connecting*the*dots

Artist: Public Enemy
Song: Louder Than A Bomb

==========

Professor Griff:
They claim we’re products from the bottom of hell,
‘Cause the black is back and it’s bound to sell.
Picture us coolin’ out on the fourth of July,
And if you heard we were celebrating that’s a world wide lie!
Yo Chuck!
The fed-dead-arals, man, trying to pull a 2-2-6 on ya G,
Yo man,
Show ‘em what you got!
Sh-Show ‘em what you got!

Chuck D:
This style seems wild.
Wait before you treat me like a stepchild!
Let me tell you why they got me on file,
‘Cause I give you what you lack,
Come right and exact,
Our status is the saddest,
So I care where you at, black!
And at home I got a call from Tony Rome,
The FBI was tappin’ my telephone.
I never live alone.
I never walk alone.
My posses always ready, and they’re waitin’ in my zone.
Although I live the life that of a resident,
But I be knowin’ the scheme that of the president,
Tappin’ my phone whose crews abused,
I stand accused of doing harm.
‘Cause I’m louder than a bomb.

C’mon, C’mon.
Louder! Louder. (C’mon, C’mon…C’mon)
Louder! Louder. (C’mon, C’mon…C’mon)
Louder! (C’mon Track Cut)

Professor Griff:
Hey yo D!
Show ‘em you on the block
Show ‘em you on the block, D!

Chuck D:
I am,
A rock hard trooper,
To the bone, the bone, the bone.
Full grown - consider me - stone!
Once again and,
I say it for you to know.
The troop is always ready.
I yell `Geronimo’.
Your CIA, you see I ain’t kiddin’.
Both King and X they got ridda’ both.
A story untold, true, but unknown.
Professor Griff knows…
“Yo, I ain’t milk toast!”
And..
And not the braggin’ or boastin’ and plus,
It ain’t no secret why they’re tappin’ my phone,
although I can’t keep it a secret,
So I decided to kick it, yo.
And yes it weighs a ton, I’ll say it once again,
I’m called the enemy - I’ll never be a friend,
Of those with closed minds, don’t know I’m rapid,
The way that I rap it,
Is makin’ ‘em tap it, yeah.
Never servin ‘em well, ’cause I’m an un-Tom.
It’s no secret at all.
Cause I’m louder than a bomb.

C’mon, C’mon.
Louder! Louder. (C’mon, C’mon…C’mon) (X6)
Louder! (C’mon Track Cut)

Professor Griff:
That’s right boy
The D is on the block, boy
Don’t forget it!
Kick that shit, D!
(It’s Yours)

Chuck D:
Cold holdin’ the load,
The burden breakin’ the mold.
I ain’t lyin’ denyin’, because they’re checkin’ my code.
Am I buggin’ ’cause they’re buggin’ my phone,
for information,
No tellin’ who’s sellin’ out or power buildin’ the nation so…
Joinin’ the set, the point blank target,
Every brothers inside - so least not, you forget, no.
Takin’ the blame is not a waste,
Here taste,
A bit of the song so you can never be wrong.
Just a bit of advice, ’cause we be payin’ the price,
‘Cause every brother mans life is like swingin’ the dice, right?
Here it is, once again
this is,
The brother to brother,
The Terminator, the cutter.
Goin’ on an’ on - leave alone the grown
Get it straight in ‘88, an’ I’ll troop it to demonstrate
The posse always ready,
98 at 98.
My posse come quick,
because my posse got velocity.
Tappin’ my phone,
Never leave me alone,
I’m even lethal when I’m un-armed.
‘Cause I’m louder than a bomb.

C’mon, C’mon.
Louder! Louder. (C’mon, C’mon…C’mon) (X7)

Professor Griff:
Tell ‘em what happened, D!
Prove ‘em, man
Go and prove ‘em, man
That’s right, go and prove ‘em, D
Show ‘em all what’s hot, D
Yeah.
Haha.
Tell ‘em how loud you is, D
They can’t mess with you, D
Yeah!
(All Right)

Chuck D:
‘Cause the D is for dangerous,
You can come and get some of this.
I teach and speak,
So when its spoke, it’s no joke.
The voice of choice,
The place shakes with bass,
Called one for the treble
The rhythm is the rebel
Here’s a funky rhyme that they’re tappin’ on.
Just thinkin’ I’m breakin’ the beats I’m rappin’ on.
CIA, FBI, all they tell us is lies.
When I say it they get alarmed.
‘Cause I’m louder than a bomb!

[…]

Artist: KRS-One
Song: The Truth

==========

(Chorus)
It’s not natural (If it goes against God)
It’s not factual (Her truth is not hard)
It’s not natural (If it goes against God)
It’s not factual (Gimme the truth!)

Listen to the lyric as the negative is shrinkin
It’s shrinkin out your life when you decide to change your thinkin
One of the first things we gotta switch around of course
Is Jesus Christ, and him dying on the cross
You’re looking at the cross, surrounded in it’s mystery
With Jesus on the cross in a, total misery
Now seperate Jesus from the cross so you can see
The truth about the cross, and the cross’s history
The cross was created by the Roman government
It’s only purpose and use, is cap-i-tal punishment
But Jesus Christ, was all about the revolution
While the cross was used as Jesus Christ’s execution
See what if Jesus Christ, was hung upon a tree
Upon every church wall, that’s exactly what you’d see
If Jesus Christ, was shot in the head with no respect
We’d all have little gold guns around our neck
If Jesus Christ was killed in electic chair, now get it
You’d be knealing to the electric chair with Jesus, still in it
You gaze upon the cross, and you see the execution
You yell stop the violence but the cross you’re still using

(Chorus)
It’s not natural (If it goes against God)
It’s not factual (Her truth is not hard)
It’s not natural (If it goes against God)
It’s not factual (Gimme the truth!)

So I say listen, listen, open up your third eye vision
God is not down with religion
Religion they be sellin it, listen up, God is intelligent
Reading of the bible is irrelevant
You gotta look within yourself, not a scripture
KRS-One comes to rearrange the God picture
If you sit and believe, you can acheive
If you sit and accept, you don’t know, what’s correct
or incorrect, take for instance Adam and Eve
The first two people on the planet, or so you believe
Their first time in heaven kids they had, Cain and Abel
Huh, now let me show you why the story’s unstable
According to the story, according to what you believe
There was only Cain, Abel, Adam, and Eve
on the whole planet, now use your intellect
and tell me, what did Cain and Abel do for sex?
Upon the whole planet there was not another
Could it be for sex, heh, they were looking at each other?
Hold up! I thought the church wasn’t into that
But wait, still yet, there is another fact
How did the world get populated?
Now tell me if I’m wrong, but obviously Eve had it goin on
Think for a minute, I know it gets notorious
But yo G, check out the chorus

(Chorus)
It’s not natural (If it goes against God)
It’s not factual (Her truth is not hard)
It’s not natural (If it goes against God)
It’s not factual (Gimme the truth!)

As social tagging begins to catch on beyond the early adopters, content and commerce domains are opening up their information architectures to empower their consumers to tag, creating exponentially greater degrees of faceted, semantic relationships between their information objects.

Amazon is already in the lead to extend this open paradigm into the commerce space with object tagging and Mechanical Turk (a program which could seriously disrupt peasant-class wage pay around the world). Amazon’s past innovation isn’t a guarantee for future success, but their recent moves prove to be a good sign.

How Social Tagging Works

Folksonomies change the dynamics of generating useful index pages by centralizing human perspectives expressed through single or compound descriptive terms into navigable indexes. It’s the equivalent of a dynamic, open-ended thesaurus, eliminating the need to manage the static creation of valued relationships, as co-occurance stitches together threads of information like newly created and evolving synapses in the brain.

The usefulness of these visible, semantic relationships to the person searching for specific content or products is quite possibly the most sticky form of extended discovery not generated through database algorithms.

I mean, forget dropping out of my mental model to browse topical navigation or stopping to search for an explicit term or phrase; when I engage with a domain such as flickr or del.icio.us, my desire to stay within the domain is increased simply because the language I use to define my world through tagging simultaneously allows me to peer into the world of like-minded folk (ergo: folksonomies).

Tagging creates community through the overlap of perspective.

While this extends conversation, it can also impact the sales potential of commerce sites by adding another layer to collaborative filtering, which Amazon has already acknowledged through their advancements in tagging. Now, extend this concept further into the realm of consumer contributions with industry and one can envision the incentive for business to slightly open their gated approach of mass manufacturing in this age of personalization, allowing customers to participate in defining what a company produces by simply tagging their existing objects.

• Tagging builds community
• Tagging increases the findability
• Tagging can give customers a transparent stake in the process of creating services/products/content

Back To The Interface

Try thinking about tagging interfaces on a few distinct levels:

• Interfaces which display common tags from across a particular domain need to be designed to maximize their semantic relationships.
• Object-level interfaces need to be re-crafted to both accommodate the display of previously applied personal tags and tags applied by the community.
• Management screens, which can give ownership of personally applied tags to the people that spend their time generating them, need to be compiled from contributing domains across the web for individuals to manage and, potentially, collect residual dividends related to sales generated from exposed tags.

I recently stumbled across an interesting site that leverages the API of del.icio.us tags. Kevan Davis created extisp.icio.us to scrape user tags and visually represent them using only words or images:

My good friend, DeWitt Clinton, created Delancy, which leverages the open nature of del.icio.us, providing an enhancement with the ability to manage tagged objects by personal click-through popularity:

Kevan’s enhancement focuses on re-presenting information in a way that presents our constantly evolving association with the world outside, while DeWitt’s enhancement focuses on adding feature value, assisting us to quickly find our most used bookmarks.

This type of innovative, open source development reflects the same type of creative energy that non-developers posses — people that are becoming hooked on tagging, hooked on participation.

Sharing Interfaces, Creating A Usable Web 2.0

Now that Silicon Valley is reaping the rewards of innovative open source development—observing hundreds of prototypes across numerous types of applications—how long will it be until these companies begin to act in a similar fashion? Yes, I’m talking about open collaboration.

TypePad enables me to tag my posts by assigning categories, but the management screen is a simple list, one that doesn’t allow me to easily create more manageable sub-categories (I’d probably group my tags by proper names, places, titles, descriptors, etc.). Mena, it’s becoming painful for me to manage my 200+ tags; how about TypePad teaming up with del.icio.us to use their management screen?

del.icio.us does many thing well, including their flexible interface for managing tags by give user created groups of tags nicknames. So simple, but so powerful. Why aren’t domains like TypePad, flickr, Flock, etc. bartering with del.icio.us to leverage this successful interface—one that thousands of early adopters are already using and loving — while providing their own best practice proprietary interfaces or code in return?

This level of collaboration amongst businesses is an example of what would allow companies to focus on developing more focused innovation, enhancing development cycles, reducing resource allocation and most importantly, providing best practice consistency across applications where possible. Toyota recently leased the technology of its Hybrid engines to Ford and other automakers.

How much quicker would a usable and useful Web 2.0 network be created if companies operated in such a manner?

The collective intelligence of humanity seems to be amped to contribute. Are we ready for them?

I tag like a 15 year-old kid in the South Bronx with a box full of Krylons and a yard full of freshly sandblasted cars.

I tag like I just got jumped by a handful of punks who made the mistake of letting me follow them to their trailer park homes adorned with freshly cleaned aluminum siding.

I tag like I get told who I am, what I’m supposed to believe and how I’m supposed to act on a daily basis.

I go all city, hoping that one day, the vehicles I’ve touched get stitched together to form a complete sentence.

I tag because I saw you leave your mark and it was dope.

I tag because I know how to freeze, watch TV and (kinda) avoid the kissing bugs.

I tag because the words I drop in time will find a way to form a cohesive rhyme.

I tag because the world may be getting smaller, but it’s damn sure not coming together.

I tag your name, your spot, your position, your mood, your frame of mind when it’s too hard for you to see it for yourself.

I tag the expected terms of modern constructs.

I tag the post-modern undercurrents of miscellaneous descriptors.

I tag my tags so that when structure is forged out of chaos, you’ll know how to find me.

I tag so that it’s me you won’t be looking for.

When I tag, I’m regurgitating the meal I’ve caught for the chicks in my roost.

When I tag, I feel one with the universe of the collective unconscious.

When I tag, I can see the pillars of control quaking in their foundation.

When I tag, I experience therefore I understand.

When we tag, anything is possible.

————

Tag! We’re It! Part II
Tag! We’re It!

For all of the advances our world has made over the past 200 years — from the industrial revolution to the digital revolution — human beings still can’t seem to work together within a world stitched together by sovereign nations… unless there’s a dollar figure attached to the cause.

The reality is that the world is stitched together by corporations — legal representations of people.

Our government, depending on its leadership at any given time, swings from balancing business and human interests while creating a positive difference in the world to leaning hard on the side of business, capitalism and next-day profits — running full stream ahead with Gordon Gecko’s “Greed is good” philosophy.

Because in our society, public officials — from a local mayor to the President — can jockey back and forth between the public and private sectors, corruption has a chance to take hold and dictate policy decisions that affect the entire globe.

After all, we are the super-power of the world; as we cough, the rest of the world sneezes.

State government and congressional representation are also complicit in the lobbyist equation, while the fourth estate — the media — is complicit simply by not developing their presentation format to the degree necessary for reporting the transparent details of our political process.

The American government is the largest corporate business on the planet; in essence, an All-Star team of capitalist legislators, negotiators, lawyers and management. It is this system that all but guarantees that politics remain politics as usual.

This past week, former President Bill Clinton led the inaugural meeting of The Clinton Global Initiative. From what I’ve read, Clinton is determined to spend the remainder of his life in an attempt to band together with global citizens to circumvent sovereign politics and this insipid, self-serving culture we’ve developed, to make positive and necessary changes in how the world functions to support the sustainable future of all mankind.

This is visionary leadership at work.

According to DeWayne Wickham:

“The former president walked about the stage for more than an hour speaking without the aid of notes about the things that should be done to wipe out poverty, end religious conflicts, control climate change and encourage good governance.”

No notes? Heartfelt, passionate vision? I almost forgot how Presidential it is to speak from the heart.

While Clinton is raising cash and cooperative support from around the world, the Internet industry is about to move past the first year of its re-dedication in building the Semantic Web, by developing Web 2.0, both philosophically and literally.

Sometime soon, the odds are that these two disparate, yet symbiotic worlds are going to collide, and when they do, the effect will change how we communicate, network, inform ourselves and make decisions in a global manner.

Peter Merholz has been on a philosophical bend regarding the continued development of Web 2.0 and the role of business for a few months now, and I’m pretty much in agreement with most of his assertions.

Changing a large, old school domain’s approach to interactive product development — specifically, in the Web 2.0 arena — doesn’t occur solely through the availability of smart engineers armed with APIs, feeds and Ajax alone. Unless the business has evolved its underlying approach and culture to facilitate this paradigm shift, the resulting efforts will be futile, or to quote Peter, “they’ll fuck it up.”

The powers that be must believe in and back the philosophy behind the technology.

So when it comes to business — I mean straight up, hardcore, numbers driven business — philosophy better equate with an explicit road-map to profit, otherwise we’re not talking business, we’re talking charity. More succinctly put, corporations won’t structure their annual and long-term corporate initiatives around Web 2.0 “open” principles and the investment in the underlying technology if they don’t explicitly understand how and why it will positively affect both their brand position in the market and the bottom line — both now and into the foreseeable future.

Now, I don’t hold a MBA from Wharton, so my ability to speak to the nuances of business is somewhat limited, but I did have the opportunity to spend the last three-years of my life within the walls of a conservative corporation. During my time there, it was extremely difficult to espouse any degree of change to their approach to design, development and serving their clients without raising agenda sniffing eyebrows — even when only attempting to sell the basic concept of listening to your own users when designing user experiences.

That concept alone took years to gain traction.

So while change within the Earth’s environment is as natural as a sunrise, within traditional businesses the mechanisms that foster change often signifies a threat to both the corporate strategy and the management team alike. One cannot move into traditional areas of business looking to flip long standing product development paradigms and revenue models overnight.

A recent Economist article ("Yahoo’s personality crisis") suggests that there’s a schism developing in the Yahoo! strategic and brand position, while Google is poised to sprint light years ahead. Peter’s latest post," Yahoo!: Walled Garden or Commons," tacks onto that perspective, suggesting that Yahoo!’s internal tugging between an open and closed  web philosophy, and their imminent plans to open a Hollywood office, could become a mission critical issue if not paid proper attention. The Economist even went as far as comparing present day Yahoo! to AOL from back in the days of the first web revolution.

AOL?

If we were talking about Bob Davis and Lycos, I’d have to agree, but we’re talking about Yahoo!, a company that has always been forward thinking, willing to tackle any attribute of traditional media and turn it on it’s head to make it useful on-line. With their soon-to-be-expansion into the mainstream media bastion of Hollywood, Yahoo!, for better or for worse, continues to operate as a change agent in the information age.

Simultaneous focus on open and closed aspects of the web is a solid business approach

Yahoo! has been at this web thing for more than 154 years now (posthumous math courtesy of Dick Sabot). In that time they’ve established a huge member base around the world, while designing a majority of their domain to be accessible to non-members with zero usage fees. A person can use most of Yahoo! without ever spending a dime until coming across a service with direct, fee-based competition already in the market. This holistic business model may seem passe by today’s standards, but that’s only because Yahoo! set the benchmark years ago; they were the early adopters of such an open business philosophy on the web.

This approach has provided Yahoo! with the means to both create and promote very precise revenue streams, leveraging the continuously growing reach of their membership and platform. Simultaneously, their focus on a variety of forward thinking, open tactical initiatives, such as flickr, 360, News, Music, etc. continues to move their domain forward with the best practices of the medium.

To the naked eye, this overarching strategy hints to be a metaphorical form of iterative change management, but not on the project or Yahoo! domain level, though; it’s more like change management for entering untapped external markets and media industries. In other words, Yahoo! seems to make closed moves (i.e. extending its domain by dealing with old school industries) in order to tap and evolve an established sector into a more open and web-centric format.

So does that make cents, compared to Google’s approach? Let’s see…

Google is also made-up of a brilliant group of people, creating forward-thinking user interfaces and search retrieval algorithms, but where Google’s daily operations differ from Yahoo! is their position in the market.

Their underlying funding relies almost solely on revenue established from their AdSense program and by floating company shares into a market that has provided a whopping market evaluation, based primarily on growth potential. So who really has the edge to last, riding through and continue contributing to the infrastructure of Web 2.0?

They both do.

Yahoo! has a consistent, upwardly moving market cap SMA since the bubble burst, whereas Google is on a meteoric rise post-dotcom crash. How much do you think the assertions of this chart tie directly into the two company’s strategic approaches to extending market reach? What about their commitment to open forms of Web 2.0 development? To the non-economist (that would be me) it would seem that each company has it’s own DNA to deal with and make decisions accordingly.

• Yahoo! took its bruises, but made it through the bust and learned their business lessons
• Google’s people felt the crash, but missed it all together as a company with a bottom line and shareholder’s interests to protect, so they’re more aggressive
• Yahoo! has more than a decades worth of experience, so they operate like a surgeon
• Google swings wildly at product opportunities with brilliant, broad strokes and precise algorithms to quickly iterate change

Basically, there’s room for multiple approaches to paving and extending Web 2.0.

Crafting an interactive world, one industry at a time

Take a moment to think about your life before Yahoo! took off. Ten years ago, the average American received their daily news through a newspaper and/or a TV broadcast. Due to Yahoo!’s revolutionary efforts to establish News aggregation for the public, I can barely remember the last time I read the newspaper during the week. Yahoo! forever altered that paradigm, shifting me and countless others in front of their screen for a news upload each morning.

Since Yahoo! News launched, Google raised the bar by expanding indexed sources to include international and local perspectives, while recent feed services like Rojo have cropped up, pushing the information boundaries into gourmet concept feeds.

Yahoo! set all of this in motion and continues to play a major role in how a large number of people (members or not) receive a variety of news items at their fingertips. By iterating the open, tactical aspects of their holistic user experience (i.e. feed widgets, top mailed articles, reviews of articles, etc.) while adding content (i.e. specific opinion blogs such as the HuffingtonPost.com), Yahoo! innovates by keeping one foot in the tactical realm of Web 2.0, with the other firmly planted in the strategic realm of the business philosophy.

It takes two feet to walk the walk.

As DeWitt Clinton has recognized, Web 2.0 is also about working together to reach a common goal across company lines. Forget the feeds and the tagging and the asynchronous display of data; collaboration between progressively run web firms is the biggest open paradigm shift one can imagine. Could this concept of collaboration and strategic balance be something that Yahoo! — a former Google-type firm which did experience the market correction of all market corrections in the bust of 2001 — has mandated itself to follow? Maybe it’s not schizophrenic to play both sides of the Web 2.0 fence; maybe it’s a solid business model.

With their historical record of successful brand extension — creating and/or acquiring useful, engaging experiences to change actual industries (i.e. News, Finance, Jobs, etc.) — I wouldn’t bet against Yahoo! in convincing Hollywood, through either the front or backdoor, to operate in a fashion that is more open than not.

Will the geek-to-media employee ratio be higher in the Valley than in Santa Monica? Sure. When in Rome, hire Romans, but so what? 154 years of Internet experience isn’t going to be thrown out the window because a handful of media executives are brought on-board. Will the output of this venture be as revolutionary as Yahoo! News or Finance? That’s left to be seen, but with Yahoo!’s track record, why be pessimistic?

Yahoo! espouses the tactical and philosophical pillars of Web 2.0, yet also understands business and how to engage in change. They’re no AOL.

UPDATE: AOL bought Weblogs, Inc. Let’s see how long it takes them to assert full control.

A few months back, I finally stepped out of my dead bolted existence within Ameritrade and began to digest the current state of this Web 2.0 explosion, and as soon as I did, the Semantic Web seemed so much closer to fruition than it did just a few years prior.

Much of the renewed push and entrepreneurial spirit that has driven this industry-wide rebirth seems to have been driven simply by our economic recovery from the dot-com crash. On the surface, that answer is sufficient, but something deeper is at at play. So, with my newly created free-time, I headed down a 2.0 rabbit hole to take me on a journey for clarity.

What I’ve come to realize isn’t anything particularly shocking (unless you’ve been a corporate slave for the past three years).

We’re living in tumultuous times. The air we breathe is being compromised more and more every day. Poverty around the world is increasing exponentially. Our country is knee deep in another Vietnam, another occupation, another struggle for gaining natural resources at any cost. People are becoming polarized by important and moral, personal and social issues, seemingly on a daily basis. All of this is occurring during the reign of an administration that has even the staunchest of conservatives questioning whether we, the people, are living within the midst of a dictatorial democracy, rather than a thriving Republic, built on the principles of political discourse, government checks and balances, fiscal responsibility, the separation of church and state and the power of the individual voter.

So where does this leave us as a people?

Personally speaking, I’ve decided to refocus my effort to publish my views, opinions, perspectives, experiences, etc., in an effort to make even the slightest dent in the discourse surrounding our roles as American citizens.

What motivates me? Pick your poison: the War on Terror; the Rove/Plame/Wilson scandal; the Bolton push-through appointment; the Cindy Sheehan vigil. It seems that every day a new flow of bullshit only fuels the righteous indignation I’ve come to hold regarding this administration.

Is it even possible to imagine a more visceral description of an Aristocracy at play?

For me, the complete disregard of the intelligence and voice of the American citizen begins to explain the groundswell of blogging that has occurred over the past four years, specifically the political blogs and mainstream media watchdog sites.

Sure, the potential for capital gains plays a large role in the motivation to advance technology or any other industry. The web, though, is a bit different due to it’s low cost of entry, so I believe that moral conviction plays a role in both driving the evolution of technology and the passion to leverage it to it’s fullest degree.

So what’s the connection between geo-political events, blogging and the tactical fervor of Web 2.0? (social bookmarking, tagging, open source, open content, etc.)

In a nutshell: everything.

Without a true social democracy in the real, we’ve evolved to create one on-line — where boundaries can be broken down, hierarchies can be dissolved, control can be minimized, etc.

I blog in order to get my voice out into the ether of this new social construct; I tag my blog posts to provide context and semantic relationships on numerous levels, yet with a similar purpose:

1. On the base object level to provide a succinct description of how I perceive this content from a conceptual perspective, perhaps creating a) a greater connection with the reader on a discernible level and b) connections on associative & relational levels with other objects (within my domain and elsewhere)
2. On the categorization level to establish context within a particularly defined category or across a faceted classification scheme. If I were an actual brand, this would be how I’d ensure my position was reflected within my editorial construct and navigation scheme.
3. On the retrievable object level to allow for more avenues of findability (four, well-thought descriptive tags exponentially increase the odds of object retrieval rather than none or even one, either in straight queries or in contextual presentation on the base object level)

These are tactical strategies in the information revolution.

The same principles apply to tagging even more granular object such as photographs, video and sound files, as well as the macro-level social bookmarking of URLs. The effort, I believe, is based on the desire of individual voices to be heard amidst the shelling of the mainstream media. While technically speaking, Web 2.0 is about the creation of richly defined object models and attributes — the more good data we entrench within our objects (be it content, files or URLs themselves), the better the chance for a semantic web experience — the movement behind it is much more compelling, much more philosophical in nature.

After leaving Ameritrade in April, I spent a month digesting Noam Chomsky’s Understanding Power, which introduced me to the specifics of his propaganda model thesis, which I fully digested by watching the documentary Manufacturing Consent. Recently, Dave Sifry (CEO, Technorati) posted a graph on the Technorati Blog displaying the impact that blogs are making within the once dominated realm of entrenched, funded, mainstream media.

I’m only guessing that if Chomsky has studied the progression of the web, he’s smiling up in Cambridge right about now.

The legitimization of the individual (creative and political) perspective is being sustained in the 21st century by the conviction of the blogosphere, passionate focus on the possibilities of 2.0 revenue models and domains, such as Technorati, taking a leadership position. The concept of social dialog, networking and organization and the elemental foundation of capitalism are beginning to shift in exciting ways.

Imagine a near future where:

• Individual perspectives can be made more readily sustainable through a common revenue model, reversing the big money/power structure of publication and media saturation? How would that impact the politics of our nation? Our wage labor practices?
• Algorithms and interfaces allow for rich, precise retrievals of topical queries, with just as precisely retrieved contextual objects presented within a usable format, based on better clustering techniques and taking richer and more valuable attributes into account? How would this impact the way we learn and connect to one another?
• Information domains allow topically defined objects to be rolled up into navigable concepts by users (through customization) instead of predefined categories by information architects? How could this seamlessly raise the bar for common folk in their efforts to research online? To manage information across numerous domains?
• Mainstream media articles and blog posts are presented on the same level (query or article), ensuring checks and balances of mis/disinformation, without a partisan bias? How important is it for check and balances to be rooted within the last bastion of traditional governmental checks and balances — the media?

And the great thing is that we’re not too far away from this revolutionary existence.

Blogs are beginning to bridge the social and communication gaps between nations. My peers are thinking differently when developing this medium, even in traditional business development circumstances. The tactical approach to producing, managing, sharing, finding and using information objects — defined from the bottom up — is finally getting it’s due.

Yes, these are tumultuous times, but they’re exciting as well.

purpose to the point of the matter exists.
the fact that remains is at the top of the list.
which often changes daily,
but somewhat less than before…
our slutting days are over now that we’ve moved up to whore-
ing direct
me to the system’s ways…
direct me to the system’s grays…
expose the in-between wrinkles which make the system pay…
my faux mo fro’ stylin’ has me on a different wave-
length of focus can sprout an early grave-
yard markers can only count so much-
more can be known through a simple touch…
a beat (or two)
a drop (or three)
mirrors in my pupils reflect eternally.

a different type of code.
a bass line to corrode.
the old…
the new…
the positive…
the shrewd…

a la mode.

the context of the game,
acted out in no ones name…
except hours,
spent on the dimes,
exposing the crimes,
a sign of the times,
puffs worth times nine;
algebra’s property leads to mine:

in capitalism, a man’s value is equal to the amount he produces.
yet, production value has been reduced to service (inconclusive…)
a service based economy is ripe for leadership betrayals.
furthering the agenda of an administration which derails:
the creative life juices.
the spirit of the common man.
the community in which he lives.
the extent to which he lends a hand.
all planned…
all plotted…
all groomed…
all hatched…
the test is open book!
the formula is up on the board!
the calculators have been made available!
it’s time to hit a chord:

the bloodsuckers "leverage."
the meek "turn the other cheek."
a third party exists.
exposed for a peek…

a BOO!

A few years ago I ranted about my fear of a society where the media is absolutely controlled by corporate interests.

Now, my head wasn’t in the sand. I obviously realized that we were already living in a particular version of such a world, as money and power drives practically everything in this country. I was just a little concerned with the audacity of the FCC to even consider the type of deregulation it ended up approving. Sure, it happens every day; legislation lobbyed for by people in power turns around to increase the empowerment of those same people. I mean, this is how the free market works. But this legislation goes beyond just making money for the upper class.

If you view media reach as ephemeral noise in the ether, then the concerns of this post won’t bother you. Feel free to hop over to Amazon and consume away.

The fact is that Americans are glued to the tube and this type of conglomerate legislation — spanning all media (television, print, radio and the internet) — has now allowed for a greater possiblity to create a lasting, singular, corporate perspective in the psychology of the moment and beyond. Consume messaging has been given even more proximity to our children’s brains.

They Live shades are looking pretty good right about now.

So without the prospects of landing a pair of magic sunglasses, what exactly can be done to defend ourselves from this destructive approach to creating a consumer culture at all costs? As a contributor to public discourse, I’ve always believed that the ‘net (in 1997), and specifically, blogs (over the last five years) were a key development in the fight to present a perspective to battle corporate or government disinformation. Why?

• With blogging, there’s no managing editor around with advertising pressures to censor (or generate) a particular perspective. (Well, that is until the corporate structure tries to jack the nomenclature of blogging to dilute it’s effectiveness outside the reach of capitalism)
• Blogs are also a time permitting endeavor; you can publish many times a day or once a year. There isn’t a revenue figure to drive towards, which allows for individual perspectives to be expressed at will

This break from the days of publishing via the standard print revenue generation model is something akin to the advent of the printing press, yet with the merchant nation-state taking the place of the previously empowered Church. Okay, maybe that’s a little pre-mature, but the possibilities are there. And what are the possibilities?

Over the past few years, the blogging revolution has become more and more accessible and mainstream with the advent of RSS and aggregate readers. With Yahoo! adding access to RSS feeds to their My Yahoo! content modules, blogs are one step closer to being mainstream. But this last step is a big one, steeped in moral conviction… a belief in the common man. Why?

Until blogs are automatically indexed as viable, alternative feeds when running, say, a news query at Google or Yahoo!, they are going to, at best, sit on the periphery of the conscious of the world’s inhabitants. The average person does not have the time, nor the patience, to sift through the pedagogy of managing RSS. Bookmarks are about as much as they can handle. Blogs do return in general search queries, but this “general return only” pre-supposes a value level to the quality of the information being retrieved. You know, a perspective or opinion or even investigative research presented by a blogger has less value than a feed from the New York Times, The Washington Post, etc.

That’s why this information retrieval concept would have to be one generated out of moral conviction. By keeping news sources limited strictly to incorporated, staffed and vested (in the economic structure of society) newspapers, a Google (or any other news search engine) is basically saying that only these sources can report and editorialize news. Even though Google has gone a long way in presenting perspectives from small and foreign sources, providing the chance opportunity for conflicting perspective, it’s still not enough.

It seems to me that with a search capability, news aggregator and a blogging tool, Google and Yahoo! are best poised to create convergence between the “professional” news organizations and blogging communities, within the boundaries of their individual interfaces. How accessible blogs become in the presentation, will be a litmus test of their commitment to providing contextual channels within the information age, while creating usable interfaces for digesting a world of information overload and disinformation.

It’s completely doable and their historical commitment to data mining and information presentation doesn’t seem to indicate that they’ll shy away from heading in this direction. Well, as long as blogs don’t impact their institutional investors or advertisers in a negative light, that is.

the time is here
yes, now is the time
to make water out of wine
like the real extracted from rhyme
the haves and the have mores
ceilings are their floors
while working on their secret knock
they straight up kick down doors
you see, terror is pushed nightly
to establish our core fear
an appetite for the here
and now just doesn’t matter
we’re all well fed consumers and their pockets keep getting fatter
what, you think shit is gonna change
with a dollar?
or a dream?
wipe out your eyes
unplug your ears
wake up to the screams
from indochina death teams
from nicaraguan insurgent regimes
from vietnamese bloodstreams
from terrorist state schemes
power is power
green is green
you see?
deeper than a lost soul
you find the blue collar toll
trained to corrale the buck
to scream "what the fuck!?"
when capitalism capitalizes on fear
giving proud men deaf ears
you hear?
this society makes american sheiks
who pro-actively partake in high-risk stakes
to retire by 45
no matter who wakes up or not…
a shot to the head
a timely blood clot

my feet stand firm on the floor
as they pass by in multiple takes
the tension in my body relaxes
refusing to bite on the head fakes
shots whiz by my ears and eyes
my palms face upwards to the roof
slow motion moves and prefabricated lies
so just where exactly is the proof?
in the pudding
in the whispers
in the minds
in the wind
the vinyl is simply scratched
cross-faded
knowing
jaded
hatched…
a 45 revolution
a soon to be released patch

what is that
that is not craft?
the time it takes to shake and bake?
the time spent coughing up a good laugh?
the time it takes to find a large enough room?
room for one?
room for all?
the time it takes to see June in December?
the time it takes to March to a Fall?

leaves drift down every year
dried up and dead in just a few
all eyes land in the gutter
while buds refresh anew
no, you don’t need an MD to bring back
your man from the edge
your jen from her pitt
here’s my option to hedge:

drama is just drama
except when it hits off in the street

you feel me?
’cause you do steel me
from passing the solid yellow line
from counting down the time
for when my tv guide is on hold
for when the story has been told
the knowledge of self-determination
the common source of a nation
the feet in the shoes when a toll has been hiked
"the ones i like to wear when i rock the mic"

So I ended up watching PBS Frontline last night about the Saddam/Iraqi crisis going back 25 years.

Either our government is perpetually run by a bunch of short-sighted morons or we’ve always had long-term vision for conflict and strife. I really don’t know which one is more frightening, but at least one is the truth.

The CIA gave Saddam power. Our tax dollars went to overthrowing the previous Iraqi government (which in the process led to close to 1,000 executions by Sadaam on coming to power) and handing the reigns of a strategically important country in the Middle East to a wanna be dictator, who frequently and vociferously declared that he longed to be the “Sword of the East” to destroy the West.

Now please answer this question for me: Were the men running this nation at the time so stupid to think that this wouldn’t come back to haunt us? OR were they so obsessed with overthrowing Iran that putting a maniac like Saddam in office was just an afterthought as long as he could do the job? That seems to be the standard operating procedure for our government; insert dictator in land a to accomplish disputable goal b so our hands don’t smell like c.

I went to art school, but hell, even I took Algebra. If a=b and b=c then a=c. Karma is fuzzy math, our actions are not.

So now we swoop in to “defend the safety of Americans.” Oh yeah, we also want to end an era of human suffering in Iraq. I guess it only took us 12 years to realize that there were human beings there, and not just brown people. I mention that because after we kicked the shit out of Sadaam the first time around in Desert Storm, we urged the Iraqi people to overthrow the government… from the decks of our aircraft carriers.

And what happened when the people actually rose up to take back their country? General Stormin’ Norman gave the Iraqi’s permission to fly armed helicopters in the just established “no-fly zone,” leading to the systematic killing of the resistance movement.

All the while the Iraqi people are pleading for us to come in and finish the job of taking out Saddam, Colin, Daddy Bush and the rest of the world sat back in containment mode.

Look, I’m not against removing Saddam, but this country has made so many blunders in Iraq since the 70’s, I’m just discusted how we’re attempting to storm in there and sweep the proverbial dirt under the proverbial rug.

Sadaam is our Frankenstein. Where’s the accountability?