message further, I’d be guilty of simply adorning eye-candy on my wall. For as much as I love the image and the powerful message it delivers, after thinking about it for a few months, there’s a very romantic naivety to the whole scene.

Back To Reality

Our government isn’t structured for any administration to listen to the explicit desires resonating from the free speech of Americans. The Executive branch works with Congress, whose members have been elected by the constituents of each state. Free speech can move, motivate, challenge and change individuals, but it will never influence the Executive branch. Only polls of the American people have that power and the resulting moves by an administration are placating at best. If you want to elicit change through the actions of an elected official, you have to start on a local level—blog, call your congressman, volunteer in a campaign, meet with like-minded folk, organize unions, etc. Ranting alone will not make change occur.

Take old school corporate structure as a metaphor to government. How often do you think C-levels base their policy on the voice of employees or individual consumers? Sure, it may happen at times due to sheer coincidence, but policies are primarily based on:

1. Shareholder desires and concerns
2. Advertiser desire and concerns (if applicable)
3. The domain experience and agendas of executives
4. Client/user/customer desires and concerns
5. The input of employees

To a user experience designer like myself, this is in the very least ill-balanced, but it’s the common DNA of present day big money capitalism; first serve the desires of your investors, then serve the desires of the common folk—even the ones who use your products or services. Would Michael Dell listen to a bunch of individual customers over his shareholders or retail customers?

Probably not.

So, back to our current administration — considered by many to be the most secretive administration ever—the problem isn’t that Bush, Chaney and the rest of the gang aren’t listening to the people; the problem is that they’ve lied to Congress, creating false evidence to go to war, while simultaneously placing social reformations on the back burner. We don’t need to completely reinvent the wheel of our government and the constitution; we need to hold public officials (and corporate lobbyists) accountable to working within