Giles Turnbull writes in The Guardian on how that Cluetrain stuff worked out now that it’s been five years since the site went up. Good article.

I’m always a bit awkward talking about Cluetrain. I think it was basically right about the value of the Net at a time when the media and most businesses were (IMO) insistently wrong. But, for example, the other day at a conference someone very sweetly thanked me, crediting Cluetrain as the inspiration for the company he’d founded. That’s great to hear, but it also invokes my Flight or Polite instinct. Cluetrain tried to articulate ideas that were just below the surface (and occasionally above the surface) in the Web community, but now the co-authors sometimes get credit for the ideas.

Also, I don’t like reading what I write. That explains why at the end of The Guardian article I’m quoted as saying that I don’t remember what was in the book. Of course I don’t! Do you think authors sit around rereading their books? My books terrify me because I know they contain wrong ideas and passages that read like sandpaper, yet they’re still out there for anyone to read. (And then I read someone like Steve Johnson and think I should just give up entirely. Sigh.)

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The Passion of the Present is out to raise awareness of the Sudan:

In Darfur, a region in southern Sudan approximately the size of Texas, over a million people are threatened with torture and death at the hands of marauding militia and a complicit government. Imagine a militia that forces parents to choose whether their children will be burned alive or shot to death. Imagine that in the very same month the world remembers the genocides of Cambodia and Rwanda, the unfolding news of another in Sudan is barely heard and largely ignored.

It includes a useful list of background info on the Sudan.

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The amount of spam I’m receiving seems to have stepped up significantly over the past few days, going from about 1,200 per day to about 2,000. I’m not seeing any particular pattern to the increase – they’re not all coming from the same address, they’re not all advertising remote control cars or Nigerian. beefsteak mines, nor has my address shown up on some high-traffic site, to the best of my knowledge. (Ironically, after Doc and I published World of Ends, my spam rate got a boost.)

Is it just me?

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Harvard’s Berkman Center submitted a friend-of-the-court brief in the case of Capital Records, et al. v. Noor Alaujan:

The amici parties in the brief are individual members at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, acting not in the interest of any of the parties in the case but in the interest of helping the Court balance the competing claims of the Plaintiffs and Defendants.

This case requires balancing rights of copyright holders, who allege harms caused by the distribution of their songs on peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks, with protections for individual consumers accused of copying and distributing these songs on such networks. The briefing outlines some of the factual matters in the case, such as possible errors in the methods by which these users are identified, as well as more substantive legal issues such as potential fair use defenses and the question of whether merely storing files in shared folders violates Plaintiffs’ rights of public distribution.

In this brief, amici parties urge the Courts to exercise caution in granting uniform remedies, given the diversity of possible factual and legal defenses that might be raised by individual users.

Makes me proud to be a Berkperson.

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I’ve been a happy but puzzled Vonage user. I thought I understood pretty well how VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) calls make it from my telephone onto the Internet, but I couldn’t figure out how they snake their way back into the phone system to ring a non-VOIP phone in, say, Malaysia (or Roxbury, for that matter). So, I called Vonage and asked them.

When you subscribe to Vonage, you get a modem that plugs into your cable/DSL modem. You plug a plain old phone into the Vonage modem so it can convert the phone’s analog signal into digital, package it into the sorts of packets the Internet expects, pat them on the tush and send them on their way. As Louis Holder, Vonage’s Executive Vice President of Product Development, explained, Vonage has done deals with phone companies in each of the cities where you can get Vonage service. The phone companies sell phone numbers to Vonage that Vonage then offers its subscribers. When a call comes in for a Vonage subscriber, the phone company sends it to a Vonage gateway co-located at the site, treating Vonage as one of its customers. The gateway then sends the call to the appropriate subscriber’s telephone.

But how about when a Vonage customer calls someone who isn’t a Vonage customer? Suppose I want to call someone in Malaysia? Vonage has done deals with companies such as Qwest and GlobalCrossing around the world, installing gateways that turn digital signals back into analog for local delivery. With the Internet, not only is all politics local, but so are all phone calls.

When I asked Louis how Vonage is doing as the telephone companies begin to roll out their own VOIP plans, he said that things are going great. “We’re able to pick the best rates for each market,” he said, explaining why it’s $0.02/minute to Hong Kong but $0.04 to Copenhagen. About the Big Boy competitors now offering the service, he added: “Their first year will be spend fixing bugs.”

By the way, I asked how they pronounce “VOIP” inside Vonage. It’s “voip” as in “void,” although they spell it out for newbies and customers. Now if we can only decide how we want to pronounce “GIF”…

[I am 100% certain I have gotten something wrong here. I’m sure you will tell me what.]

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David Batstone at Worthwhile (where I also blog) expresses skepticism that is not only appropriate but inevitable when it comes to corporations issuing reports about how well they’re upholding their self-defined social responsibilities. Some of the reports may be honest but they suffer from Electronic Ballot syndrome: By their nature, they engender disbelief.

I’d be more impressed if corporations enabled an independent, third-party group to investigate them and issue reports. Is there any such group that gets full cooperation and support from the corporations it researches?

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I’m in Somewhere Pretty, MD, doing a keynote for the I-Media conference, getting to yell at them about why marketing alienates customers. I’ll be on the road most of the day and probably won’t be able to blog anything except, well, this…

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Ralph Reed (here and here) was the creator of the Christian Coalition and is currently the SE Regional Chairman for Bush-Cheney ’04.

As a result of the new technology, we are turning to the politics of an earlier time — face to face, neighbor to neighbor. The stakes are high and the ideological divide is more even than since the 1880s. Also, we’ve lost confidence in the dominant media.

Howard Greenstein: What do you mean by grassroots? You seem to talk about grassroots and what receives messages from the center.

Reed: MoveOn.org tried doing bottom up and ended up with an ad on their site. As you empower people, you also have to maintain message discipline. [“Message discipline”…I’m oddly aroused.]

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Little known fact: I elected Senator Wyden. Perhaps an overstatement, but aroune 1979, my wife and I lived in Portland OR for a year. Wyden was running for Congress for the first time. My wife called his office with a question about one of his stands, and dang if Wyden himself didn’t call back and talk with my wife for 20 minutes. So, she and I went door to door for him, and have been Wyden fans ever since.

Joe Trippi says that we shouldn’t be calling it the “information age.” It’s really the age of transparency and empowerment. The Dean Campaign was just a blink, one of the first glimpses of how the changes are going to happen. WRT to TV, Joe says that in 1956 when Nixon gave his Checkers speech, “Bullshit had a medium.”

Wyden: The challenge is to make sure that the decentralization is accompanied by as much accoutantabilility as is possible in the public interest.

Trippi: Authentication on the Net is very tricky. About two weeks before Iowa, an email went out from DeanForAmericas.com asking for volunteers but not if you were gay. (Note the plural in the domain name.)

Wyden: I helped kill Poindexter’s TIA. (Isenberg from the audience: “It’s back as the Matrix.”)

Trippi talks about how the FEC rules work against grassroots organizing. For example, you have 15 days after the quarter ends to file a report on all contributions. That’s fine when you have a few thousand large donors, but when you have 240,000 donors, you end up wheeling in 20′ of reports.

Trippi: The Kerry campaign, like every campaign, is about “Look at me, I’m amazing!” The thing the Dean campaign got right was that he said, “Look at you, you’re amazing.” Kerry ought to say, “I cannot catch this guy by myself. But you can.” Two million Americans would put in $100 and we would take our country back.

Jerry Michalski: What do we do after the campaign?

Trippi: If people were asked to engage and contribute in the campaign, Kerry could govern the same way: “I’m not going to get this health care plan passed. You will.” If we had a leader who believed that people were there to catch them before they hit the sidewalk, he’d do amazing things.

Q: Will the Republicans figure this out?

Trippi: Absolutely. They already have.

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BuzzMachine has a list of bloggers blogging the conference. Also try Bloglines.

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