J. Thomas Vincent has sent me an email in response to my reporting on scuttlebutt that Sen. Hollings' CBDTPA bill won't pass during this session:

...I'll go so far as to say that is the conventional wisdom around DC. Leahy doesn't like it and as long as he is unhappy it's dead because the bill hits his jurisdiction. I do completely agree though that the pressure needs to be kept up, for while this year and perhaps not even the next Congress will CBDTPA pass. After '04 regardless of what party wins that will be the session where the battle will really get ugly. That's why the organization efforts online need to get up and running now, to have a coherent message to politicians well before that cycle. (Not to mention efforts like GeekPAC)

So, we shouldn't drink so much champagne that we fall asleep while the issue rises from the dead. It ain't going away so soon.

Perhaps you heard me on Italian TV yesterday, although I doubt it. The producer of the show said that it's the "Nightline" of Italian TV, on RAI, the national network. When he called at 6:30AM, he said that they were doing a show on the ceremonies marking the removal of the debris that was once the World Trade Center and they wanted someone to comment on the role the Internet played on 9/11. This is something I'd talked about on U.S. National Public Radio. "Sure," I said.

"I'll ask you about how the Internet allowed the world to tell itself its stories," the producer said.

"Excellent," I replied with the confidence of someone about to make a fool of himself.

So, a few minutes before air time, the phone rang and the translator introduced herself. "The first question," she said, "will begin with the host saying that the events of 9/11 have changed the world and affected each of us. In such a time, we think about what it means to live in a world together. We're talking with David Weinberger, an American philosopher and writer" - Danger! Danger! - "Tell me, Dr. Weinberger, about your reaction to the ceremony and what we learn from 9/11. What are our feelings?"

"I didn't see the ceremony. I'm an Internet guy. You don't want to ask me that question," I replied. Worse, from the question, it seemed I was the first guest. Why would they put the Internet guy on first to provide a general, non-Net comment about 9/11? Thank goodness I had had a chance to warn them off that question!

Seconds later, the interpreter asked me the first on-air question. Except for taking out the part about the ceremony, it was exactly the same. With dead air looming, I tried to come up with an answer to "What do we learn from 9/11? What are our feelings?"

I felt the weight of my country's honor descend on me. Speaking for all Americans, nay, for all sentient creatures in the universe, I babbled about being sad. And then I forgot that I was required by international treaty to close by saying something uplifting about courage and instead blurted out: "And fear. For all of our economic wealth and all of our science, there is no protection."

Undoubtedly sensing that he had a guest who too thick even to get the platitudes right, the host asked a question about the role of the Internet in the new world. "Connections," I said, wiping frothy spittle from my lips, "The children are connected. Connections. Hope. Children. Links. The connectedness of connection. For the children. Connectannectannectannecta..." The show switched to a commercial, an act of desperation since I think RAI doesn't run commercials.

Kevin Marks passes along a clever Flash on the Electronic Frontier Foundation site that parodies the Mickey Mouse Glee Club while propagandizing against Sen. Hollings' evil CBDTPA bill.

Ading to the list of simple tools for managing URLS and comments about URLs come two suggestions.

Phililp Webre recommends askSAM. But I'm a formerly happy user of surfsaver. It saves the entire page, not just the urls, which would be ok except that it does so in a proprietary format (or at least it used to) so that when it broke and askSAM couldn't fix it, I lost all my data. I also got stuck in upgrade hell with them: couldn't install the new, couldn't get the old back...

Jonathan Peterson recommends Compass which looks pretty durn neat:

I love compass (), it can import/export opera, Netscape, IE bookmarks, you can do drag-n-drop and hotkey bookmarks, it autograbs meta tag info, but allows you to stick in your own comments as well. It works pretty well out of the box, but has a lot of customization features while still being pretty small and quick. I've got over 1500 bookmarks, in dozens of categories and subcats. One of the most powerful features is an HTML/XML export, which isn't well documented, but lets you do stuff like: http://way.nu/bookmarks/, which I know I wouldn't deal with otherwise.

The author is very responsive, I made a feature suggestion that he implemented with 2 months and I've managed to lose my serial number twice and he's emailed it back to me.

Kevin Marks thinks he's disagreeing with my attempt to boil down the telecomm story. In particular, he thinks he's disagreeing with "The Paradox of the Best Network," the longer version David Isenberg and I wrote. But he's not. I like a lot what Kevin says.

The supposed point of disagreement is that Kevin thinks Isenberg and I imply that "you can't make money with a well-designed network." Says Kevin: "It was a good soundbite, but wrong on a deeper level" because you can make good, steady money selling a commodity.

No argument! In fact, the heart of what we were saying is summed up in Roxann Googin's phrase: "The best network [the "stupid" network that does nothing but move bits] is the hardest one to make money running." Not impossible. Just hard. This is why the telco's want to be in the added-value network business, not in the we-move-bits business.

So, Kevin and I are in agreement. And we also agree that Larry Lessig's "The Future of Ideas" is really important; Kevin includes an extended quote from an article by Lessig in The American Prospect.

At my session at Connectivity 2002 yesterday (see my previous days' blogs as well as Halley's astute coverage including her pilloring of my presentation ... and Dan Bricklin has just blogged his take on the conference), I asked the group to come up with ways of explaining to an intelligent layperson (well, a senator) what the technological argument is for fighting the incumbent telecommunication companies. The idea was to boil it down to the simplest possible story from the technological point of view. What's the picture technologists should paint for the rest of us?

I'm nowhere near as up on this area as just about anyone you'll meet, but it's good to know that ignorance doesn't deter me from making large-scale pronouncements. So, here's what I would say:

Let's just agree that the Internet is the best way our species has ever come up with for spreading free speech and free markets on a global scale. Screwing this up would be an epochal mistake. And, we want to make sure that we Americans don't lock ourselves out of this arena, repeating the mistakes we made in, say, the auto industry. So, what do we do?

The Internet has succeeded because it Keeps It Simple, Stupid: it just moves bits around. And we want to keep it as a simple bit conveyer belt. That way, any bright new ideas someone has for products and services that can be done with bits — a little thing we like to call "innovation" — can count on the Net for getting bits from A to B with incredible efficiency.

But there's a danger. The old types of networks have assumed that it's always good to be tuned for particular applications — for example, a network specifically for telephone calls. But tuning a network for one type of application means that it's "de-tuned" for others, and the strength of the Internet has been precisely that it just moves bits without caring what type of applications are sending the bits. To keep the Internet open for innovation we have to keep it the simplest possible "de-tuned" bit conveyer belt.

The temptation to tune the network is inevitable if control of it is given to a group that has one particular type of service to provide. That's why it's vital that we keep the provision of the network separate from the provision of applications that use the network. This has to be enforced at the technical level but also at the application, business and regulatory levels.

Yes, this doesn't cover other vital issues such as free speech and the need to remove municipal regulations that hinder smaller competitors, but the aim is to keep this simple.

Comments, criticisms, suggestions, humiliating exposures of the fact that I am merely a poseur? Most important: Other ways of telling the story?

Marek, referring to an article by Doc in Linux Journal, suggests we send our thanks to Marybeth Peters, Register of Copyrights, for rejecting the CARP recommendation that would have killed Internet Radio. I called the Copyright Office and got her contact info:

Email: [email protected]
Fax: 202 707 8366

Marybeth, our love is on its way!

On Tuesday at the Connectivity 2002 Conference, David Isenberg opened his talk by waving his underwear around and listing the metaphorical similarities between jockey shorts and telecommunications. So, on Wednesday morning during my session, I waved David Isenberg's underwear around as the prize for coming up with the best way of explaining the telco mess in the fewest words. Yes, I was blatantly trading on the laughs Isenberg earned.

It was only on the way home that I realized that about 20% of the audience on Wednesday hadn't been there on Tuesday and thus must have their own theories about why I would give Isenberg's underwear away as a prize.

Keith, Joe and Lee

Panel: Open Communications Infrastructure: Cutting the Knot. Lee McKnight is talking, Prof. at Tufts. He says, there should be no regulatory distinctions local and national communications, wireline or wireless, narrowband or broadband, broadcast or switched. He's presenting what he he thinks the new regulatory framework should be.

Keith Weiner, CEO of DiamondWare. He's here to ruffle our feathers. Keith begins by stating the prevailing theory with which he'll disagree: In theory we need to reign in the profit-hungry corporations, level the playing field and intervene to manage competition. People here would like to see hundreds of little companies competiting and would like to see the incumbents destroyed. But (now he's stating his own views) there is no such thing as public interest because (on Ayn Randian grounds) there is no such thing as the public. But under the theory of "public interest," the Bells are the ones who are delivering because they provide a universal service without tax money. (Fred from the audience says that the Bells don't do rural delivery and it is subsidized by a tax.) Keith is trying to show equivocation on the word "power" that leads us to think that we need regulation to protect us. Microsoft doesn't have the same sort of power as the Mafia; you can always go to a competitor. His point (as I understand it in response to a question from me) is that all regulation is bad and is only needed because of prior flaws in the system that prevent markets from being truly open and free; he would roll back the regulation and then attack the more fundamental problems (e.g., courts that favor incumbents with money). ... Many ruffled feathers later, Keith wraps up: In a regulated environment, the richest gang wins, so fight against regulation.

[Must type louder to annoy Halley.]

Now Joe Plokin from Bway.net (a NYC ISP) and www.teletruth.org is up. He says we're not looking at deregulation but demonopolilzation. TeleTruth is a consumer protection and advocacy group within telecommunications.

David Brustein looking more like Fidel
in the photo than he does in person.

Dave Burstein is leading a panel on "The Realities of the Local Access Bandwidth Bottleneck." He's reminding us of what's at stake: our ability to decide what we want to put on the Net at prices we can afford, e.g., a broadcast of a church service. What is it that we want, he asks? The audience answers: Connectivity to be treated like a utility; as many people connected as quickly as possible (that was me).

How do we get there? In politics, you find allies and phrase the issues in their terms. Here are some potential allies:

• Commissioner Kevin Martin at the FCC is a rigid conservative but he loves what the Net can do and doesn't want parts of the country left out. He wants a better, faster Internet.
• John Chambers and Andy Grove want to sell lots of equipment to do these great things on the Internet. Their TechNet initiative wants to deliver lots of bandwidth.

Back at the Connectivity 2002 conference. Bob Frankston is giving the morning's introduction, boiling it all down. Here's his slide:

Connectivity: The Concept

Separate transport from content
- Pack connectivity like the Internet
- Functions defined at the end point
Current situtation
- Inherent conflict of interest
- Egregious restrictions on free speech

Bob is pushing on his "More is More" (More's Law) that says that you want to be in a situation where if you want more of something, you can buy more. This makes for a healthy market. But the current situation isn't like that: if you buy more set-top boxes, you don't get more channels or more choice. But it should be true for connectivity: if you buy more streams, you get more capacity. This puts connectivity into the market where market forces can work its magic. Currently, broadband, on the other hand, is a set capacity with no ability to buy more. That's why Bob said yesterday that he considers broadband to be a distraction; we shouldn't be worrying about delivering broadband but about building a market where capacity is subject to market forces.

We just broke slightly (as the projector reboots) to let newcomers introduce themselves. David Burstein from Vortex - a big time telecomm forum - just brought us greetings from Doc Searls and news that we may have allies in quarters such as Cisco that would benefit greatly from a rapid growth in connectivity.

Frankston: "The thing about companies is that it's not against the law to kill them." His slide says that we are not saying they should die, "only" that they should reinvent themselves.

Audience: How does this work in rural areas? And what about the expense of rights of way?

Me: Doesn't the logic of "More's Law" lead to paying by bit, which we agree would be a bad thing?

Frankston: No, that'd just be a bad business model. [So, More's Law actually says that we should be able to buy more in increments that maximize the market. After all, we can buy "more" now by moving within the upload/download increments in cable, and moving from dial-up to cable to T1, etc.]

Frankston: Rights of way is part of the "nefarious conspiracy" to keep this so expensive that only the incumbents can win. And we should open up the problem of rural access through innovation.

Halley Suitt takes a moment from blogging the conference...

Frankston: Content does have rights. And privileges. [I'm glad to see the conversation get down to the battle for the words that count.]

Bob is continuing to outline why breaking the hold of the "content providers" will open new business possibilities, e.g., aggregating content in flexible ways, etc. etc. I don't need convincing on this point. But I'm also worried that we're not seeing these new models already emerging. Some depend on greater access, but some - bands selling their own music over the Internet - could work now and yet haven't caught on.

Frankston: "But it's not all about entertainment. Some people have come to think that the purpose of the roof is to keep the rain off the television."

Bob DeRosa

Bob DeRosa, VP Mktg of American Fiber Systems, is up now. They design and develop metropolitan dark-fiber networks - fiber that can be used for whatever purposes the customer wants. (Thanks to David Isenberg for the explanation.) He's explaining his competitive market: lots of groups (ILECs, CLECs, CATV, Gig-E players, utilities and more) are hooking wires up to your house. The "hidden competition" is the city itself: rights of ways, franchises and fees, permits, regulations and restoration demands. There's some wiggle room, but "given the regulatory environment, competitors of any stripe are at a major disadvantage when competing against incumbents..."

I'm up supposedly up next leading a panel on "What the Fuck Do We Do about It?" Because this topic has come up pretty consistently in other panels, I instead, I want to have the entire group try to come up with the story by which we can explain the technological reasons for keeping the Net open. Divide into small groups, report back to the total group ... the entire yechy, touchy-feely, marketing-offsite-meeting thing.

...Ok, I'm finished. We broke into groups and reported back. I can't say that there were any tremendous breakthroughs, but it was - I hope - useful at least to begin talking with one another about this.

Here's what the groups came up with: 1. Transport and connectivity are different 2. Infinite growth of imagine makes for infinite growth of potential... Split between:" everyone can be an ISP vs. This is a natural monopology which we hate but we're going to get our net from the post office We were split between do we really need broadband and Broadband or Death. We'd send a politican back to look at national infrastructure projects, e.g., highway system. It's not so much the post office as we need the network.) We sought a way to tie the self-itnerest of the legislator to the desire to achieve access to bb broadband. But what type of access? By facilitating universal access of any strength, you can induce the legislator to see it in his self-interest because the demographic can include new voters, by opening up access you open up particeipation in the electoral process. A number of the goals the Telecomm Act advanced have not been met (e.g., education). We wwant to promote 100mb/sec broadband. Platform neutrality. Might be wireless in rural, fiber to the home. Maybe through taxx breaks. It will serve the economy globally and locally. Do we attack the IP rights of the entertainment industry, which becomes an issue when you have the higher connection speeds? If we start talking about the RBOCs, we won't get anywhere. So we have to frame this to meet the legislator's self-interest by getting appropriations into the home district. We talk about the private road and the public road. The Internet is one of the greatest highway systems in the world but it's being turned into a private road that serves private interests. Our country is rapidly losing employment to offshore competitors. How are enterpreneurs and people in disenfranchisede areas going to compete if they have worse access than, say, Korea and have to pay high prices? We're shutting down the competition and our ability to be entrepreneurial in the global society. We need to create an "innovation platform." The next great boom, like the Net's first great stimulus of creativity, will come from the breakthrough of an innovation platform.

Kevin Werbach

Kevin Werbach is speaking. He's not only the editor of Esther Dyson's "Release 1.0," he's also an ex-FCC person. (He has a paper on this topic here. Regulators are well-intentioned, he says. They want broadband access nationally. They just lack the right way of talking about the issues. The "regulatorium" (Frankston's term) exists for reasons. The FCC is under tremendous constraints: when you're inside the FCC, all you see are the limits on what you can do.

Michael Powell has been spending his time marshalling his forces. He's started at lesast five seprate broadband-related proceedings. He's trying to push through his agenda but not much has happened.

What's missing is the right information. They rely on what they're told and mainly what they're told comes from the established players. There's a woeful lack of engineers and economists for independent internal analysis...but this is beginning to change. This is the best thing Powell is trying to do. Before, the FCC had lawyers but no engineers.

But the real problem is that the FCC doesn't have the right paradigm. Its communications policy is based on the 1934 Communications Act. Today we have horizontal categories: teleecomm, broadcast, cable, Internet. But connectivity doesn't fit into this model because it isn't a service, it's a platform for delivering many different services, e.g., Voice Over IP. But the FCC has to stick it into one existing bin or another. So, the most important questions simply don't compute.

Is there a better alternative? Sure: Look at how the network actually works (today, not in 1934). There are vertical layers, not horizontal categories: not separate networks for voice, for pictures, etc. This is old news for techies (OSI stack, etc.) but it's news to the law. Reconfigure the law to recognize perhaps four layers: content, apps/services, logical, physical. [This is very close to Lessig's argument, which is certainly an argument in its favor.] This would let you put constraints on physical networks that would lead to greater openness higher in the stack. Not all-or-nothing regulations. (There are always going to be regulations.)

So, how do we get there? It'd be nice if we had a creative and committed FCC, but even then the courts would be a problem. So, we need new legislation. It'll take time and money. We should start writing the Telecom Act of 2010. We need to recognize that the time frame is longer than 6 months. But we also need short-term tactical actions. Kevin helped draft the Stevens Report issued four years ago to explain why Internet telephony shouldn't be regulated, so the FCC does occasionally do the right thing. But we need more input from the public and tech industry by informal meetings with the staff and by formal filings. The FCC keeps asking "Where's the other side? Where's this big tech industry?"

[Chris Herot just passed me a pointer to Dan Gillmor's excellent article on David Reed's excellent article on spectrum.]

Realtime Blogging

The most visible initial fact about Connectivity 2002 is that there aren't a lot of people here. The room is set up for about 150 people but there are only 30 of us here. [At 10am we're up to about 50.] On the other hand, we just went around the room introducing ourselves and it seems like a really good group.

Bob Frankston is the conference chair and he's giving his presentation as we wait for The Dave Farber to show up.

I'm now swapping notes — actually scribbles on 3D paper — with Halley Suitt, about what is and isn't blogworthy. So, 10 minutes in and I'm already three levels of abstraction beyond where I am. Ack.

Bob Frankston's explaining his version of Moore's Law, More's Law, which says if you want more, you can buy more. That's what drives Moore's Law. This argues against subsidizing the delivery of broadband because that destroys the dynamic of building more as the market needs it: if the cable company runs out of bandwidth, it builds more because people will pay more. [Yeah, but subsidizing may kickstart a market and, more important, can get over the inequities of a purely market-driven infrastructure.]

Bob Frankston

Bob's second slide:

RAGE!
You are hostages!
You can't choose what to watch
You pay the trolls for "phone calls"
You can't be seen or heard
They must kill the Internet!

You are at the end of the last mile!

Bob, in response to a question, says that the incumbent business model pretends there's a scarcity of bandwidth so that it can maintain control over access and over prices. But the users are the "unindicted co-conspirators" who go along with this.

Carl Ford, formerly from GTE but now with pulver.com, is standing in the aisle disputing the conspiracy theory. [Chris Herot IM'ed me with this info. He's reading this blog as it develops. Thanks, Chris!]

Carl Ford protests!

Bob would like to see a decoupling of the network from the services built on it. He thinks the telco's should actually want to be broken up, if only they were smart enough. The people here from the telco industry are shaking their heads at the idea that it's stupidity that keeps them from seeing the wisdom of decoupling. If this conference can actually get to the common ground here -- for surely it is anything but stupidity that drives this mess -- it'll be truly useful.

Dave Reed (right) - Icon ... and Icon-Abuser

David Reed, of End-to-End fame, has announced that his point is that it's time for us to admit that we don't know what the business model is. The end-to-end argument says that the network itself should be "stupid" in Isenberg's phrase in that it ought to do nothing but move bits, and the applications that make sense of those bits ought to be on the edges of the network. The alternative is to build special functionality into the network itself, but every time you do that, you actually make it harder to come up with innovative uses of the network. But that means that the network becomes commoditized which the telcos desperately don't want to have happen. [This is my summary. Don't blame Reed.]

Damn! Blogger just hiccoughed and ate two paragraphs of recapping of Reed's economic model and why Bluetooth failed. Basically, Reed argues that the value in the network comes from the options at the edges where you make bets on innovation that may work. "Optimizing" the network itself for this or that app closes down other options. Reed pointed to Bluetooth and Universal Plug and Play as ways not to do this. Bluetooth came up with app-specific protocols rather than being a "stupid" protocol. Universal PnP tried to anticipate every conceivable app/decide that might come its way, an impossibility.

Reed is saying that pervasive computing will be wireless, so let's look at it. All the wireless devices will have to be capable of highly flexible connectivity. The situtation is urgent already. It's not so much about bandwidth... [Damn. I have to go make a phone call that can't be rescheduled...]

[Ok, I'm back. Which is as unnecessary as "If you lived here you'd be home now."] Reed is saying that end users can afford gigabit broadband (currently $2,500-$3,500 and dropping, much less than remodeling a kitchen) as opposed to looking for a business to make that sort of investment. And now we're all clapping for David... Sorry I missed the center. I am a huge admirer of David's.

David Reed

Privacy and Spam panel. The connection between privacy and spam is, says the panel chair, Ray Everett-Church (ePrivacyGroup), is that many people assume that the spam they're getting offering them photos of "barnyard frolics" is actually based on someone knowing something about them. The other two panelists: 1. John Levine, the author of "Internet for Dummies" among other books and a member of Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email. 2. Rob Waters, a lawyer in DC who works on privacy issues.

John: People make two basic mistakes about the Net. 1. They don't believe that it's two-way all the time, unlike TV. But he doesn't mean that The Web is a Conversation(tm). He means that web sites know you've been browsing. 2. People don't believe that no one is in charge. They want police and they want rules.

Rob: Initially, Congress took a hands-off, libertarian attitude towards the Net. Then Ed Markey brought up some privacy rules out of his consumer advocacy. But we've confused security and privacy; people's #1 concern is with identity theft, which is a security issue. Now let's trash the Hollings bill. It segregates electronic transactions foolishly. It creates data collection with no restrictions on a class action suits. It does no harm...except to everything we do. [Rob has assumed I know more than I do so I'm a little at a loss here. Sorry. (This is the bad part of being in over my head.)]

John: [as if sensing my plight] The bill says spam has to have a return address, it has to have opt out, and there are penalties if they continue spamming you. But opt out is unworkable because there are too many lists and you have too many addresses.

Bob Frankston (who is on the panel as an emeritus): The problem is that we treat email addresses as physical objects. The return address is fictitious. Instead, you can create your own email addresses for each of your personae, from public to higher grade addresses for friends to a gibberish hash for commercial transactions; that's what Bob does.

John: Yes, an email address is not like a physical address or a phone number; there's no central, valid list. So, do-not-mail and do-not-call lists are workable because there's a master database to work against. But not for email.

From the audience: A powerful industry coalition is against privacy safeguards because they want to use personalization software to own more of the customer.

[Isenberg just terminally distracted me from this panel, which is meandering down some paths I don't find compelling, by taking a headline from today's Globe -- "Cancer Study Backs Ovary Removal" -- and writing "Headlines You Won't See: Cancer Study Backs Testicle Removal."]

Had Stephen Jay Gould's writings always taught us something — Dayenu! — that would have been enough. That he was an original contributor to his field just adds to his lustre. But the fact that everything he wrote was written from his heart with a passion to make the world fairer by making it clearer — what a faith in understanding! — made him, for me, one of the transcendent presences. I am sad to tears.

I'm about to leave for Connectivity 2002, a conference technically only a few miles from my house but a major commute in terms of actual travel hours. It's three days of confabulation about how The Bad Guys are trying to centralize control of the Internet, violating the end-to-end principle (about which see David Reed and David Isenberg and maybe even "The Paradox of the Best Network" that Isenberg and I wrote to try to boil the situation down a bit.).

I'm going because I recognize that it's a big stinking problem but I expect the conference to be over my head. Actually, there's no "but" about it: being in over my head is the best part. This is a topic about which I am smart only by association: I don't understand it but I am fortunate enough to know people who are freaking geniuses about it, starting with Isenberg and Reed.

The organizer, Daniel Berninger, bills Connectivity 2002 as a telecommunications Woodstock. So, let me tell you about Woodstock. The real Woodstock, you young whippersnappers. I went because I had made a plan with Nancy Weeks, on whom I had a major crush, to "meet her there," thinking that I'd spot her across a field, wave my arm in recognition, and we'd trot off to a secluded nook by a waterfall as The Airplane played "White Rabbit." I had just finished my freshman year and was, of course, a moron.

Instead, I spent 4 hours in a traffic jam, parked about 5 miles away, got a ride on the hood of a car that crawled for another couple of hours, and arrived just as Melanie was a couple of songs into her set. It was raining. I hadn't eaten in hours. And, yes, you are talking to the only person who couldn't score drugs at Woodstock. Not a puff, much less a tainted acid tab.

I just gave a keynote this morning at the Transcentive annual user's conference. (Transcentive provides software and services for managing 401K plans.) One of the main points of the talk was that B2B and B2C are both being shaped by "C2C," customer-to-customer conversations; this matters because it means that businesses have lost their main way of controlling their markets: the selective release of information. So, I went through some sites that have lively C2C interchanges not knowing that the next speaker was announcing Transcentive's own open-ended discussion boards. (I was really pleased to hear that the inspiration for putting up the boards came from The Cluetrain Manifesto and Chris Locke's Gonzo Marketing.)

Small Pieces gets a nice blog writeup by Martin Roell. It's in German, but here's the translation (checked and authorized by Martin himself):

I want to give an especially strong recommendation of the latter (= Small Pieces). This is a wonderful book about the Net, beautifully written, with many anecdotes, insights, analyses and philosophical thoughts ...for dreaming, thinking ahead and developing new ideas. It�s an *important* book that you won�t give away and will always keep near your desk.

But now for the real reason for posting this: Here are pictures of Martin's German Brazilian musical group.

I'm looking for a shareware or freeware app that does one of the most basic of jobs: save and organize links into folders. I've tried a whole bunch, and even wrote one for myself, but none have stuck, often because they were over-featured (or, in the case of my home brew, screwed up too often). Here are my requirements:

• Within the browser (tool bar or whatever) invoke the app and store an URL and a comment in folder
• Arbitrarily create and nest folders
• Be able to browse and search the archive
• Doesn't lock the info away in a way that makes me totally dependent on the app provider

Simplicity counts above all. If you have found something that has actually become a part of your working set, would you let me know?

Halley's in a mock snit because I dared to refer to her as normal. To be precise, in writing about how we're getting admirably personal on the Web, after talking about RageBoy I said:

Take someone who doesn't have RageBoy's penchant for laying himself out as his own best argument: Halley Suitt. Halley is normal the way the rest of us are normal (i.e., not the way RB isn't).

Halley writes:

Don't you know I'm a Chris Locke wannabe?! I don't wannabe normal like everyone else.

Hey, Halley, tell me about it! Aren't we all RB wannabes? But you left off the end of the paragraph:

(And, by the way, for a normal person, Halley's pretty remarkable.)

Here's what gets me. Joe Conason writes in Salon (in the pay-for-content section) that in July of last year, "U.S. and Italian officials were warned, according to a Los Angeles Times report, that Islamic terrorists might try to hijack an airliner and crash it into the summit location, with the hopes of killing Bush and others." Then, "Almost simultaneously, on July 26, 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft abruptly stopped flying on commercial aircraft, reportedly due to a 'threat assessment' by the FBI."

Conason says the White House says that this was due to threats unrelated to al-Qaida but the CIA has told CBS that it knows of no such threats. (Remember, this comes from the same people who first lied about Air Force One being targeted, and then had the chutzpah to sell the photos of Our Hero high-tailing it.)

Greg Carter points us to Brad Blanton's amusing and provocative site on the concept of radical honesty. On its surface, the site is bland, but if you poke around you'll find pockets of genuine voice (and a whole lot of o'er-weening self-confidence). Here's a snippet of a description of one of Brad's seminars:

This is an eight day program which provides you with the hilarious experience of a new family based on honesty which will give you all the training necessary to sustain ongoing transformation for yourself and ongoing torture of your real family and friends back home. It will also serve nicely to mess things up at work.

Chip reminds us to click on a site that pays for mammograms and one that addresses world hunger. These folks gather a daily donation from various sponsors based on the number of clicks to their site.

Peter Kaminski has a terse but splendid set of materials explaining why the farm bill Bush is backing is a big pile of doodoo.

Open Source guru and gun Libertarian Eric Raymond has joined the blogging community with a weblog that promises to be as objectionable as possible as straightforwardly as possible.

<whine>
I like Linksys. I've had their 4-port router for a few years and it just sits there and works. And once when it stopped working they sent me a new one, no questions asked. Compare this to, say, BestBuy. Yesterday I took our Playstation 2 back because when you play a DVD on it, if the video scene is dark, it stops outputting to the TV entirely and then takes a couple of seconds to bring the TV back to life. Even though I'd purchased the "no-hassle" extended warrantee, they had to send a 14 year old employee to the back of the store to verify that the machine was broken. After spinning through all of "Ocean's 11," the child reported that the machine worked fine. The manager graciously agreed to replace the unit anyway. "I'm not supposed to do this," he said, waiting for my gratitude finally to spill over my natural reserve. "Just don't tell anyone." Oh, I might actually tell someone that BestBuy actually believed that one of its customer was telling the truth. Sure, you wouldn't want that to get around!

Anyway, I'm no longer able to play online games. When I try to connect, it just hangs. I've reinstalled Wolfenstein and Quake but to no avail. So, I go to linksys.com and don't get any useful hits searching for information on games. So, I google "linksys games" and .27 seconds later find the linksys FAQ that tells me I need to open port 27960 "in the router's advanced feature." The FAQ tells me to consult the manual. So, I open the PDF manual and can't find where it tells me how to open a port. So, I google "linksys 27960" and in .36 seconds I find a page — GamesAdmin.com — with a user-written, careful description of exactly how to do the deed. In fact, these step-by-step instructions cover the overall setup of the router and are far better than Linksys' own. And it has a set of very useful links.

Doc mentions that he drove through an earthquake last night, and that he maintains an Earthlink account. That leads, of course, to the following puzzle:

Q: What do you call an ISP in an earthquake?
A: Earthblink

And, irresistably, we are led to:

Q: What do you call an ISP that over-controls its customers?
A: Earthclink
Q: No, that's not what I was thinking of...
A: CompuSerf

Next thing you know we'll be posing puzzles like these:

Q: What do you call an ISP for a fading superpower?
A: America on Decline
Q: What do you call an ISP for cats?
A: America on Feline

But then we grow ashamed of ourselves and stop. Please.

Peterme links to a provocative article conceiving of narratives as spaces rather than as threads. Peter is interested in the nature of space both real and cyber and his site is always an excellent resource on the topic.

Dana Parker, "DVD Diva" and editor of the DVD Report, recommends a page opposing the Senator Fritz "Dumb as a Hollings" Hollings' bill that gives Walt Disney direct control over all content.

Julianne Chatelain points us to a project that uses the banner ad as a political art form. Click on the "Collection" button. (You'll need Shockwave). And, at another banner-art site she points us to, there's a fancypants UI that uses a 6-story building as a visual metaphor. (Be sure to type "Y" to get past the home page.)

Brian Millar has a funny aggregated reply to spammers. It begins:

Dear [email protected]

Thank you for your concern about the size of my penis. But I like it just fine, thank you and over the years I have discovered my own ways of enlarging it...

The LA Times gave SPLJ an excellent review yesterday. Woohoo! (Note: It takes a free registration to see it.)

The discussion about a standard to enable the sharing of message threads is picking up steam over at QuickTopic. The standard, tentatively named "threadsML" may be broad enough to cover blogthreads although blogthreads are hyperlinked, not threaded; that is, a blog entry in a blogthread may have more than one parent.

Kevin Marks responds to the transcript of a "conversation" with a Microsoft support bot:

Customer service people routinely fail Turing tests because they are told to follow a script. They are part of a programmed machine. My friend Stuart is comfortable with this, as if they are programmed, he can find the bugs and exploit them to get what he wants anyway.

see my Edemame piece.

The winner of the Kids' Philosophy Slam has been announced, an essay contest in which students all write about the same topic. This year it was "Is Human Nature Good or Evil?" Congratulations to Vineetha Joseph who beat out 4,000 students from first grade to high school senior.

Julianne Chatelain recommends a fascinating review by Geert Lovink of Hubert Dreyfus' brief (136pp) book "On the Internet."

Dreyfus is best known in the computing community for his classic "What Computers Cannot Do," a book that applied the insights of Heidegger to the question of AI. I've always loved that book because it critiques AI from the right standpoint (IMO) - its implicit assumptions about consciousness - much as Andy Clark's much more recent "Being There" does. I know Dreyfus, however, primarily for his Heideggerian scholarship and even once brought him in as a guest lecturer at a college at which I taught.

I haven't read his new book. I only heard about it through Lovink through Chatelain. But the review is hefty and substantial. Based on it, it sounds like Dreyfus has chosen a dyspeptic stance towards the Net that in some ways mirrors my own mindlessly optimistic view. Says Lovink:

Dreyfus develops his version of 'net criticism' in four different fields:

the limitations of hyperlinks and the loss of the ability of to recognize relevance;
the dream of distance learning (no skills without presence);
the absence of telepresence
and a chapter on 'anonymity and nihilism,' leading to a life without meaning.

Lovink quotes the following:

"Thanks to hyperlinks, meaningful differences have been leveled. Relevance and significance have disappeared. And this is an important part of the attraction to the web. Nothing is too trivial to be included. Nothing is so important that it demands a special place." (p.79)

and replies "There is no mention here of users and groups creating their own meaning and context on the Net. Dreyfus apparently never heard of mail and web filters." Lovink astutely connects this fear of the rabble to its roots in the authoritarian impulse.

All I'd add, not having read the book, is that Dreyfus' rant is the complaint of the outsider, the one who is refusing to enter the fray because he might get grass stains on his new pants. Merely browsing from site to site, chat to chat, the participants look like gibbering baboons. Enter into the discussion and you now find the conversations that matter to you, that expand your thought. In short, Dreyfus is making the dry fuss of a crotchety old man, yelling at the kids to turn down that racket, stop gabbing, and go to bed.

Andrew Orlowski points us to an excellent column by Larry Elliot, economics editor of the Guardian, reflecting on the demise of ITV Digital in the UK. After a standard opening mocking the exaggerated claims of Net enthusiasts, he writes:

The demise of ITV Digital is a sign that we are now well into the endgame of the technology miracle. Outside the hi-tech sector, the impact will be minimal. When the boom in railway shares came to an end in the 19th century, it did not mean the trains stopped running; what it did mean was that investors came to their senses and realised that many of the lines built when the markets were at their most manic would never be profitable.

Eliot is concerned mainly with the effect on the hardware industry — PCs, mobile phones, etc. He says the recovery won't be fast because the technology is already good enough to discourage upgrading, over-production is lowering prices, and "there are signs that the passion for the new technology is cooling." For instance:

In the City, dress-down Friday is being replaced by no-email Friday. Workers are being told that they should rediscover the art of face to face communication rather than firing off electronic messages to someone in the next office.

And, he says, RW encounters provide a richness of nuance the Web can't. We like being with one another in person. It's human nature, he concludes.

If Elliot's argument is that the Web isn't going to replace RW interaction, then he's arguing against a strawperson. If he's saying that the Internet has hit us with the brunt of its blow, we have absorbed the impact and not much has changed, I disagree on all three counts:

1. We're only at the beginning of the Age of the Net. My daughter's high school hasn't even yet figured out that all the kids are just "naturally" doing their homework collaboratively via IM. And at the other end of the spectrum, NPR today had a story about an attempt to wire remote Chinese villages so they can enter the world economy without forcing the inhabitants to move to one of the major cities. Not to mention the effect of the Internet on our basic self-understanding, but I'm trying (unsuccessfully) not to plug my book Small Pieces Loosely Joined.

2. We have absorbed much of the impact of the Internet, but our confusion about basic issues such as privacy, copying of content, and how to market indicate that we are at least as confused as we are complacent.

3. The Internet has already changed many of the basics. It just feels like normal already. Consider what would happen if you shut off email not just on Fridays but everyday. Consider what would happen simply within a single process such as recruitment and hiring. Think about the effect email has had on meetings. Not to mention the effect it is having on universities, government, journalism...and — to switch to another level — its effect on the role of authority and expertise.

Jim Bassett at Digital Media Tree has come up with a way to include at the bottom of a blog entry a list of all sites that refer to that entry. Well, "all" is too strong; for a linking site to make it onto the list, someone somewhere has to actually follow the link. But there's a certain unintended Google-like effect of this limitation since it excludes links no one has ever bothered to click on.

You can see this running at Jim's weblog. At the end of the article, next to the "[link]" button, there is a link to "[ref]" (with the number of references noted). Click on that link and you'll go to a page that repeats the original post and appends, in a gray box, a list of all the pages that have linked to that entry. (You can go straight to the page with the gray box here.) If all works as planned, this blog entry — mine, the one you're now reading — should be on that list also.

Michael O'Connor Clarke has blogged a Peruvian congressperson's reasons why his government should go open source whenever possible.

John Benditt's panel on biotechnology at the Nantucket Conference was about how this new technology is going to alter what it means to be human. Since that's the question that seems to draw me with regard to the Internet, it struck me that I'm stuck in my own mind/body dualism, not paying sufficient attention to the precipice of change on which our corporeal selves stand.

I have to learn more about this. I got to spend some Quality Time with Jonathan Rosen and his daughter Samantha yesterday. Jonathan built and runs the CIMIT Consortium that encourages tech innovation to advance patient care that is engaged in some really interesting projects. (And by mentioning him in my weblog, I'm holding my own feet to the blog fire, forcing myself to follow up with him.)

A generous relative gave me a $100 Tempurpedic pillow a few months ago made of the space-age Swedish foam that conforms to your body's shape. I came to it expecting neck comfort. Instead...

First, it drains all the heat from your body as your head vainly tries to come to tempramental homeostasis with it. It is like sleeping in wet cement.

Second, it has the consistence of a fairly firm part of the human body, so I'll wake up thinking that I've been wrapped in my wife's left arm only to find that I've spent the night snuggling into space-age Swedish foam. This flashes me back to when I was in college and a coed who was out of my league put her foot up against mine under a lunch table. She didn't move it, so I wiggled mine and soon we were playing footsie, me smiling knowingly — is "leering" the word I want? — at her as she played it real cool amidst all of our friends.

Then my pal Jeff left and I discovered I'd become sexually aroused by his knapsack.

Not much time to blog today because I'm at the Nantucket Conference. I only have a few minutes now, so here's the briefest overview I can give: The forum topics tend to be more focused on finance than is to my particular taste, but the set of technologists here is fantastic. Dan Gillmor has a blogged a summary of what's being discussed.

I'm quite nervous about speaking at the Nantucket Conference tomorrow (Tagline: "It's on Nantucket. It's a Conference. Did we leave anything out?"). This is a confabulation of about 170 people, mainly New England high techers with a slant toward hard core business and finance people. So, with my usual perversity, I'm trying out a presentation that is focused directly away from the bright light of money. I'm trying to communicate in 45 minutes what I think Small Pieces is about. That means getting abstract and conceptual in public. As I'm saying on my title slide: "Today's debut is tomorrow's rough draft."

I want to end by saying the way in which the Web is ours because I think this is something that business usually doesn't appreciate. We're off having ourselves a good time on the Web, blogging with our buddies, emailing our pals, being who we are, and then we go to a business site and suddenly it's all about them. "Oooh, aren't our products just so gosh-durned splendid? Please sit still while we tell you all about them!" Bullhorn at a cocktail party. But I don't want to say that the Web is "ours" in an Us vs. Them way. I mean that it's putting us small pieces together in new ways.

So, I thought I'd try the following formulation:

The Web is nothing without links. It's architected on links. But

Links = Passion + Voice

I put in a link because I care enough about something to send you towards it and away from my own site. And I do so within a context (a page, an email msg) written in my own voice. In fact, my choice of links is very much an expression of my voice. Without voice, the Web would be a mere information resource.

And this gets at what is for me the contradiction that above all others — e.g., the contradiction between the Web being both mass-ive and full of individuals who don't become face-less in the mass — gets at the pull of the Web: On the Web we join with others who share our passions, but we do so in our own unique voices. Sameness and difference, the ultimate contradiction. If the Web lets us resolve such a basic duality — which means embracing both sides fully and simultaneously — no wonder it matters so damn much.

Now, let me pull back from the dread disease: Ontological Overstatement. It's not as if we've never overcome this contradiction before. In fact, we resolve the duality every time we have a conversation with someone in the real world. The importance of the Web, in this regard, is that as a medium (because of its hyperlinked architecture) it enables the resolution of this duality on a scale we've never seen before.

In line with yesterday's Fun with Numbers, here's another puzzler. All you have to do is figure out how many zeroes follow the numbers in the following factoid, culled from today's Boston Globe:

There are 5____ tenured professors of philosophy in the US.
BONUS: Of those, 7____ are African-Americans.

From a quiz about communications comes this factoid:

The US Postal Service was handling ___ pieces of mail per year as of 1886, according to the US Bureau of the Census.

See if you can get within an order of magnitude of the right answer.

The always intellectually generous Peterme responds to my comments on an article on postmodernism by Chip Morningstar

Chip has an even better essay on his site, describing the design of the first multi-player virtual environment. Some interesting thoughts on "creating a world" online.

I figure you'll enjoy some of the links here (talks of "space" on the web!)

And I wrote a response to Gladwell's "Social Life of Paper" essay that you saw a bit back... it's stimulated some decent thought on my site...

Freepint, a site that publishes an interesting and useful UK newsletter called PubCrawl, has published part 1 of Laurel Clyde's intro to weblogs. Straightforward, informative, balanced and voiceless. Here's her tell-'em-what-you're-going-to-tell-'em paragraph:

This article will first discuss the question, "What is a weblog?", and then describe types of weblogs. Following this is a section dealing with how weblogs are created, with reference to popular weblog creation software and services. Some examples of quality weblogs are described and an overview is provided of weblogs in the field of library and information science. Some lists and directories of weblogs, and search engines for weblogs, are identified. The article concludes with a brief discussion of what weblogs might do for you.