connecting*the*dots

Yesterday, Andy and I had the opportunity to rap with a handful of UNCG film students, as his former professor (Matt Barr) invited him to present his documentary, reveal his creative process and expose the realities of the distribution game. I tagged along to introduce the possibilities of the web; how it can be used as both a creative channel and a viral mechanism for distribution.

Andy dove right in and introduced the story behind his documentary (Greensboro’s Child) to the students — the ties between the 1979 KKK shootings of five worker’s rights protesters and the unjust sentencing of a civil rights activist’s child to two life sentences for unarmed burglary just 7 years later.

The entire time I sat listening intently to my brother’s passionate presentation, I couldn’t help but notice the amount of times he mentioned his desire to not only go back into the film and improve upon his student-level production techniques (he began the documentary back in 1996), but to continue to document the unfolding story by re-editing the film and updating it with the findings of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

While I completely understand his intent and agree with the desired results, I just don’t agree with the approach — not in this day and age.

As a blogger and an enthusiast of web/documentary projects like the Echo Chamber Project and The War Tapes, my perspective of an evolving narrative is completely different than Andy’s.

When I think about Greensboro’s Child, I view it as a foundation of knowledge; an element that can be built upon with new elements of video, images and text to create an even broader and more reputable narrative thesis. It’s an impossible goal to continuously include the numerous, ever-evolving tentacles of the story (the Greensboro police department, the community attitude, etc.) within a single 1.5 hour long documentary.

So once the lights came back on and the students finished their Q&A, I introduced myself, a bit of my career history and proceeded to find my zone… Somewhere in the midst of my presentation, I introduced:

• myself as an activist, rather than a designer (a first)
• the possibilities of using cutting edge video distribution channels to introduce their voices to the world, such as youtube, currentTV, democracy
• how a mixture of blogging and video can have a more lasting reach than both tv and film (Rocketboom for example)

By the time my diatribe subsided, I found myself engaged in a conversation surrounding The People, Yes. Once we moved beyond the concept of the collaborative blog for the homeless of Greensboro, we evolved into a conversation about weekly trips into the community to capture the various stories of the underprivileged, on camera, and turning it back around as weekly shorts in a vlog. Heads were nodding left and right as the film students seemed eager to participate in such a project.

So I now have a new angle to TPY… and quite possibly a pool of energetic, dedicated, creative filmmakers to participate in the cause.

While walking off the UNCG campus, I turned around to take in a final glimpse… something, I don’t know what, just seemed different…

Let’s play a game that I call, “Guess Who’s Masturbating.” Read the following quote and try to guess who wrote it (and don’t cheat).

Quoted three years ago, a week into the invasion of Iraq:

The people of Eastern Europe stared into the abyss of tyrannical evil for decades, and recognizing the Iraqi regime for what it is, they stand with us today. Some people may mock the fact that Poland, Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic, and other minor countries are part of this coalition — but they remember what life was like without freedom. They remember what it took to climb up from the rubble.

They remember what it was like to hear the words of Vaclav Havel (who would go on to make more than 100 official speeches, with no speechwriters), on his New Years address as first President of the free Czech Republic:

“My people, your government has returned to you.”

Soon, the Iraqi people will hear those words. The sound you hear, Saddam, is the sound of inevitability. It is the sound of your doom.

So what’s your guess? Dick Cheney? Someone else from the PNAC gang? Not even close.

Give up?

I’d like to introduce you to Ben Domenich, the 24 year-old founding father of the RedState blog and freshly hired blogger at the Washington Post.

Only someone this young and naive could actually believe the bullshit he espouses as fact. In this particular case, Eastern Europe does what they’re told, or maybe he missed the memo on the New World Order?

While I’m a huge proponent of citizen media, and completely support young Ben’s right to publish his perspective, his track record is obviously partisan, and at times, skirting an extreme position. What is WaPo thinking? Are they trying to create a loose cannon, ideological microcosm of the political blogosphere within their walled garden?

Media Matters’ David Brock seems to think so.

The thing that WaPo doesn’t get is that by hiring Ben Domenich, they’ve taken away his blogging ID; both his credentials and his independence. In their haste to capitalize on his partisan readership in this 2.0 world, they haven’t just lowered the bar — they’ve replaced it with a hula-hoop.

Aloha, WaPo.

Photo by Colin Gregory Palmer

I usually tend to keep announcements under wraps until I’ve made enough progress to warrent them, but in the spirit of Tantek Çelik’s building blocks presentation, Kent Bye’s Echo Chamber Project and Chris Messina’s barcamp escapades, well, here goes nothing:

thepeopleyes.org

Jill, a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, was abducted more than two months ago in Iraq just after her translator was murdered in cold blood. Please take a moment and post a link to this video in an effort to raise awareness across the blogosphere.

If you’re a blogger in the middle-east, your help is most appreciated.

My heart has been and will continue to be with Jill’s family and friends until this nightmare is over.

(via Mental Mayhem)

Great conversation.

Now that I’ve been blogging full-time for the past year, I can relate to these ancients of the craft like never before. They’re going back and forth on the ills of advertising and subscription models — something I’ve yet to have to deal with as my readership ain’t quite there yet (read: go tell your friends to come on by!) — and the origins of their ideas, style and voice.

Regarding advertising, sustaining my effort is eventually going to catch up with me… I think. Right now balancing freelance gigs with writing is working, but the allure to blog even more is getting stronger and stronger, especially as I get more and more into a groove with my voice and my POV. And once I start connecting with more like minds…

But back to Jason and Heather; the conversation is shifting into how blogging has affected their friends and relationships. It’s interesting to hear them talk about direct feedback and how it affects their personal lives. Jason brought up Heather’s Wiki biography, where a fan ended the bio by saying, “Heather and husband remain unemployed.” Really funny. (Heather, I had to live-blog update that last line ;)

I wonder what Dave Winer will think of Jason’s view of him being a pied piper-type blogger. It wasn’t a dig of any type — it was Jason trying to make clear how he didn’t view himself — but it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out in “Days Of Our Blogosphere”

Kottke just called his fiance, Yoko. Doh!

Blogging rules.

Well, I made it to Austin in one piece, but since it took me until last week to register, I had to rush to get a hotel and transportation and kinda blew both.

My hotel is about a mile away from the Austin Convention Center (ACC ) — not terrible — but my rental reservation, well, it didn’t quite work. I must’ve missed a submit button in my haste. So I’m walking around town, which is a good thing, as I’ve become Veal over the last six months working out of my home office.

So after walking across the river, I met up with Tish Grier (of Snarkaholic and Corante Media Hub fame). Over lunch, we talked citizen media, self-promotion in the blogging age (do we really need to think about it?), the role of an academic pedigree in the market and… elbow grease (ask Tish about that one)

Following lunch, we headed back to the ACC to check email, met David Beach from Yahoo! while sharing table space, made some temporary party plans and went our separate ways; it was time for me to get catch Thank You For Smoking over at the Alamo Draft House.

The theater is as hip as can be, with wait-staff taking both drink and food orders from our seats. Yes, I ordered a Guinness pint from the middle of the theater. It felt like I was front-row at the Knicks game. Can you say, dope? And then the movie…

So true and so funny. Classic. Jason Reitman — the writer and director — took the time afterwards to answer questions and tell a few behind the scenes tales; one dealing with the Katie Holmes “missing sex scene” at a Toronto festival and the other being Sam Eliott’s pension for carrying his own rifle on set.

And with that, we were rushed out of the theater into the now packed streets of downtown Austin. Excuse me, but it’s time to go hit up a party.

Austin rocks.

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)

so what’s it gonna take, people?
when is enough, enough?
how long until his actions reflect your morals?
how long until we pay for his sins?
are you feeling me?
are you fucking feeling me?
every day it’s something new
a smirk to the right
and a pound to the few
the base recognizes His play
our theocratic dictator
our aborted yesterday
i mean, tomorrow
tomorrow
yeah, keep on sitting back for tomorrow
shit will just get right
right!?
right.
so right that trees will snap back left
so right that bass will become treble cleft
you can’t get much righter than that
turning a c sharp into a b flat
so right that a woman loses her right
so right that good men lose sight
that an emergency contraceptive replacement
is a backhanded slight
so the question that remains
is what are you willing to do?
are you ready to alter your life?
are you ready to let reality shine through?
are you ready to put pen to pad?
are you ready to find that voice within?
are you ready to step up and grad?
are you ready to stop being chagrined?
it ain’t a simple move
(discerning truth from lies)
it takes a whole new groove
(cutting away from some comfortable ties)
friends will drift away or straight up get cut
from your roster of ideals
your ability to deal
in a life of new found zeal
but that’s where i live
how i move through my day
it’s my warrior way
my soldier’s pay
my march in step to a brighter day
the difference between
feelin’
knowin’
holdin’
showin’
askin’
tellin’
seperatin’
gellin’
Contact!
Can I get a ***!?
***!
Bullshit.
Now there’s a Scenario that won’t get played…?
Out

Conferences often resemble a living, breathing, talking gallery exhibit… with bad food; an expensive, explicit exhibit, which usually fails to inspire me (not as an artist’s juxtaposed take on light and mass might).

That being said, I’d pretty much do anything to make it to the TED conference; the annual gathering of the world’s top philosophers, technologists and intellectuals created by the father of information architecture, Richard Saul Wurman and now run by Chris Anderson.

Well, thanks to Ethan, we can now all sit in on the experience via his live-blogging of this year’s event.

You know, he’s bound to get more than a three minute spot in the future.

I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist. No sooner than I blink(ed) the title had already formed in my post.

Malcolm Gladwell is now blogging. And as you might expect, he’s not writing about his garden. His mea culpa positions his blog as a vehicle to document offline feedback and attribute sources for stories which aren’t footnoted in his New Yorker articles.

Sweet.

Now if he would only redesign the site before I begin to go into convulsions.

UPDATE: He’s switched to a new template, which is much more readable and friendly to me avoiding seizures. It’s kinda fun watching someone in the process of tweaking their blog into a format that suits them.

(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!

Four months ago, in the midst of writing an essay about Web 2.0, I threw out an example of a potential service that reflected the best qualities of the movement. Well, it’s now a reality; Welcome coComment.

Man, I love this industry; a thought one day, a full-fledged service another. Now if I could only score an invite to use my dream service of discourse.

UPDATE: The folks over at coComment just sent me an invite. Thanks, guys!

Forget connecting*the*dots; it’s time for eating*the*dots.

Bunchball. This could get really interesting… fast.

(via Michael Arrington)

The cluetrain: Doc Searls reporting Terry Heaton essay-ing Gordon Borrell

This “Boycott MSNBC” meme being promoted by the “Open Letter To Chris Matthews” blog and pushed by big-time, left bloggers is disingenuous at best, and a horrible strategy… period. Forget for a moment that Chris Matthews compared Osama bin Laden’s recent choice of language to Michael Moore’s, the facts regarding Moore are just not being represented correctly. The “Open Letter…” blog states:

What’s this all about? Chris Matthews has repeatedly compared Osama bin Laden to Democrats…

Wrong.

1. Michael Moore is not a registered Democrat
2. Michael Moore does not hold office
3. Michael Moore is an independent documentary filmmaker, one who goes after both corrupt corporations and government administrations

1992 was the last time Moore was registered as a Democrat. In the past, I’ve had my own problems wrestling with how he has been positioned by both the media and the RNM as a “Liberal Democrat” due to his hardcore stance against the Bush administration. And then I experienced F9/11 on opening night and my eyes opened even wider regarding the actions of this administration, realizing that Moore wasn’t being partisan, he was being as direct and honest as humanly possible.

I’m sure Democrats feel a rush when an independent, creative voice rips apart the opposition party — especially one as corrupt as the Bush administration — but these actions don’t exclusively subscribe a voice such as Moore to the Democratic Party’s brand of progress or politics, nor should the Democrats want such to be the case.

As an independent (or non-affiliated here in North Carolina), I respect Moore’s perspective because he doesn’t belong to a political party. Michael Moore will reach more people to act and/or vote against corruption as an independent filmmaker, than a labeled “Liberal Democratic” filmmaker. The sheer amount of bloggers that are blindly supporting this meme is poor strategy.

Stop feeding the machine their propaganda. This is a short-term tactical reaction, one that will negatively affect Moore’s long-term output of truth if he’s pigeon holed as a Democrat.

UPDATE: The blog has changed its intro to now read:

What’s this all about? Chris Matthews has repeatedly compared Americans who are concerned about the war in Iraq to Osama bin Liden…

Well, at least they got the Democratic issue corrected, but Matthews only compared Moore’s language. This boycott is retarded. Shit, I’m watching Keith Olberman no matter what Chris Matthews says.

Deborah Howell, the much maligned Ombudsman for The Washington Post, has created a stir; she reported that Jack Abramoff gave money to both parties. Whether one wants to believe it or not is not my concern. Her column created an outroar in the blogosphere and incindiary comments began to fill the editor’s blog. Jim Brady, Executive Editor of The Washington Post, tried to deal with the situation:

As of 4:15pm ET today, we have shut off comments on this blog indefinitely.

At its inception, the purpose of this blog was to open a dialogue about this site, the events of the day, the journalism of The Washington Post Company and other related issues. Among the things that we knew would be part of that discussion would be the news and opinion coming from the pages of The Washington Post and washingtonpost.com. We knew a lot of that discussion would be critical in nature. And we were fine with that. Great journalism companies need feedback from readers to stay sharp.

But there are things that we said we would not allow, including personal attacks, the use of profanity and hate speech. Because a significant number of folks who have posted in this blog have refused to follow any of those relatively simple rules, we’ve decided not to allow comments for the time being. It’s a shame that it’s come to this. Transparency and reasoned debate are crucial parts of the Web culture, and it’s a disappointment to us that we have not been able to maintain a civil conversation, especially about issues that people feel strongly (and differently) about.

We’re not giving up on the concept of having a healthy public dialogue with our readers, but this experience shows that we need to think more carefully about how we do it. Any thoughtful feedback on that (or any other issue) is welcome, and you can send it to executive.editor@washingtonpost.com.

Thanks,
Jim Brady
Executive Editor, washingtonpost.com

So, the ombudsman of an institution can erase comments and lobby to shut down their feedback channel from customers? Can someone please explain to me the purpose of the role again, specifically for an institution that supposedly sheds light on critical matters to the public?

Here’s my email in response:

jim,

people who are online, commenting on your blog, are used to being flamed. they’re participating elsewhere, and have been for years. don’t try to turn this into a case where WaPo is “protecting” anyone.

as backwards as it might sound, lower your commenting standards, remove the worst when they are submitted, and go on about reporting the news.

welcome to the world of free expression. “adding blogs” to your realm comes with the price of bringing one channel of WaPo down to street level. it may not be the salad fork you’re used to, but it’s still a vehicle for consuming necessary roughage.

-sean

I realize that WaPo might be stinging from harsh criticism and frank language, but this shouldn’t motivate Brady to react in such a drastic manner. I mean after all, it’s a WaPo blog, the editor’s blog at that. Not all of us peasants are good and proper; some are mentally malnurished, but we’re taxpaying peasants just the same, and obviously, interested enough in WaPo to spend our time flaming each other and WaPo staff on comment threads.

This is a healthy sign for an institution. It might register as backwards, or uncivil, but so is your average football game on Sunday when you’re not watching it from the comfort of your living room.

“Transparency and reasoned debate” cannot be managed, otherwise you’re just adding back the filters of mass consumption that blogs have removed from the web. Commit to the medium and over-engage in the discourse; it’s the only way to make a connection with the people that care enough to fire back at you.

We are the voices that will be heard, whether you like it or not. Deal with it.

UPDATE: After receiving a form response to my above email from Michael Golden, the Director of Customer Relationships (strange, the email was addressed to Jim Brady at executive.editor@washingtonpost.com), I stubled upon this great post from Jesus’ General.

Wake up WaPo.

I could get really snarky with this post (yes, Tish, I do have it in me), but I’ll let the images below speak for themselves:

(via Miss Rogue and David King)

Here we go again.

A blogger is just a writer with a cooler name
Why Blogging vs. Traditional Media Has Been Oversold
By Simon Dumenco

I’ve been thinking of what I am — about what any media person in the digital age is — since having coffee last week with a 30-something newspaper editor who bemoaned the fact that newspapers keep on setting up blogs as these separate, exotic add-ons to their Web sites, instead of integrating blogging into their usual newsgathering operations. There’s simply no good reason to segregate the functions, he insisted.

And it occurred to me that there is no such thing as blogging. There is no such thing as a blogger. Blogging is just writing — writing using a particularly efficient type of publishing technology. Even though I tend to first use Microsoft Word on the way to being published, I am not, say, a Worder or Wordder.

It’s just software, people! The underlying creative/media function remains exactly the same.

OK, you might argue, blogging is aesthetically a different beast — it’s instantaneous media. (Well, since the dawn of the 24-hour news cycle, pretty much all media has had to learn how to be instantaneous.) It’s unpolished. (The best blogs I read are as sophisticated as anything old-school media publishes.) It’s voice-y. (The best old-school media I read tends to be voice-y.) It’s about opinion, not reporting. (The best reporting to come out of MacWorld in San Francisco last week was published on blogs.) It’s, well, often sloppy and reckless (and Judy Miller wasn’t?).

OK, then, you might further argue, the Internet itself treats blogs as structurally distinct things. Well, sure, there are blog-specific search engines (Technorati, Icerocket, blogsearch.google.com, etc.), but the lines between blog and non-blog content are rapidly dissolving. Traditional news organizations and blogs often get seemingly equal weight as news sources in Google News. And just last week, I found out about Sprint’s West Coast fiber optic network outage from the new Gmail “Web Clipâ€? ticker that sits atop my e-mail inbox — and the clip came from a blog, not a traditional news organization.

So why does the idea of the blogger as The Other continue to persist? Because many bloggers, of course, like the idea of being all alterna; it’s a point of pride, a tenet of the “blog communityâ€? (whatever that is), that bloggers are superior to the musty, lumbering, out-of-touch traditional media. And for traditional-media types, blog/blogging/bloggers are variants of a sort of linguistic armor — labels that allow old-school-ists to convince themselves that they are the true professionals, and they needn’t radically alter the way they work (i.e., work way faster, interact constantly with readers, be vastly more voracious, etc.) to compete with the amateurs, the arrivistes.

Of course, the false dichotomy gives rise to internal inconsistencies — like at The New York Times, which is acting like David Carr is one thing (he’s a columnist!) when he’s doing his Monday media business column and another thing (he’s a blogger!) when he’s doing his Oscar-season dispatches under The Carpetbagger rubric on NYTimes.com, even though both are edited by a Times editor before being published. (By the way, why isn’t The Carpetbagger called The Carrpetbagger?) Those who remember David’s spirited, nearly instantaneous media reporting at Inside.com know that he was “bloggingâ€? way before there were blogs. (A historical note: I was a columnist for Inside; David and I never worked together directly, though we shared editors.)

A lot of the tendency to draw lines internally, I think, has to do with the fact that most old-school publishing organizations with online components invested heavily in the ’90s in then-state-of-the-art, but now-cumbersome online publishing systems, which are functionally very different from more nimble blogging software solutions. But over the next few years those legacy systems will be phased out and everyone publishing online will be using some form of what’s now commonly thought of as blogging software.

Ultimately, it comes down to this: In the very near future, there are only going to be two types of media people: those who can reliably work and publish (or broadcast) incredibly fast, and those … who can’t.

I had planned on commenting on the article itself, but I couldn’t (ironic, eh?). So here’s my email to Simon in its entirety:

———-

Simon,

While I agree with your premise of software being a non-differentiator to the act of writing, I have to disagree with you across the remainder of the board.

So why does the idea of the blogger as The Other continue to persist? Because many bloggers, of course, like the idea of being all alterna; it’s a point of pride, a tenet of the “blog community” (whatever that is), that bloggers are superior to the musty, lumbering, out-of-touch traditional media.

If you don’t understand what the “blog community” is… what form of masterbation did I just digest? No, it isn’t a point of pride; it’s a means for expression, the only mass form of expression many of us “bloggers” have access to and one which differentiates itself from writing in any other form:

1. bloggers don’t have editors breathing over their shoulders
2. bloggers understand, use and respect the community-building, conversational power of inline linking
3. bloggers provide a means for public discourse (comments/trackbacks) to their writing

Of course, the false dichotomy gives rise to internal inconsistencies — like at The New York Times, which is acting like David Carr is one thing (he’s a columnist!) when he’s doing his Monday media business column and another thing (he’s a blogger!) when he’s doing his Oscar-season dispatches under The Carpetbagger rubric on NYTimes.com, even though both are edited by a Times editor before being published.

Here’s a scoop: a blogger doesn’t have an editor. Your reference is simply an example of an old school media giant labeling something a blog that isn’t… pure and simple. That’s “quick, call it [a blog] because it’s hot” old media, glom marketing tactics. Period.

Also, regarding your thesis; a blogger wouldn’t have framed the discussion as you did, focusing on how blogging is the same as writing in “old media” by using this example of split media (a “column” in one area, a “blog” elsewhere). A blogger would have seen that split as a sign that “old media” isn’t comfortable with explicitly running with [point] #2 from above.

Old media absolutely does not like to send people away from their *domains* because they have an ad sales infrastructure to grease, one that is too menacing for a blind leap into the world of “links in, links out.” Too many salaries, benefits, careers, etc. are on the line.

We don’t have such concerns.

-Sean

ps. Since you don’t have comments on your “writing” I want to let you know that I plan on posting this email… just a courtesy heads up.

When Courtney asked me if I knew of anything similar to Northern State, the only band that popped into my head was the Beastie Boys, circa 1985 - 1989.

A trio, all white, from the NYC area, with shrill voices… but I gotta say that’s where the comparison ends; the NS lyrics are a mix of a message, sex, fun and being… hard? Unfortunately, one second everything feels contrived, while the next sometimes feels somewhat real. I guess I’m not feeling them, but then again I’m not a 24 year-old in NYC.

The following Northern State song seems closer to Limp Bizkit. What do you think?

Northern State - Girl for All Seasons (QT Movie, Real and WMP)

Beastie Boys - Hey Ladies

Limp Bizkit - Rollin’

By the way, YouTube is sick. Wait until the day we can post clips from live satellite keyword searches. Blogging is getting amazing.

With thirteen simple words, David Letterman expressed to Bill O’Reilly what the entire blogosphere has been squaking with post after post for the past month or so:

I have the feeling about 60 percent of what you say is crap.

Well, that just about sums it up for me. You know, I tried my best to stay away from this “War on Christmas” meme, but when David Letterman dropped that gem on Bill O’Reilly last night, I had to get a word out on this contrived issue.

To begin with, Bill O’Reilly and John Gibson may be a lot of things, but they’re not idiots; neither of them believe the bullshit they spew for one single minute. Both O’Reilly and Gibson are key, prime-time players in the Fox Broadcasting Channel ecosystem, the modern day network equivalent of a Bill Veeck run ballclub. Not familiar with Veeck’s antics for filling seats back in the day? Check out this quote from ESPN Classic:

Just as he predicted, Bill Veeck, for all his accomplishments, is best remembered as the guy who sent a midget to the plate. And yet, Eddie Gaedel’s lone major league appearance, while the most famous of Veeck’s stunts, may not even have been his most bizarre.

I wonder where this “War on Christmas” meme will rank in the annals of Rupert Murdock’s broadcast network legacy.

See, the problem I have with the coverage that Media Matters, Think Progress and the rest of the well-meaning blogosphere has given this topic is, well, it’s on multiple levels. To begin with, the meme had no legs until the blogosphere chimed in. A large percentage of this country — not “dumb middle-America” mind you — considers this form of opportunistic stupidity a cheap form of simple entertainment. With the costs at the theatre and the ballgame, can you really blame them? I’d be extremely interested in seeing someone create a model to express the amount of free advertising the ’sphere provided The Factor with it’s coverage of this meme.

Remember, conversations don’t always subvert hypocracies, they can also reinforce them.

Last year, while working on the Media Matters redesign, I posted about O’Reilly’s incessant whining regarding MM’s coverage of his “60 percent of crap,” I ended the post with a bit of baiting:

So put on your seatbelt, Billy Boy. If you don’t stop spewing misinformation from a projected position of “news,” your rough ride is going to continue to get worse.

Now, imagine if you can that Fox and O’Reilly actually decided to see how far MM and the ’sphere would go to frame his retarded crusade as a litmus test for the network (with the running premise that all data is good data). Just a month prior to defending Christmas, O’Reilly went on a media blitz, admitting that he was worn out and considering retirement; what if that was the grand bait and switch of all bait and switches?

1. He plays gimpy in the mainstream media, drawing in his “smear sites”
2. He gets us salivating over the prospect that just one more major O’Reilly campaign from the blogosphere will get him to call it quits
3. He launches the War on Christmas meme, and like clockwork, the sphere bites hook, line and sinker

I’m all about framing propaganda for easy digestion by the public, but the War on Christmas? Call me paranoid, but don’t you think it’s possible that Fox and O’Reilly learned their collective lesson when their trademark lawsuit made Al Franken’s book a top seller on Amazon? Just by going after him and dedicating airwave time to the battle, they exposed Franken to a whole new audience (which he greatly appreciated).

All I’m saying is that sometimes a softball isn’t necessarily a softball. Sometimes it’s an iceball packed by evil, elves aiming knee-high.

In either case, thank you Dave!

UPDATE: While trekking across the web today, I found this gem from O’Reilly, where in 2001, just a month after Clinton left office, he claims that Letterman can smell bullshit from a mile away. Ha!

The funny thing about running into the posting wall, is that it almost always comes out of the blue, often at the most random of times. Well, unlike past years, in 2005 I hit the wall at the most appropriate time of the year.

So, in order to get back up on the blogging horse, I’m now going to confront what annoyed me the most over the past week or so by presenting you a better late than never (maybe), hodge-podge list of the best stuff I personally experienced in 2005:

Going freelance
Yeah, I know you can’t buy this or go see it, but it was somewhat of a life-changing moment for me. And while I’ve gone back and forth between full-time and freelance gigs over the years, unless the perfect full-time opportunity to build smart experiences and flex skills with like-minded people arises, this time I just might not go back.

Beginning to blog full-time
While I’m still a bit of a beat-down blogger, I’m pretty amped that I’ve been writing consistently since last April. Because my last job consumed so much of my time and energy, my posts were few and far between in 2004 and without writing, sketching, or being creative on some level for me and me alone, I begin to lose it. Maybe I won’t post as much this year, but when I do, they’ll be accompanied by original creative output (illustrations, music, podcasts, etc.).

Working with Media Matters
Admittedly, before I took the gig to collaborate on the redesign of the Media Matters site, I had never heard of David Brock. So as I researched Brock and Media Matters the week prior to starting the job, I became fascinated with his story, especially how the concept of his book literally became a functional venture (the Media Matters for America non-profit) to clean up the media. Does the released information architecture of the site exactly reflect my vision for a forward-thinking domain? Not quite, but it’s getting there, and man, does our media need a real-time ecosystem of accountability.

Picking up my father’s habit of watching the 11 o’clock news
My father is religous in catching the local 11 o’clock news. Aside from catching the weather for the following day (ever notice how the weather is placed at the end of the newscast?), it provides him daily insight into the local news that he feels he needs. Well, I’m now picking up his tradition by religiously catching The Daily Show. Yes, with the amount of in-depth news I catch on my aggregator, I need Jon Stewart’s take on our twisted planet to close out my day-to-day.

Returning to The Chuck Nevitt Invitational
In 1999, the innaugural CNI season, my handicapped parkin’ squad ended up tying for first place. Thanks to Carver High, an invite was extended to me six years after I released my entire fantasy baseball squad due to the real-life threat of a strike (I thought they’d never get over that one). I’m only a few healed players away from having the trophy living in my den for the next year, so Bonzi, Emeka, hurry up and get healthy!

Becoming active by donating to causes I believe in
Historically, I’ve backed organiations by talking them up and defending their practices within mixed crowds. Similar to how I viewed my ability to become a Big Brother (not responsible enough), I also thought that one needed to be rich to financially support an organization. Well, after giving a few hundred dollars to EFF and TerraPass, I’ve come to realize that one doesn’t have to be wealthy to contribute. This year, I’m looking to expand my philanthropic range, so I guess I’ll just have to kill a few magazine subscriptions and keep my heat down at night.

Really Simple Syndication: For real
I’ve been using feeds for years, but not to the degree I used them this past year. Bloglines has become my primary source of information and news from around the world. Out of my 130+ subscriptions, less than ten would be considered mainstream media, so for the first time in my life my perspective is being primarily influenced by people like me. This is a post all in it’s own.

Moving to Greensboro, North Carolina
As I posted before I left JC to come to Greensboro, I’ve a bunch of mixed feelings. On one hand, going from a long-distance relationship to living with Angela has been great. Just as cool has been seeing my brother much more than once every six months. Greensboro is a laid back town, larger in scale than my one-time home of Williamstown, but similar in vibe; small enough to get away from the hustle and bustle, but large enough to ensure that your girlfriend isn’t one degree away from your doctor, dentist, shrink, yoga instructor, etc. On the other hand, it’s not New York City.

Well, that’s that. This post isn’t chock full of top movies or albums, but hey, those types of posts probably annoy you just as much as they annoy me. If 2005 was my year of change, then I’m thinking that 2006 will be the year of transparency across the board. The internet has far too many dedicated, passionate people and easily accessible, open hooks to not dig into rich domains (such as government) to create open, honest conversations.

Transparency and accountability in 2006.

Last Wednesday, I attended my second Blogsboro MeetUp and had a great time speaking with a bunch of local bloggers:

What’s On Mikey’s Mind Ver. 5.0 - Mikey’s a Marine, husband, father and a really, funny guy (even though I think he watches Bill O’Reilly).

Jay Ovittore’s Blog - We didn’t get much of a chance to talk except for a hello and a goodbye, but I’ve been reading Jay’s blog for the last few months. We’re very like-minded.

Chosen Fast - Cara and I are pretty far apart on the issues of religion, but suprisingly, she’s very open to listening to a different opinion. And she’s hyped to learn about tagging!

Waiting For Vizzini - Any guy that names his blog after a character from The Princess Bride is alright in my book. Juan is well read and has a gift for tying Christian verses with progressive ideals. I’m looking forward to hanging out and talking power, authority, tagging and change in our next MeetUp.

Billy The Blogging Poet - Billy’s the organizer of our MeetUp and the king-blogger of the area–a really nice guy.

Greensboro 101 - Roch is the man with the plan, trying to bring community together through local perspectives. I’m looking forward to our next round of drinks and progressive rants.

Hopefully next time I’ll be able to speak with a broader range of local bloggers. I gotta say, it’s great to live in a neighborhood that has such a strong citizen media base.

Open source developers know all about bounty projects, but for those of you who aren’t in the know and/or are looking to start working with open source, let me get you up to speed.

Bounties are mini-open source projects that individuals or companies will sponsor to get implemented. More often than not, a bounty project consists of fixing a known bug in a platform or product for a fee ranging between $50 and $300. Depending on where you look, you might even be able to find larger, more complex projects, with bounties upwards of $4,500.

Well, starting this past Monday, you don’t have to look all over the place to find a project to work on.

The Participatory Culture Foundation’s latest project, Bounty County, is your one stop shop for open source bounty projects and I’m serving as the volunteer… blogmaster?

Nicholas Reville is the the man with the plan and Matt Brett is the in-house guru, but I’ll be responsible for culling and posting bounties, and hopefully, steering the evolution of this blog into a dynamic interface and down the road, a sustainable market for forward-thinking, open source collaboration between funded resources and roaming talent.

Welcome to the county.

As I tried to explain to Anil, my move over to Wordpress was more of a philosophical move than a practical move. It’s absolutely true that I’m primarily a designer and writer (and not a programmer in the very least), and a simple interface for publishing my thoughts is a priority, but I’ve been feeling a bit too much like a Monday morning quarterback recently. I mean, honestly, how can I speak about the benefits of open source design/development, when I’m adverse to stepping out of my controlled TypePad experience to get my hands just a little bit dirty with Wordpress?

Anil, Ben/Mena Trott and crew over at Six Apart have a range of reputable services that meet the needs of a range of people and organizations; I just happen to be one person who has morphed out of their persona set. So to the fabulous ladies of TypePad support — Carla, Kymberlie, Colleen, Laura — thank you for everything, but I’m moving on to the Wordpress community. Speaking of community, a handful of people helped me get this WordPress blog up and running with relative ease:

• Christine, of the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin fame, helped me pull my .php tweaks together from across the globe, in-between working her garden and prepping for a dinner party.
• Ianiv, of blogginghelp.com, pointed me in the right direction to get my permalinks synched up with my TypePad permalinks. His response time was practically immediate.
• The WordPress Codex community is full of helpful people and an immense library full of support threads.

So, I’m finally using the open source software I’ve been so geeked about. I gotta admit… it’s fun floating about, tweaking code and using a tool by the people, for the people.

UPDATE: Here’s a perfect example of why I’m finished with Typepad. I’m trying to download all of the images from my TypePad account (yeah, I know, I should’ve kept a local folder) and they don’t allow FTP access. This is the response I received from my help ticket to get FTP access:

“I apologize for the confusion. Currently, there isn’t a way to download all of your files at once, you’ll have to access each separately and download that way. We apologize for the inconvenience.

We’ll be looking at adding more options to the File Manager for a future release, so thank you for letting us know you’d find that helpful.”

Providing FTP access to my files is TypePad feature dependent? I’m sorry, but that’s bogus.

If you haven’t noticed, I’m in the midst of transferring my Typepad blog to Wordpress. Last week’s performance issues at Typepad pretty much did it for me.

The only major issues I have left to deal with are my permalinks; I’m trying to get them to match up to my old Typepad permalink structure. In playing around with the .htaccess file, I might have screwed something up, as my permalinks now display an error instead of the actual post.

Bear with me. I’m a designer learning .php over a seven day period.

In the meantime, if you’ve linked here in the past, please update your permalinks if you wouldn’t mind. I’m not feeling too confident that I’ll be able to update the .htaccess file successfully.

I’ll keep you posted.

As social tagging begins to catch on beyond the early adopters, content and commerce domains are opening up their informati