Evelyn Rodriguez usefully distinguishes authentic voice from credible voice. I still think, however, that the concept of authenticity is a failed attempt to express something important. We’ve gotten the terms of the equation wrong so no concept quite fits. That’s why we have so much trouble defining “authenticity” or even agreeing on it.

BTW, Evelyn here links to Tom Peters’ candid talk about what’s gone wrong with his life and the path he’s taking to make it right. It won’t be everyone’s path, but, then, what is?

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danah boyd, Michele Chang and Elizabeth Goodman are running a workshop in Chicago, Nov. 6, on Representations of Digital Identity:

This workshop will address the many ways by which online presentations of self have been — and could be — constructed. In the absence of the body as a source of accountability and social legibility, individuals project a sense of self through multiple layers of mediation, including email addresses, graphic avatars, “friend lists,” and results from search engines. How can we use the body in a mediated world? Or alternately, how can we promote rich modes of interaction that do not rely on the illusion of physical presence?

Great topic and one we ought to get some clarity about before we charge down that other road called “digital identity.” It’s not as if our culture has done such a great job understanding the way being embodied affects who we are.

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Paul Loeb may be coming to your town soon to publicize his anthology, The Impossible Will Take a Little While, a book on political hope that includes pieces by Nelson Mandela, Tony Kushner, Cornel West, Vaclav Havel, Alice Walker and other moral and literary legends.

JOHO Challenge: Show up and see if you can depress him.

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The ultimate trivialization of democracy or telling character detail? You be the judge. (And, yes, by running the link to this video, I am definitely having it both ways. Feels good.)

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From Tom Matrullo, after suffering the worst or Charley:

Thanks to everyone who tried to call or write – apologies to those of you who have been worried about the impact of hurricane Charley on us here in appropriately named Charlotte County, Florida, for the slow reply. I had to drive 50 miles today to get to a working internet connection. We are all alive and ok. Our house, like many in our area, has suffered a lot of damage – roof is half off, wall caved in, ceilings down – i.e. not very habitable. The county is without water, power, phone. The President was good enough to fly in and tie up traffic. (Saw a good bumper sticker: “There is a village in Texas that is missing its idiot.”) There is a lot of good in people here, amid a lot of suffering and loss, and some of the usual negative elements, looting etc. Much help is pouring in from elsewhere, but so far, it doesn’t seem rationally organized, lacking most media to do so. My neighborhood is sort of camping out. We are either camping or staying with friends whose homes are still intact, as the occasion warrants. I hope those of you who live in our area are alive and in good shape – do let us know – you’re in our thoughts and hearts.

Thanks again for all the good wishes….

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How do people take notes these days? I’ve poked around this list of outliners and note takers but nothing seems to do exactly what I want. But my needs are pretty simple and pretty common, so surely somewhere there’s a piece of software that’ll help.

I’d like an outliner. It doesn’t even have to be very sophisticated. As I read a source, I want to type in brief notes that I can stick into that outline, with some notes stored in multiple places. I only want to type in the bibliographic information once, so it needs some way of annotating the notes with a reference back to the source. That’s it. Anything more than that is gravy. Well, here’s one important lump I’d like in the gravy: I’d like to be able to assign multiple topics to each note and then be able to sort them by topic or source. (Sticking them into the outline structure should count as assigning them a topic.) So, yes, this thing at its heart is a database with an outliner for presentation and manipulation. Is that too much to ask?

I have Microsoft OneNote (see disclosure), but it’s too unstructured for my needs, and it lacks the bibliographic function. A bunch of the applications I looked at have strong outlining capabilities but don’t recognize that entries strewn about the outline actually come from the same place.

Surely I’m working the way lots and lots of people work. What are y’all using?

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David Akin has started something that ought to become standard issue for all blogs: An upfront disclosure statement of who pays for the blog and where the conflicts of interest might be. (This should make Zephyr Teachout of the Dean campaign happy; I spent some time with her at the Demo Convention and she wanted to see something just like this happen.)

So, now we can argue for the next 9 months about exactly what ought to go into one of these statements, and who’s more disclosive than whom, but let’s at least get started. Here’s a first draft of mine. I’ll fix it up and link to it somewhere prominently on this page.

Disclosure Statement

I pay for this blog. No one pays me to write it or to say particular things in it. That includes all forms of compensation, including offering to shovel my walk or tell me that I look like I’ve lost some weight. I don’t run ads, no one pays me under the table, and I don’t sell JOHO t-shirts or coffee mugs. I don’t own stock and the couple of companies I invested in went broke a long time ago, so I’ve got nothing to tout except the companies and people I’m enthusiastic about. So, what the hell am spending so much damn time blogging for? Now you’ve got me all depressed.

I use Movable Type, for which I was happy to pay Mena and Ben Trott. I get a great deal on hosting from friends of mine, and I’d be happy to say nice things about them in my blog if they wanted me to because those things would be true.

I make much of my living as a marketing consultant and as a speaker, although I spend most of my time writing. When I write about one of the companies I’m working for, I note it in the body of the entry. I’m not going to list the companies I’m currently working for because that’s between them and me. I will disclose them (and have disclosed them in the past) if I talk about them on my blog. (None of them has ever asked me to mention them, btw.) Also, I’m on a bunch of advisory boards, including: a John Kerry tech policy advisory board, Metacarta, Microsoft (for OneNote), SocialText, Technorati, and Yahoo! (for their local services). I don’t get compensated for participating in these boards, unfortunately.

Authors sometimes send me free copies of their books. Often, explicitly or implicitly, they are looking for a mention. If I like the book, I may indeed mention it. If the author is a friend of mine, I’m pretty likely to mention it – because that’s what friends do – and I’m also much more likely to like it than some book that arrives from a PR agent. I’m probably not going to tell you that I got a free copy. Why? Because it doesn’t matter, because it makes me feel like I’m boasting, and because it encourages people I don’t know to send me copies of their books. Also, it reads funny.

Inevitably, I use my judgment. For example, there are times when the mention is so slight or inocuous that the disclaimer would be out of place. For example, my service to the Microsoft OneNote board seems to consist of my filling out a product survey for them occasionally, so if I write something about, say, why Microsoft’s MediaPlayer’s digital rights management policy sucks, I probably won’t bother explaining that I’m on an uncompensated advisory board for a different Microsoft product. I also wouldn’t mention that from about 1991-3, when I worked for Interleaf, I managed that company’s marketing relationship with Microsoft, unless it seems relevant. Life’s too intertwingly. That’s why we make judgment calls.

All I can promise is that I will be honest with you and never write something I don’t believe in because someone is paying me as part of a relationship you don’t know about. Put differently: All I’ll hide are the irrelevancies.

If you don’t like this or disagree, let me know.

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Jeneane has been blogging helpfully about Hurricane Charley and points to this blog that makes for some homespun dramatic reading. Be sure to read it in reverse page-al order.

Meanwhile, I’ll feel better once Tom Matrullo has posted a “Still here!” blog entry…

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Jay has blogged an atypical piece that is typically brilliant. He asks: Did 9/11 change journalism? Should it have? What story do journalists tell themselves about their role in the “war on terrorism”?

Are journalists who inform citizens of the most powerful and influentual nation in the world participants in the war on terror, in the worldwide struggle for democracy, freedom and markets, because their country is a participant—the biggest by far—and they inform it?

Don’t miss the discussion in the comments.

I only have a simple-minded answer to the question Jay poses in his nuanced post: 9/11 should have helped make even more clear what’s always been the case. Journalists are always embedded because they are human. We humans are fallible, context-bound and self-interested. Our glory is that we can be less so rather than more so. But, we’re stuck with being bodies born into history. Yes, even Peter Jennings.

So, imagine what a relief it would be if journalists felt free to drop the 90-pound pack of bullshit they carry…a relief for us as well as for them. Imagine if American journalists could write about the advance of US troops in Najaf without having to hide the fact that they’re surrounded by Marines who are protecting them from Iraqis who are trying to kill them, that they hope the US wins the battle, that they understand the US’s motives better than Sadr’s, that they know the daily US briefings are full of shit but at least they’re in English, that if push came to shove, they’d pick up a rifle and fire at the Iraqis rather than die with the Marines, but they’d never pick up a rifle and fire at the Marines. Everyone knows this anyway. Why try to hide it?

In fact, being a body embedded in history is the condition for perception, knowledge, narrative and reporting. Fox has got this right-er than the Times. In my embodied, fallible, self-interested opinion.

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For the past few months, I’ve been a contributor to the Worthwhile Magazine blog where a bunch o’ bloggers — including Tom Peters, Halley, David Batstone and the magazine’s editors — talk about what makes working worthwhile. Interesting idea (all hail Halley): Do the blog before the magazine.

Now the magazine itself is getting ready to launch in October, and for US$11 you can have a postal employee slap a copy down on your doorstep (or outside your carton depending on how the Bush economic recovery is working out for you) once a month for a year. There’s a subscription button at the WorthwhileMag blog site.

(FWIW, and by way of disclosure: I have a title with the magazine similar to Senior Editor and will be writing a monthly column. And, Anita Sharpe and Kevin Salwen, the founding editors (ex of the WSJ, with a Pulitzer on one of their shelves), have agreed that in lieu of running a photo of me with the column, they’re instead going to include a scratch ‘n’ sniff strip. Win-win!

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