connecting*the*dots

(originally uploaded by noonespillow)

By Jason Lefkowitz, in a comment thread on Joho the Blog:

Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution says:

“The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative…”

One Congressman for every 30,000 citizens was the rule until the early 1900s, when Congress simply fixed the size of the House at 435 members. I’m no lawyer, but I’m not sure how they could square that with the language of Article I; anyway, that’s been the rule ever since.

The result is that today each Congressman represents roughly 700,000 people — an order of magnitude more than the Founders intended them to. The result is that House campaigns are just as media — and image — driven as campaigns for greater offices, which is a shame.

An interesting thought experiment: if we went back to the Article I rules, we’d have something like 10,000 House members today. How would the operations of government have to be modified to accommodate them? A Virtual Congress? Regional Congresses?

What’s interesting to note is the actual intent of this detail in Article 1, Section 2:

The total number of Representatives is set by statute, not in the Constitution. The detail concerning 30,000 means that the ratio would never be lower than 1:30,000 (like 1:20,000). This was done to prevent the House from getting too large and to prevent larger states from having an overwhelming number of representatives. The average ratio today is about 1:640,000.

So, legally speaking, we’re actually guarding the concerns of our forefathers with such numbers — they wanted a decent sized House in order for business to get accomplished.

But our forefathers couldn’t have imagined the information age.

I left a comment in the thread that might sound radical, but I think it would be a great way to up the degree of transparent discourse in government.

What do you think?

Artist: Momus
Song: The Age Of Information

==========

This is a public service announcement

Ladies and gentlemen, we are now entering
The age of information
It’s perfectly safe
If we all take a few basic precautions
May I make some observations?

Axiom 1 for the world we’ve begun:

Your reputation used to depend on
What you concealed
Now it depends on what you reveal

The age of secretive mandarins who creep on heels of tact is dead:
We are all players now in the great game of fact instead
So since you can’t keep your cards to your chest
I’d suggest you think a few moves ahead
As one does when playing a game of chess

Axiom 2 to make the world new:

Paranoia’s simply a word for seeing things as they are
Act as you wish to be seen to act
Or leave for some other star

Somebody is prying through your files, probably
Somebody’s hand is in your tin of Netscape magic cookies
But relax: if you’re an interesting person
Morally good in your acts
You have nothing to fear from facts

Axiom 3 for transparency:

In the age of information the only way to hide facts
Is with interpretations, there is no way to stop the free exchange
Of idle speculations

In the days before communication privacy meant staying at home
Sitting in the dark with the curtains shut unsure whether to answer the phone
But these are different times, now the bottom line
Is that everyone should prepare to be known
Most of your friends will still like you fine

X said to Y what A said to B
B wrote an E-mail and sent it to me
I showed C and C wrote to A:
Flaming world war three

Cut, paste, forward, copy
CC, go with the flow
Our ambition should be to love what we finally know
Or, if it proves unloveable, simply to go

Axiom 4 for this world I adore:

Our loyalties should shift in view
According to what we know
And who we are speaking to

Once I was loyal to you, and prepared to be against information
Now I am loyal to information, maybe I’m disloyal to you
My loyalty becomes more complex and cubist with every new fact I learn
It depends who I’m speaking to
And who they speak to in turn

Axiom 5 for information workers who wish to stay alive:

Supply, never withhold, the information requested
With total disregard for interests
Personal and vested

Chinese whispers was an analogue game
Where the signal degraded between brain and brain
Digital whispers is the same in reverse
The word we spread gets better, not worse
Better, not worse

X said to Y what A said to B
B wrote an E-mail and sent it to me
I showed C and C wrote to A:
Flaming world war three

Cut, paste, forward, copy
CC, go with the flow
Our ambition should be to love what we finally know
Or, if it proves unloveable, simply to go

(from courtney)

Now we’re talking. A couple hundred more good moves and I’ll start to cut President Bush some slack.

(I’m not holding my breath)

(illustration by Serifcan Özcan)

Good Magazine
Political NASCAR
by Morgan Clendaniel

In the 2006 midterms, Senators Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Rick Santorum (R-PA), both running for re-election, have raised the most money of any candidate in their respective parties. Here are the NASCAR-style uniforms they would wear if companies were proud of their political donations, and if running for senate required a flame-retardant suit.

HILLARY CLINTON
Hillary Clinton’s top contributions by sector
Finance, Insurance, Real Estate $4,650,601
Lawyers & Lobbyists $3,533,740
Other $3,258,584
Miscellaneous Business $2,332,809
Communications/Electronics $1,808,119
Health $1,122,341
Construction $521,796
Ideology/Single-Issue $432,270
Labor $340,545
Agribusiness $211,565
Energy/Natural Resource $206,462
Transportation $118,210
Defense $86,050

TOTAL (as of June 30th): $33,180,949

RICK SANTORUM
Rick Santorum’s top contributors by sector
Finance, Insurance, Real Estate $2,812,841
Miscellaneous Business $1,373,537
Lawyers & Lobbyists $1,357,125
Health $1,258,021
Other $1,243,951
Construction $666,015
Energy/Natural Resource $651,541
Ideology/Single-Issue $563,073
Communications/Electronics $474,990
Agribusiness $399,237
Transportation $299,574
Defense $76,000
Labor $56,706

TOTAL (as of June 30th): $17,252,473

Like many people, I often think about the chasm in the relationship between our state representatives and us, the constituents; how in so many cases, our elected representatives tend to not represent the desires of the people that put them in office, instead succumbing to the efforts of lobbyists and special interest groups.

While the concept of wearing logos on campaign duds is probably a bit too extreme for our culture, someone really needs to build a web site that displays such contributions and relationships in an easy to digest manner, across numerous data slices. I assume that the information is already available to the public; the big question is whether or not it’s being gathered, managed and distributed in the most open formats available.

I mean, can I get an RSS feed of newly submitted documentation of Clinton, Santorum and, say, Vernon Robinson campaign contributions?

If the answer is no, then why the hell not?

Maybe when the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (S. 2590) is finally passed, we can start serious work on the infrastructure and interfaces that support centralized repositories for decentralized accountability. Or is this not sexy enough to fit into the social networking investment craze of Web 2.0?

(via BoingBoing)

WashingtonWatch (feed | page)

Why? It’s about time we have a real-time feed for bills on the floor of Congress. A few early concerns with the service:

1. the methodology for generating cost/saving figures is very weak flawed
2. public incentive to participate is nil
3. if public participation is nil, Congress won’t pay much concern to the echo chamber of comments

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)

We who blog, incessantly rave about the progressive attributes of transparency. It’s not a beckon call that we own; political activists have been screaming for transparency in government since, well, forever. Transparency provides credibility. The truth shall set you free. You pick the cliche, they’re all spot on.

Well, in this Web 2.0 world that we live in (whether we realize we’re living in it or not), transparency is beginning to take root in interesting ways. Take the age old process of writing non-fiction; I’m starting to see authors not only openly talking about their books in gestation, but reaching out to Joe Q. Public for participation in the writing process itself.

Since April of last year, Chris Anderson has been publicly blogging his thoughts about The Long Tail, the term he coined proper in 2004. His blog tagline describes his transparent approach as, “A public diary on the way to a book.” One of his recent posts, Death of the Blockbuster, is a perfect example of the transparent methodology I’m talking about:

I’ve been collecting data on just how bad it’s getting in the music industry, and this useful list of the 100 all-time bestselling albums offered another lens on the meltdown. I looked up the release dates of each and grouped them in half-decade bins. The data speaks for itself:

If you want to do your own analysis, the underlying data is in this spreadsheet.

Anderson engages with his audience, invites them to participate in his thesis and provides the underlying data behind his perspective. The above post has generated a link from USA Today, numerous comments and two follow-up posts that further this particular aspect of Anderson’s thesis. Aside from his trademarked phrase, “The Long Tail,” the entire blog is registered under a Creative Commons license, a copyright permission which allows anyone to replicate his content (as I did above), as well as to use his research finding for their own use (as long as they give proper attribution to Chris wherever they publish).

Share and share alike and build a better world.

No, I’m not a hippie, that’s just how open, collaborative, iterative development works. Chris is writing a book, one which he’ll profit from, but his open-thinking and shared research and knowledge will undoubtedly influence others to progressively impact industry in various degrees.

David Weinberger, who is knee-deep in the process of writing his latest book, “Everything is Miscellaneous,” employs a similar approach to writing.

Joho the Blog isn’t a 100% topical slave to the complexities of data, information and knowledge (I rather enjoy his political and cultural posts), but when David does dive in, you can sense where his head is in the writing process. With some posts, he’ll directly reach out for assistance and perspective, while other posts are less direct with explicit ties, but steeped in organizational memes. David blogged before he took on his latest book, so he understands the value of releasing ideas out into the ether. Hell, he co-wrote the book on it.

Ideas out, ideas in. Links out, links in.

Now, this approach is far from widespread, as the majority of books still hit “the shelf” with guarded marketing plans as the only touchpoint into the potential reader community. Authorship equates with authority in many circles — circles which seem to care more about ownership of a thesis, rather than the conversation surrounding the subject matter and the avenues newfound knowledge takes once digested. But since the shelves themselves are changing and mainstream journalists and authors are beginning to blog themselves, this just might catch on and become SOP.

What would be the ramifications of such transparent collaboration beyond the target of binding particular pages?

David hosted an interesting thread about hyperlinks subverting hierarchies a few weeks back where the conversation shifted between the lines of power, organization and connections between people. Following that premise within the context of this post, imagine if authors who write life and death non-fiction (say, covering the war in Iraq) opened up to allow for community participation… Could the impact be greater than the explosion of citizen media alone?

Methinks so.

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.

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!

Terrance—over at The Republic of T—asks a simple, yet provocative question in preparation of the 2006 elections: What’s Your Platform?

Okay, I’m game. Here are my most imperative policy reforms, in no particular order.

1) 2.0 the hell out of government
Congress was only able to see "finished" intelligence before voting to give the Bush administration power to go to war (as a last resort). In my world, anything that the Executive branch sees, the Legislative branch sees. My voice is represented by my state officials, not the president. This one example of a non-transparent government directly led to the deaths of more than 30,000 human beings.

The most applicable 2.0 philosophy for reforming government is the philosophy of openness. From open source to open content, imagine the possibilities of employing a government that makes all de-classified government documents, congressional voting records, appointee resumes, etc. instantly available in a relational database with open APIs for public use. All of this information is available now, but it’s not prepped for accessibility and reuse. This is the future of accountability. Up communication and transparency, reduce the "Fuck You!" noise of the left vs. the right blogosphere to constructive collaboration… that is until government tries to pull something, and then we get back on them like white on rice.

2) Create a nominal tax to directly supplement teacher salaries
Great teachers are few and far between nowadays. Why? Well, you try dealing with kids, administrators and parents all day, adhere to and circumvent the red-tape and legalities of this age with the grace of a seasoned politician and pull in ~$45k per year.

I’m talking about, say, a .1% tax that goes directly towards teacher salaries. I gotta admit, I got the idea from Mini-Me when he appeared as a genius teacher on an episode of Boston Public a few years back. His thesis was that the degree to which students are prepared by their public school years directly impacts their earning potential, so reward their hometown education system with a nominal, flat tax return to impact teacher salaries. Tell ‘em. Verne!

3) Rip up the Patriot Act
As alluded to in the first part of my platform, transparency of government will lead to politicians being held accountable to create humane national and global policies. It’ll also foster the innovation of extremely real-time and smart communication user experiences, which can then be applied by government in the authenticated realm of classified material.

This edict of transparency cannot be applied to individuals. Our individual right of privacy is what has distinguished us from the rest of the world for centuries. The Patriot Act is legislation with language that allows for the control, intimidation and investigation of Americans through the guise of terrorism. It’s like the old censorship debate; who defines what is terrorism? The abuse of American rights have already begun.

4) Election reforms
First, all television campaigns are free. Each major candidate (there would have to be some way to determine "major," possibly something akin to the BSC polls/stats via past political progress made) is provided a set amount of credits to apply to the "purchase" of air time. This opens up the playing field to a diverse class of politicians who can focus on the issues, not their fund raising. I bet Tom Delay would even go for this.

Second, ensure that voting is both easy to access and secure. All voting systems could easily be tied together into one database, while creating alternative voting options, such as over the internet and by phone. We’ve been to the moon people…

5) National health care for everyone… Yes, you too
Riddle me this: Large corporations get major discounts on health care coverage due to the amount of employees they staff, right? Okay, then why not treat congressional districts as semantic equivalents of large pools of employees (citizen residents) by submitting them as huge groups into the bidding process?

C’mon, try to tell me why that doesn’t make any sense.

6) Incentivize industry to reduce our dependency on oil and clean up the environment
I know, the oil industry has major power claws dug deep into our political system, but this is my platform, so I’ll risk the blunt gas nozzle to the back of my head. This current administration gave tax breaks to manufacturers who create hybrid vehicles, but capped the production of cars to 60,000 that qualify for the break. Yeah.

First, we create California-like emmission standards and apply it nationally. Second, we apply money to develop alternative forms of fuel instead of planning a fucking trip to Mars or building that damn bridge to nowhere in Alaska. Third… well, I’m not that smart, but these people are.

Well, that’s my platform. God knows there are other extremely important issues (like getting out of Iraq, impeaching Bush, etc.), but that’s all the brainpower I have for tonight. I’m sure many of you want to label me as a liberal communist or some other "sticks and stones" nomenclature, and if I just described your take on me, my message to you is grow the fuck up. These are serious times, calling for serious people. The longer you avoid engaging in honest discussions along these lines, the easier it becomes to spot your agenda.

To the rest of you, let’s work together to get these bozos out of office in 2006.

Note to aspiring politicians: Keep it real, hound effortlessly for the truth and you will have a lasting place in American politics. The people are now involved in the process.

Harry Reid’s actions were completely justified and just caught the attention of a ton of Independent voters. A reporter asked Reid, "Why didn’t you consult with Senate Majority Leader Frist first?" Reid responded that he followed Senate policy after too much feet dragging; there’s no need to consult.

Consider me first on line to shake his hand. It’s about damn time.

(.mov via Think Progress)

This post was meant to see the light of day a few days ago, but in the process of researching, I became completely caught up in some of the ideas surrounding shared data and a micro/macro analysis by using flickr’s blog interface. The damn thing sucked me in and I ended up with another Web 2.0 thread all together.

In this post, I’m going to pull back a bit to refocus on some of the meanings behind the term Web 2.0, touching upon aspects of the meme that have driven it to a certain tipping point within the web development community. And no, that doesn’t mean everyone is on board — as dedicated professionals are either embracing the moniker or slapping it down as a marketing gimmick — but one can’t deny the lexicon has begun to reach the mainstream business world.

The Way We Were

Each year, over the past 10 years or so, the internet has progressively behaved less like a mass of disparate domains — hooked into each other via simple hyperlinks — and more like a functioning network. If you can’t remember 10 years back, 1996 was practically the McCarthy era of the web. There was a good chance you’d be sued if your web site linked to a corporate site without permission. Seriously.

The behavior of the web as a macro entity wasn’t very smart as well. It essentially stagnated as an enabler for people (including developers) to interact (publish, reuse, etc.) with individual sites. The two-way web was there on paper, but an infrastructure forged across a critical mass of domains had yet to be accomplished.

Then along came Amazon, blowing the roof off of e-commerce by implementing collaborative filtering. Skip over a few other ingenious domains and Google completely changed the definition of information retrieval within both its own domain and others. The IQ of the web jumped as its big players became smarter, but across a majority of domains, the web was still more of a parking garage for individual vehicles, with individual owners and drivers. Carpooling hadn’t begun yet.

The Definition Of A Smart Web

Take my home office network as an example. Each day I easily share data between three machines in order to accomplish a multitude of different goals and a subset of numerous tasks. If I’m using my PC and want to alter an image found on my PowerBook, I simply use Photoshop on my PC to grab the data from across the network, manipulate the image and save it back to its original location. I perform similar operations when marking up HTML and CSS on my PowerBook, then hopping on a browser on my PC to view the data in a rendered form.

This is my personal realm of shared data; a collaborative, transparent, usable space called a network. It stitches together my various personal computers, allowing my software to access data openly and freely. The label isn’t fancy, because the concept is finite and comprehensible. I own everything, from the hardware to the software to the authentications allowing access throughout. I am the network.

I Am Not The Web… Yet

A transition to a user-centered web will only occur once we, the web development community, take the well established premise of a finite network and extrapolate its underlying philosophies of connectivity, transparency and usefulness across a potentially unlimited amount of “networked” domains — each with varying business objectives and often at best, a subjective understanding of user goals and tasks.

In doing so, the rationale for the 2.0 label will start to become clear, as we’re dealing with an enormous number of variables in a potentially limitless value equation.

We’re living in an entrepreneur’s dream world.

Web 2.0 is a useful moniker to latch onto. Without a set of guiding principles, progressive domains that eat, sleep and breath collaborative, transparent and useful user experiences might end up functioning within a bubble, as opposed to influencing the adoption of industry-wide hooks of shared data by less insightful domains.

As Amazon and Google previously raised the bar in the late 90’s and challenged their competition to innovate or fold, this philosophical approach is a rallying cry for the entire industry.

The Micro/Macro Example

I’m going to stick with my current favorite example from around the web. A subset of interface features on flickr reads like this:

• the ability to share images
• the ability to tag images with (potentially) common identifiers
• the ability to view other people’s images through contextual navigation of tags
• the ability to comment on anyone’s image
• the ability to save a shared set of favorites
• the ability to leave notes on images themselves
• the ability to quickly create a blog post of an image

Each of these features within the flickr domain could be studied to find analogous patterns from the macro arena around the web (e.g. posting images is the equivalent to publishing a podcast), but by focusing on one feature, user commenting, we can blow out the possibilities for usefulness across a Web 2.0 environment.

While commenting isn’t unique per se, flickr does provide a commenting feature that is very useful. In order to help a user keep up with discourse surrounding their posts, flickr provides a “Recent Activity” screen, which not only presents user comments in context to the images, but notifies you when your image was added as someone else’s favorite. There’s also an elegantly designed page which documents the history of comments that you’ve made across the domain. flickr makes this so easy to track, they even provide an RSS feed for peripheral awareness.

Now take this concept from the micro space of flickr and extrapolate it across the macro space of the web and you have the means to track numerous conversations you’ve either started or joined over n period of time. Blogpulse has a similar interface with its Conversation Tracker, but that relates more to trackbacks and the movement of a topical conversation across posts. Interesting, but not personally interesting.

The captivating aspect of the localized, recent activity screen from flickr is through the exposure of an involved conversation, not an uninvolved and evolving perspective.

The image above is a quick sketch of how I perceive the web around me as I open my browser. There are applications that I use to stay connected and informed, a small, somewhat rotating, network of sites that I consider to be daily reads and an infinite universe of daily new finds.

I add to the discourse of the latter two types of sites on a somewhat daily basis. When flickr was without the recent activity feature, I was never able to remember what images I previously commented on, so in turn, my participation level was much less. With the feature, I comment much more often, as the connection between me and other people’s information objects is now tangible.

Now, apply that same concept to the web. What would a recent activity interface centered on your comments from around the web do for your continued contribution to public discourse?

This is only one idea for how the concepts behind the Web 2.0 meme can change the way we look at the web, moving from a centralized group of branded domains to a functional network of decentralized, shared data, information and applications.

What are some of your ideas?

As an American, I fully understand the definition of hypocrisy.

Whether you’re a devout Catholic or an agnostic who reads between the lines, it’s easy to see the hypocrisy that runs rampant in modern day America.

And while it’s absolutely true that degrees of hypocrisy can be found in the actions of all inhabitants of this earth, only the most despicable human beings will fine tune and harness their hypocrisies in order to move into greater positions of power and wealth to the detriment of others.

Large corporations have perfected this systemic practice of monetary advancement through the guise of competition and the free market and people who understand how to harness the operating levers of these machinations have the ability to freelance in similar fashion.

In this age of readily made available information, one can document patterns of hypocrisy quite easily, as they are in abundance. Take this example set forth by Sean Hannity, which is covered in detail within the documentary, “This Divided State,” shot just before the presidential election of 2004.

From the logs of Jesus’ General, it appears that Michael Moore charged a $40,000 appearance fee to speak to a crowd at Utah Valley Community College. Now, appearance fees, even of the $40,000 variety, are standard practice from celebrity types, whether they’re former government officials, top corporate executives, All-Pro athletes or even overweight filmmakers. The speaker’s political affiliation doesn’t play a part in the fee either, as both sides of the aisle cash in on these opportunities. So how does Sean Hannity expose himself as a hypocrite? In an effort to subterfuge Moore’s appearance, Hannity schedules a pre-emptive lecture at the same college and charges a, get this, zero appearance fee.

Wait a second… That’s not hypocritical. Student fees stay in student pockets for Hannity, yet Michael Moore, the liberal of all liberals, charges out the wazoo to come hear him preach. Before tackling this particular charge of hypocrisy, let’s think about how this no fee/fee dichotomy of actors play in the mind of students attending this school? What about the people that live in the community or the ones who came out to hear Hannity speak? What about the average tax-paying citizen hearing this news around the country?

The lasting image left in the minds of these hard-working Americans is “Sean Hannity cares enough to speak with us on his dime, while Michael Moore charges a big fee to support the creation of another one of his anti-American propaganda films.”

This prevailing message is so black and white due to Hannity’s uncanny ability to leverage his hypocritical nature throughout his career. The fact of the matter is that Sean Hannity charged this small college more than $48,000 in travel accommodations, specifically for traveling by private jet.

In the end, both Hannity and Moore charged upwards of $60,000 for their individual visits, but the way that Hannity structured the line items in his invoice allowed him to present a “no appearance fee” visit.

Sneaky, eh?

So why does this matter?

Michael Moore followed Hannity’s visit a week later. The pre-emptive disinformation by Hannity was designed to create a election time clusterfuck for Moore’s lecture the following week. While both men ended up selling out their respective lectures, Hannity pulled in $13,500 more in donations, which added up to a noteworthy difference in net school expenditures of ~$17,000. That’s an important number, for the next time this school is looking for a speaker with a fixed budget, they might shy away from Moore or someone similar in shape and size.

I wasn’t at either of the lectures, and I’m waiting for the DVD to become available, so I can’t say for certain why one group of people donated so much more than the other, but I’ll venture into the realm of speculation in this instance.

I’ve followed Hannity’s shtick since his days on talk radio in New York City. The man knows how the rile up a crowd, pushing button after button to get the flock moving in his direction. In the provided clip, Hannity drops lines such as:

“…Michael Moore isn’t worth one red cent of student funds, by the way…”

After measuring the crowd reaction to such an opinion (heavy cheers), he moves onto calling out to the liberals in the lecture hall to stand up and identify themselves, with a condescending chant of:

“…here little liberals, here liberals, liberals, liberals…”

With the background framed by a huge American flag draped onstage, Hannity follows up by putting a face to the opposition in the minds of the still-seated crowd by stating:

“…ladies and gentlemen, here is the surest sign that our educational system is failing.”

As the crowd cheers, all is well in Mulberry now that Hannity is here.

Now, forget the politics of the still-seated people for a moment; they could’ve represented a mixed political pot, ranging from liberals who refused to stand (or as I like to call them: Democrats) to the extreme right-wing conservatives (or as I like to call them: the Minority).

The people that remained seated are simply looking for something to believe in, which in today’s day and age, is completely understandable. But the sick thing about Hannity and his ilk is that they understand this audience inside and out and will capitalize on their fears without thinking twice.

So when the crowd disperses from a Sean Hannity lecture, you can bet that people are reaching for their
wallets to keep them feeling pumped up and proud to be an American. How could anyone, including Michael Moore, compete with a pre-emptive, "no appearance fee" grandstand such as that? (unless they were hell bent to use similar hypocritical, manipulative and deceiving tactics).

Again, I’ve yet to see the film and have only seen the clip from the Hannity presentation, but I’d bet that Moore’s audience included a greater opposition to his platform due to the Hannity circus that rolled out of town just a week prior; "anti-American" targets remain fresh in ones mind, especially when they’re coming directly to ones neighborhood.

So you might be asking yourself, how does all of this relate to blogging and Web 2.0? It relates on a multitude of levels:

• If you’re reading this, you’re already participating in the blogosphere, legitimizing it that much more as an alternative form of media and/or press.
• If you make a comment to this post or subsequently post elsewhere, you’ll serve to expand the
  discourse around Sean Hannity and the power of misinformation
• If you trackback to this post, you’re working towards creating a semantic perspective around Sean Hannity and the power of misinformation

Active participation in the blogosphere , such as the above, supports one of the primary pillars of the Web
2.0 meme; to make opaque information transparent. You might not have come across this instance of hypocrisy and misinformation if you weren’t reading this blog. Ten years ago, that statement would have been an absolute as personal publishing had yet to hit the market. So while people, like you, are expanding the reach and discourse of the blogosphere, intuitive interfaces—from Rojo to Blogpulse to Technorati—are being designed to help people connect the dots of information and data, aggregating far ranging contextual topics across the web.

Easy access to reliable information? Community and political discourse? Could it possibly be that we’re in the midst of rebuilding a Democratic Republic from the ground, or network, up?

Social networks exist in the reality of our lives. On-line, services such as flickr , Yahoo! 360 and LinkedIn are popping up all over the place, and while each of these social networks are focused on specific interests and needs of people via a particular branded domain, with hooks into other data sources from around the web, they still only serve as a microcosm of the semantic potential of Web 2.0 and beyond.

What would happen if brands truly opened up and worked together to share the greater possibilities of profit? How much more connected would our lives become in the process of such innovation? How could optimized information object search and retrieval, mixed into these applications, change the dynamics of wealthy, resourceful individuals using the media as a lie and spin zone?

I’d be a hypocrite if I said I wasn’t looking forward to the day…

About a month ago, the Economist published an article about Yahoo!’s schizophrenic nature as a company. Yahoo!’s history as an Internet pioneer moved me to christen them as a change agent for Web 2.0 — the complete opposite of the flaky AOLish operation.

Well, those wacky Yahooligans are off their meds again. God bless ‘em.

In a few weeks, Yahoo! plans on releasing In the Hot Zone, a first person, solo journalism (SoJo) effort by Kevin Sites, who’ll cover the most war torn areas of the globe; areas which receive little to no mainstream coverage in the US. Here’s a taste of the Yahoo! approach:

Our Principles:

We will be aggressive in pursuing the stories that are not getting mainstream coverage and we will put a human face on them. We will not chase headlines nor adhere to pack journalism but vigorously pursue the stories in front of and behind the conflict, the small stories that when strung together illustrate a more complete picture.

We are professional journalists and will apply to our work the ethical code of conduct as outlined by the Society of Professional Journalists:

• To seek and report the truth.
• To minimize harm.
• To act independently.
• To be accountable.

We strongly believe, as stated in the preamble of this code, "that public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy."

We also will add four more criteria to our work that will take us above the journalistic code. We also pledge in our reporting and storytelling:

Transparency
An honest and authentic accounting of both our failure and successes, to pull back the curtain on our editorial and technological process. We refuse to propagate the myths of the omniscient, infallible correspondent.

Vulnerability
We will strive to live, breathe, and experience the lives of the people we are covering — including the daily dangers they’re exposed to from combat, disease, and hardship.

Empathy
We may not always agree with our sources, but we will make every effort to understand their positions and report them with clarity, so that our audience may have context and perspective.

Solutions
Our site will contain links to organizations and groups that are working to aid victims of these conflicts and assist in their peaceful resolutions.

Will Yahoo! succeed in this venture? I don’t know, but it really doesn’t matter, because by just making this announcement, Yahoo! has already set the tone for alternative news reporting in a mainstream format (the far reaching walls of the Yahoo! membership and reach).

Even if they fail in the tactical attempt based on any number of conflicts (remember the Chinese reporter incident?) more sites will undoubtedly take on the challenge and pick up the baton running. A change agent, when all is said and done, is about the change. Steering change through it’s evolutionary course isn’t necessary the goal.

Yahoo! is leading at the point where Web 2.0 crosses over into the real. Sweet.

UPDATE: Current TV anyone?

Newsweek and Technorati are in bed together and I’m really hoping it isn’t a monogamous relationship.

I’m not sure when this started, but Newsweek is now citing "Blog Talk," creating a contextual column from the Newsweek article page (first image, click for larger image) that links to a full Blog Talk page (second image) which presents the last 10 blogs posts that have linked to the Newsweek article. This is being done automatically, sans any editorial review.

I’m currently working on a project for which I presented this exact context scenario for our blogger design persona. I couldn’t believe the serendipity. So to ensure the API and execution would support our needs, I ran a quick test and posted a response to the "I’m So Sorry" article, linking back to the story URL. Within 10 minutes of pinging Technorati, my post appeared on the Newsweek page. Okay, that’s very progressive. Sure, it’s only a glorified trackback system, but the underlying philosophy has huge implications.

We’re quickly moving to a sustainable model for presenting the individual perspective on the same level as mainstream media’s editorial-driven journalism. It’s a win-win; a site like Newsweek gets an increased blogger readership and bloggers have the opportunity to share their perspectives with people that tend to stay away from the scattered blogosphere.

From my perspective, this is the first step to truly legitimizing the blogosphere. What’s next? Well, if Google, Yahoo! and other mainstream news aggregators began to index blogs for their search queries, we’d be one step closer to breaking through the mainstream media stranglehold on information for the average American that receives their news on-line. All of this is what the promise of Community TV was supposed to provide twenty years ago, but ran into the obvious production challenges.

This is really good. It’s good for business, good for bloggers, and most importantly, good for bubbling the truth of a story to the surface. This is discourse.