Eric Reasons

Vote "NO" on SOPA - An Open Letter to Congressman Thaddeus McCotter

2011-11-17T16:51:00.001-05:00

An open letter the Thaddeus McCotter,
U.S. Rep. for Michigan's 11th District, and my congressional representative, whom I much admire.

Dear Congressman McCotter:

Please vote NO on SOPA (HR-3261)

Why is SOPA/Protect-IP such bad legislation?

First, let us agree that preventing online piracy is a noble and worthy goal. I don't fault legislators for trying to protect intellectual property. As is so often the case though, good intentions are no excuse for bad legislation. And SOPA is nothing if not "bad legislation".

SOPA is a bill that aims to thwart piracy by turning ISPs, website operators, credit card companies, and domain registrants into police. It guts the DMCA's "Safe Harbor" provision, opening the gateway for Hollywood to shut down websites it believes to be infringing upon intellectual property rights without due process. Lastly, it imposes a huge cost of regulatory compliance on entities that are some of our most economically vibrant, in a time when there aren't many bright spots in the economy.

As is so often the case, the damage it does won't just be to existing services, sites, and companies, but to all the innovation that will be strangled in infancy because a tech company's first hire will have to be a lawyer instead of an engineer.

Make no mistake - if this law were in place 15 years ago, there would be no YouTube, no Facebook, no Google, no iTunes, no eBay, no Craigslist, no Etsy. You could probably name the corporations and organizations that would have benefitted had their business models never been disrupted by the Internet. That list will look a lot like the list of organizations who spent $91 Million lobbying for SOPA. This is not an accident.

In 2006 Yochai Benkler wrote, in _The Wealth of Networks_:

For the most part[...] the state in both the United States and Europe has played a role in supporting the market-based industrial incumbents of the twentieth-century information production system at the expense of the individuals who make up the emerging networked information economy. Most state interventions have been in the form of either captured legislation catering to incumbents, or, at best, well-intentioned but wrongheaded efforts to optimize the institutional ecology for outdated modes of information and cultural production.

Sound familiar?

Destined to Fail

Even if SOPA passed, and all of the effects that I listed above were somehow mitigated, it wouldn't do a thing to slow down, let alone halt, piracy.

The internet is built to route around "damage". That's what it was designed for. And the internet sees censorship of this kind as damage. The major tool for "taking down" an infringing site is to claim its DNS entry (which turns a name like youtube.com into an address that your computer can connect to like 74.125.225.77), and pointing it to a different IP address.

Routing around internet censorship will simply be in the form of the distibution of IP addresses instead of DNS names. We saw this effect when wikileaks.org was "blocked" in 2010 (voluntarily, by its DNS provider). People just went to the IP address directly, and mirror sites popped up to distribute copies of the data.

This kind of "takedown" won't even slow a pirate down. But it will incur a tremendous amount of regulatory overhead for legitimate companies to contend with.

If I were addressing this plea to my friends on the left I might say that this bill is being bought and paid for with $91 Million in lobbying from the RIAA, MPAA, and Hollywood. I might say that they are the 1%, and they'd like to keep it that way, even if it were to harm the consumer, the public, the economy, and the United States.

However, this message is for the one person who has represented me best in Washington, and I know from long admiration, that you, Congressman McCotter, share many of my views from the right. Therefore I say that this legislation is nothing more than rent-seeking from a industry whose business model is failing in the face of innovation. This is the same industry who has tried to legislatively hinder everything from VCRs to MP3 players to cable television, all in the name of protecting their historically comfortable profit margins. They are unwilling or unable to innovate, and are fearful of the creative destruction that awaits them in the face of their obstinance. It's easier for them to petition Congress than it is to face the 21st century, and even if this legislation comes to pass it will do absolutely nothing to save their outdated business model. They are using their present position of relative strength to permanently hinder the one industry that, more than any other, shows promise for American workers in the 21st century.

Finally, (and only slightly in jest):

What would Youtube's fate be under SOPA if the Beatles or Roy Orbison decided that this video of your band playing FarmAid was infringing material?

Congressman McCotter, please consider voting NO on SOPA.

Thank you,
Eric Reasons
11th MI resident and proud Thaddeus McCotter supporter

Professor Jarvis's Homework Assignment: Jobless Future?

2011-08-06T11:39:00.000-04:00

I'm glad that Jeff Jarvis is a professor. Nobody gives great homework assignments like his. I'll welcome comments here as always, but follow the link below if you want to join in the real discussion.

Jarvis announced his intention to give the following talk at SXSW on Google+:

The SXSW proposal title is, "Honey, we shrunk the economy."
The proposal: Technology now leads to efficiency over growth. That means that we're not going to have a jobless recovery. We're going to have a jobless future. Pick any industry and see how technology, the internet, global connectedness, and transparent markets are bringing tremendous efficiency. Newspapers have shrunk by hundreds of thousands of jobs and may disappear -- while news expands at less cost. Borders, Circuit City and untold stores are gone, replaced by a new retail supply chain -- aka, Amazon. Construction has imploded and won't reinflate and recreate jobs. We will discuss the implications for business, technology, education, and policy. Instead of bailing out the old institutions -- GM, banks, even governments -- we should enable and invest in the entrepreneurs who will disrupt them. Education must shift to nurturing those entrepreneurs and retraining the jobless. We must invest in efficiency. Help me explore these ideas, this future.

Questions I propose to address with the room:

Why is technology different now? Why isn't it creating more jobs than it kills?
How are incumbent institutions preventing change and slowing this progress?
How should government help this process? Can it?
How must education change to serve such a world?
Are we headed to an economy no longer built on growth but instead on efficiency?

And that room, I hope, will be filled with he entrepreneurs and technologists who are creating this future, the investors who are funding it, the educators who are supplying it, the government wonks who should be enabling it and the rest of us who are trying to figure it out.

First off, I'm not sure that we're destined for a jobless economy, and I'm not sure Jarvis is either, but he likes to go a bit over-the-top, (it's his shtick) so I won't quibble with the plainness of his statement.

I do have some direct comments to some of his points. Jeff's original text highlighted below:

Education must shift to nurturing those entrepreneurs and retraining the jobless. We must invest in efficiency.

Retraining can soften the blow somewhat, but let's face it--most government jobs programs are largely about digging, and then filling holes. And, not to be tautological, but if efficiency is killing jobs without replacing them, is investing in efficiency going to change that effect, or just speed it up?

On to his questions:

1) Why is technology different now? Why isn't it creating more jobs than it kills?

It may eventually build new markets we didn't know existed. The entire news/entertainement/leisure industry only popped into existence as we gained the leisure time to spend on it (See Shirky's talk about the 5-day work week and cognitive surplus). Filling our leisure time wasn't a viable market until the 20th century, and it was created out of whole cloth thanks to the technologies that enabled efficiency (i.e. the assembly line and agricultural automation). I wonder if these transitions were as smooth as they look from our viewpoint in history. Maybe people asked these exact same questions as they moved from farms to cities?

The unique problem right now is that many people think they've identified this next stage of post-industrial economy as "the knowledge economy" (something you tacitly appear to agree with when you suggest retraining), which is when the second part of the problem kicks in (Shirky's "double whammy" you commented on earlier): if we're increasingly creating and sharing for each other for free, there's going to be an economy there to retrain for? We are starting to use our leisure time to help fill the leisure time of others, thanks to the Internet. This new internet infrastructure is extremely efficient, and maintaining it can't possibly be enough of a need to employ the displaced. We need something new, and it has to be something that we're not really willing to do for free (that's why we get paid, right?)

2) How are incumbent institutions preventing change and slowing this progress?

Short answer "any way they can." The MPAA and RIAA are increasingly defending intellectual property rights in the face of a sea-change of technology that shows us how fragile and impossible it is to keep a business running when you depend on people *not* copying bits.

Software companies are increasingly engaged in ridiculous patent wars that stifle innovation instead of spur it on.

I'm not weighing in on whether intellectual property as a concept is good or bad, (I have my opinions) but I think in the face of technology today, it's simply untenable in the long run. The technology to copy bits will outstrip the technology and cost to enforce their protection. It will be increasingly diificult to impose artificial scarcity, and thus impose market forces on what are essentially ideas and expressions.

And if you think it's bad now, wait until we get 3D printers online, cheap, and ubiquitous.

3) How should government help this process? Can it?

I divide my answer into two parts. The cynic in me says, flat out, "It won't". In 2006, Yochai Benkler wrote, in _The Wealth of Networks_:

For the most part[...] the state in both the United States and Europe has played a role in supporting the market-based industrial incumbents of the twentieth-century information production system at the expense of the individuals who make up the emerging networked information economy. Most state interventions have been in the form of either captured legislation catering to incumbents, or, at best, well-intentioned but wrongheaded efforts to optimize the institutional ecology for outdated modes of information and cultural production.

I have found no indication that this trend is going to change.

On the other hand, the pragmatist in me says that, if there was a way that government could help, not the transition itself, but to ease the pain of it, it would be to stop trying to inflate the economy to cope with all of our debt (personal and national), and find a more meaningful way to deleverage ourselves. Many of the benefits people could see from the disruption and efficiency brought about by technology rely on lowering our cost-of-living through it. effectively deflating the economy. We may make less, nominally, but we'd spend less, thanks to efficiency being passed on to us. Let's call this the "Walmart" effect for a moment. The problem we'd have to solve is paying back all of our debts in deflated dollars. In a deflationary economy, you borrow cheap money up front, but then have to pay it back with the same "amount" (nominally) of expensive money down the road. It's a non-starter with all of us leveraged to our eyeballs. I don't see an easy way through this problem.

4) How must education change to serve such a world?

Mostly, I think our expectations of education have to change. Let's leave the skills and knowledge aside we are supposed to get from our education aside for a moment. In the 20th century, the education system was built to teach us certain intrinsic values as well as skills. In k-12, we show up on time, 5 days a week, and have a teacher broadcast accepted knowledge top-down from the front of the room, which we were quietly to consume. Then students regurgitate spoonfed answers back to verify them for quality control. This level of education would largely prepare us for blue-collar jobs.

In college we're taught, in addition, how to navigate a complicated beauracracy, get our paperwork filed the right way, and the top-down model was expanded to show that, if properly trained and credentialed, we may be able to add to that knowledge base in our professional lives. This would prepare us for white-collar jobs.

This education system was built in the 20th century for 20th century work. Entrepreneurs are almost always some form of outcast our outsider to this progression. We trained against entrepreneurship, and instead trained excellent workers. If you jumped through all the hoops the right way, you were rewarded with the reasonable expectation of a career.

We need to teach entrepreneurship, independence, and initiative from the start. I don't know how to achieve this, or if it can even be done, but I think that's the target we need to aim for.

5) Are we headed to an economy no longer built on growth but instead on efficiency?

Efficiency can fuel growth if there's a proper channel for it. When agricultural automation started taking over farms in the 19th and 20th centuries, people started to leave for the cities, to build the machines that would make our food instead of making the food directly. This produced a new set of problems as we coped with managing the needs of city life. Each new practical problem to solve created a market. We need to transport machines to the country and food back to the city. We need to store food in the city instead of consume it on the spot. We need food prepared for us. We need sanitation, advanced construction, a more concentrated police force, etc. We need services and entertainment to soak up our free time on the weekends and cope with our alienation from work that was less connected to the products of our labor (God, I sound like a Marxist). Each of these needs and desires created brand new markets, entrepreneurs, and and ever increasing need for new technology. (Whew, capitalist again.)

As we migrated to cities in the 19th and 20th centuries, for the first time ever, our life wasn't just about working sunup to sundown to put food on the table. Work was part of our lives but not the sum total. I think there's a kernel of insight here into what possibilities are next for us.

The real question is, what are the direct and personal needs of the 21st century that we need to pay people to do, and which will we do for each other for essentailly free thanks to the Internet and intrinsic motivation to create and share? What markets are going to have to spring up out of whole cloth to fill those needs and desires that we won't fill intrinsically?

Hopefully some of the very smart people listening to your talk at SXSW have some ideas.

Jobless Recovery or Jobless Future: A Reply to Jeff Jarvis

2011-08-05T12:47:00.000-04:00

suggests over on a Google+ post, that "We're not going to have a jobless recovery. We're going to have a jobless future. "

Back in 2009, he sent me and others off on this topic, so I thought it deserved a thorough response now that he's announced his intention to focus on the issue again. I wanted to reproduce my response here, but I encourage any readers to carry on the discussion over on his g+ post.

Here's my response:

Jeff -- you sent me down this rabbit hole back in 2009, and I haven't emerged since. I'm glad to see you've circled back around to it, because I think it's terribly important, and few people could focus attention on it like you can.

I take it as given that disruptive innovation, particularly at present, yeilds efficiency more than it yields growth. (Mike Masnick would probably kick me in the shins for saying this so plainly, as he did here).

In many ways, however, I think Masnick is correct. The post he was responding to was focussed merely on the *threat* side of the equation. We can't forget that the upside of this disruptive efficiency is that consumers reap the benefits of it in terms of lower cost-of-living.

So the real question becomes: can we reap the benefits at a rate that corresponds to the pain that transitioning the workforce is costing us?

As I said in the linked post above:

"[Disruptive efficiencies] cost jobs and are not likely to replace them. Too many of these jobs relied on the traditional inefficiencies of their business models--inefficiencies that have been *eliminated*, not just shifted to new markets. The closer the markets are to intellectual property, the faster they fall.
Lastly, all of these displaced professionals are going to go seeking work in still-viable markets, if they can attempt the transition at all. The labor supply will increase as both knowledge markets and traditional markets restructure to take advantage of new efficiencies, and that restructuring will include taking advantage of the aforementioned increase in labor supply. Hours will be cut. Wages will fall. So too will the cost of living fall as these efficiencies are passed on the consumer. *The balance between these two forces will be the key to determining how painful the transition is.*"

Again, is our current economic discomfort a temporary situation, caused by the difficulties in transitioning our workforce, or is it a more permanent restructuring? The same question may have been put to a farmer at the turn of the 20th century, or (closer to home for me) a factory worker in 1980's Detroit. Today, America produces more food than it did 100 years ago, and (contrary to commonly-held belief) manufactures more than it did 25 years ago. But much like you point out in your post, increased production (in those markets) does not equal increased employment when new efficiencies are introduced.

Consumers may reap the benefits of efficiency, but can it make up for the costs in terms of employment? Finding a meaningful measurement of those two rates of change, I think, are key to properly addressing this very important predicament.

Followup questions still to be framed and wrestled with:

1) Unintended consequences of deflation:

Assuming that deflation wouldn't be so terribly if we could capture the benefits of it (i.e. Would you take a 20% pay cut if bread, housing, music, movies, etc. were 20% cheaper?), what other unintended consequences would deflation hold (since public policy at present is trying desperately to use inflation to ease our debt burden)? You see, we've already agreed to past prices for these things (largely mortgages), but would be asked to pay them back in future deflated dollars. This is a huge problem, since we're all in debt up to our ears.

2) In a world of bits. not atoms (your term, which I love, Jeff), we're increasingly creating value for each other without exchanging money. Price can't always capture value. What happens to the supply-and-demand curve when supply is practically infinite? See my post on Scarcity, Abundance, and the Knowledge Economy.

Lastly, you may want to check out this excerpt from Kevin Carson's book as well. It's barking up the same tree. It also rightfully credits you with stirring up this conversation in the first place.

Google+: Managing Community and Audience

2011-07-03T13:27:00.000-04:00

(First, let me apologize if this post is specific to Google+, a service most people aren't even allowed in yet. However, there's already a lot of chatter about what it is and what it is not, and I wanted to collect my thoughts.)

It was sheer luck that a conversation I had a month ago led me to pen some thoughts about the qualities that can make or break social media platforms. At the time, I had no idea that Google+ was less than 30 days from launching it's "Field Test". In that post, I cite some literature on the "150-connection gap", which shows that the limit for social circles seems to settle in at about 150 real connections to real people, and that when you start interacting with more than those 150 real connections, you're acting as an Authority does to an Audience, not participating in a community/conversation. I then posit a hypothetical new social media service, and claim that if it can't "cross the 150-connection gap", then it will have a difficult time gaining traction amongst the general population. Facebook and Twitter eventually became decent at managing this dynamic. Buzz was horrible at it (more on that, below). So what can Google+ do to cross the 150-connection gap? The key is in the Circles feature, and in "re-sharing".

Will we "Make Lists"?

Mark Zuckerberg famously said "Guess what? Nobody wants to make lists."

I know it's just a single data point, but I think Gina Trapani has a pretty strong answer to that question.

So let's assume for the sake of argument, that we're willing to make lists by using Circles, because they are useful to us. How many times have you decided not to post something to twitter because the audience is too broad, won't care about what you write, or it's a little *too* personal? Let's assume we are more willing to share with an audience that we think will be more interested in the topic we're sharing. Google is betting the farm on it.

What Circles can do for us

Presently some early g+ users are complaining that the Stream is too "noisy".

Robert Scoble documents this issue well here, where he says:

So, until Google gives us the ability to control noise Google+ will continue not being used by average people (my metaphorical “yo momma and yo daddy.”
The thing is what is noise control?
Two things, one of which Google is known for:
1. Search. The ability to say “show me all cool new items that talk about venture capital.”
2. Sifting. This is similar to search, but goes beyond. “Show me all future items that talk about venture capital.”

Following someone does not necesarily corellate to targeted ideas. I follow Jeff Jarvis to hear about social media development and it's impact on disrupted institutions. I get a lot of penis news too.

Essentially, Scoble is highlighting a problem that Buzz was also notorious for: If you follow a famous person, you are beset with noise that drowns out your "real" connections, and leaves you little ability to gain topical control over what you hear from whom.

Scoble wants downstream filtering (read, "an algorithm") to help him select what to read (and this is by no means a bad idea, escpecially given how good Google is at this sort of thing).

Google+ tackles this problem head on with their Circles feature, but the present limited population of g+ is hiding how useful Circles can be. The most useful part about circles is that they *filter twice* - I pick who I follow, and they pick what they share *topically*. In g+, the intersection of these interests will be what I actually see.

It is a huge step forward in crowdsourcing curation. It can hugely reduce the noise that a reader gets compared to twitter and facebook. It may rely on the author to select their (initial) audience,which may seem inconvenient, but in practice this is exactly the feature we've been clamoring for in other social media tools. Circles finally gives us that power.

So why don't we see this emergent property of Circles yet?

Presently, Google+ is populated only by "Internet Celebrities" (to quote Leo Laporte), and their nerdly hangers-on (myself included), and I think this population is masking this very important feature, making the graph (at present) look more like this:

The Internet Celebrities are followed by almost everybody, and they're making everything public, as is their way. (Your mom isn't on g+ yet, and most g+ conversations going on right now are--surprise!--about g+).

If Circles allow an author to feel as though they're sharing with a targeted community (and more than just the Internet Celebrity/Early Adopter community is present), then they'll be useful enough at the source to help more open sharing, and more targeted conversation. This can solve the "Community" problem of social networks, but what about the transition past the 150-connection gap to an "Audience"?

Sharing, Resharing, and crossing the 150-Connection gap

Jeff Jarvis highlights a currently talked-about issue with re-sharing, where he essentially says, that disabling re-sharing stifles discovery by a third-party audience. (From my standpoint, this is a kiss-of-death to an emerging social media technology). Sometimes, we may *want* that discovery stifled, and should be allowed to announce it to our circle by disabling re-sharing (which is, by no means, a guarantee that a malicious member of the audience won't find a way around it--Jeff's excellent point). The question is really a matter of *defaults* (Defaults matter!), and I'm glad to see that g+'s default is to allow re-sharing.

Why?

Because re-sharing is one mechanism by which we crowdsource curation which is important in the long-term for social technologies, and the Internet in general. But it also allows a relevant post to jump from Community to Audience, which is, as cited before, the key feature for a social technology to "take off". That's not to say we ought not to offer as much control to the author as possible over their intended audience, but we should leave that control to the social pressures that work so well in this space, as opposed to relying on technology to lock away information in a space that was actually built for sharing it. We need the system simply to promote transparency of the author's intentions to their chosen circle (i.e. to let your circle know that the message was intended for them and only them), and let social pressures handle the rest. (If you violate my trust, you'll find yourself quickly removed from that Circle).

Having the ability to disable re-sharing is an important signal to the audience that this is for them only (see Gina Trapani's excellent thoughts on why having the ability to disable re-sharing is important here), but hiding away anything not explicitly marked "public" would hamstring any social media technology before it has a chance to even leave the ground.

Conclusion

Google+ looks like it has the genetic makeup to be a very impressive social technology. If we find utility in "making lists", and sharing defaults are kept open, it has the tools to help people interact with thier close communities, as well as allowing relevant content to jump to a wider audience. There are many other hurdles to clear to see if Google+ will gain the critical mass of users needed to sustain any new social media technology, but it's off to a very promising start.

Bridging the Gap: Authority, 150 connections, and the Power Law

2011-06-05T12:22:00.002-04:00

---150 Connections: The difference between a Community and an Audience---

I found myself in a conversation with friend and sometimes mentor, Nathan Hughes (@ndh313), about the upper bound of one's social connections. Back in the 90's Robin Dunbar proposed an upper limit of around 150 real social connections (knowing who a person is and what their relationship is to you). Scientists have recently used Twitter as a laboratory to confirm that this number holds true, even with all the recent advances in social networking technology. This number has also been confirmed by actual practice throughout the range of human experiences, from hunter-gatherer societies to corporate organizations, to the U.S. military.

In our new social media landscape, this limit seems to manifest itself in two interesting effects:

Most of you have probably already observed the first effect, and it is unlikely to surprise you: those of us who follow hundreds or thousands on Twitter or Facebook will ignore most of the traffic in favor of our "core community" of around, surprise, 150 people--the people we have built real social ties with. This is well-understood enough that Facebook tries to predict this core community based on conversations, and filter the newsfeed appropriately.

Second, the rest of our connections (the ones we don't maintain more structured formal ties with) fall out of the conversation paradigm, and become an audience. To a small number of people, we're a member of their community; to everyone else, we are (however transitory) set up as some sort of Authority. Broadcast mechanics take over, and the conversation becomes one-way, because of the limits of human attention, and not the limits of the social media tools we use. When a social network extends our reach as an individual beyond our core communities, it does so in such a way as to set us up as an author(ity), not a conversant. There doesn't seem to be a way around this issue. It's how humans are hard-wired. This almost seems counterintuitive to those of us who've grown up digital, because we see traditional authority structures being challenged everywhere from academics, to the music industry, to the media ("the" media, hah!).

---Author(ity)---

The Internet generation isn't getting rid of "experts", we're just changing the criteria.

Who is to be considered an "expert" on a topic is quickly becoming an ad-hoc, crowdsourced meritocracy. The technology of the 20th century set up firm barriers between community and authority (you were either on TV, or not; a published author, or not). Social media tools have greatly softened that barrier, to the point where many of us can drift in or out of authority, or remain a member of one community, and an authority to another. However, in a web-linked world, contrary to our instincts, Authority is still inherent in the system. That authority is granted by our core communities, however, and not (solely) by some sanctioned social institution. This is the difference between "PhD. X on television said...", and "My friend and sometimes mentor said...". As we each act in our own communities as gates between the communities of others, we lend credence and authority to those voices, sometimes diminishing the authority of traditional incumbent institutions in the process. (More on the social graph as gatekeeper here).

---The Power Law---

The interesting effect of this is as statistically demonstrable as the 150-connections rule. It establishes a power-law relationship inside of networks. Clay Shirky noticed this effect as far back as 2003. For an evenly-distributed bunch of egalitarians, look how often we all quote Clay Shirky! To most of us, he is an "Authority", not a member of our community (more's the pity). Meritous or compelling memes gather an audience because members of various communities lend the meme (or author) credence. As reputation grows across communities, some people get propelled out of the long-tail and into the big-head of the power-law curve and a wider audience. It's at this point that their social networking relationships change: The conversant becomes an author, and they have to address an audience instead of a just a community.

I've noticed this most frequently when listening to Leo Laporte's This Week in Google podcast with Gina Trapani and Jeff Jarvis. Conversations frequently center around various tools and services that are coming online in the social sphere, and I find how often my own likes/dislikes are at odds with the hosts. This is, of course, because I am using these tools to interact with a community, not to manage an audience. Therefore, our criteria for evaluating the usefulness of these tools is fundamentally different. Things that they find terribly useful tend towards those features that make managing an audience easier: Google's Priority Inbox, Twitter, Gina Trapani's own ThinkUp app, etc. We're using all the same tools, but they're using them from the big head of the power law distribution graph, and I from the long tail. I believe this is the reason why a service like Twitter caught on amongst the media traditionalists more than other social technologies: it's natively a broadcast media, and pretty bad at conversations. Which is exactly what media traditionalists are used to.

---Crossing the Gap---

Thanks to social technologies, it's easier than ever to cross the gap from community/member to audience/author. But the most successful social technologies (let's say Facebook and Twitter) succeeded because they were flexible enough to change when their users were faced with the 150-connection barrier. Facebook iterated through many changes, but the most important to managing the crossing were the "Top News" feed, which filters the user's news feed heuristically based on the most common connections, and the creation of "Fan Pages" that center around managing an audience more than participating in a community. Twitter stumbled onto success largely by having a well-documented and widely-used API that allowed the userbase to extend it's functionality to fit their needs on their own. Hashtags and Retweets are both user-created conventions that help bridge the community/audience gap, and were eventually incorporated into Twitter's core functionality. And almost nobody uses Twitter via SMS anymore, as it was originally intended. Google Buzz is an excellent example of how being able to cross the 150-connection barrier can make or break a service. Even though Google had a ready userbase via GMail, and far superior technology for cross-platform integration, it was the inability to service the big head of the power law distribution graph, without destroying the usefulness to the long tail, that held it back. Following even a few popular feeds in Buzz can bury your closer connections, short-circuiting Buzz's usefulness to core communities, and leaving it as an "either-or" tool. (It can service the audience, or it can service a core community, but for any given user, it can't service both). It does *not* help a user cross the gap between community and audience, and therefore remains far less popular than the bigger names in social technology.

This problem of crossing the gap from core community to authority/audience isn't just for social technologies, however. Any form of human collective endeavor suffers from it. How many companies that function well as a startup are unable to take the leap to full-fledged corporation? (Eric Schmidt admits that even Google's biggest problem is managing growth). How many grass-roots political movements get co-opted by established incumbents? (Something the notoriously decentralized Tea Partiers rightly fear). In the connected age, whether you are building a social technology, or cultivating like-minded people to a cause or corporate mission, building a system (or culture) that is flexible enough to accept growth beyond a core community, without destroying the core community in the process, is the key to success. This not only explains the successes and failures of various social technologies, but also explains the rise of the web itself in the face of the far-less flexible traditional media.

Scarcity, Abundance, and the Knowledge Economy. Tightened Up.

2011-04-17T10:25:00.000-04:00

Blogger A^3 spent a little time pondering my writings on Intellectual Property and the Knowledge Economy here. I thought I'd offer my response to his post here as well, as I thought it tightened up some of my earlier writings on the subject.

Also, it's a shame to waste that much decent writing in a comment response. Thanks again A^3. My response follows:
---
A^3:

Thanks for speaking well of my blog posts. I'm very glad that more and more people are giving thought to these issues.

I think the key point when talking about that which can be meaningfully measured by economics, is that the Supply/Demand curve is based on *scarcity*, and in a world where *scarcity* is mostly artificially induced (via copyright and patent), the system is fighting a losing battle to cram 21st century ideas of production into 20th century framework of capitalism and property. The problem with the 21st century is dealing with *abundance* not *scarcity*, and traditional capitalism is a tool to allocate *scarce* resources in teh most efficient way. It says next to nothing about allocation of resources that are abundant.

In short, what happens to the Supply and Demand curve when Supply becomes infinite? It's not so much that economics falls down, as that it *divides by zero*, as it were.

For some goods, (notably, anything relying on materials in the real world) this will never happen (until we get the Star Trek replicators online, of course). However, we see what happens when the product is divorced from natural scarcity:

When music was distributed on vynyl records, there was next to no issue with copying or "piracy". When it moved to magneteic casette and CD, there started to be grumbling about "bootleggers" or "pirates", but the problem was still mostly well-contained because copies required a phsycial medium, and a decent investment of labor on the part of the copier to make the next copy. In short, marginal cast was still far from zero. Come to the early 21st cenntury, and the Internet changes everything: 1 copy could become thousands in the matter of a mouseclick: and recorded music was no longer scarce. It was abundant.

Thus my "bits vs. atoms" split helps me think about where traditional economics holds up, and where it doesn't in the coming decades.

When asking about "what we can reasonably say about the economy of two or three decades down the line" we should be asking ourselves if that which is "important to us" is still going to be *scarce*. If it is, then traditional economics will probably be quite unchanged, and still quite valuable when talking about them (atoms).

On the other hand, if our explosion of non-rival goods has rendered supply infinite for certain sectors of "production", we can reasonably expect the bottom to fall out of those sectors, at least economically.

Maybe these goods/sectors/services/endeavors get propped up by some other intrinsic motivation to create, or maybe they just go away in time. Perhaps the musician creates recorded music as a side-effect of getting paid to perform live, instead of the other way around. (For that matter, I know a lot of people who make music, and don't get paid for it today).

I agree that we don't fully understand what the next step in economics is over the next quarter-century, but I think we can safely assume that at least for some sectors of production, it's not just "opaque", as you say, but *wholly different* than what has come before. And I believe we can start identifying those sectors now, by identifying how reliant upon "Intellectual Property" and artifical scarcity they are.

Thank you again for given my writing such thoughtful consideration. Much like the examples above, I don't get paid for, so *my* intrinsic motivation for doing it is when I see others enjoying it.

-Eric

Cybersecurity and "Internet Freedom" Act: Who Are They Kidding?

2011-02-20T10:28:00.001-05:00

Anytime Congress puts the word "Freedom" in the title of a bill, it means that it's about to curtail the freedoms of whatever other words show up in the title. For instance, the "Cybersecurity and Internet Freedom Act", will limit freedoms in both Cybersecurity and the Internet. Easy, see?

Considering that most Congresspersons can't be trusted to check Snopes.com before e-mailing their bank account numbers to Nigerian princes, I can't see how they think they have enough tech savvy to regulate the Internet properly. And if there's anything Egypt has shown us, it's that we should be making it as hard as possible to let Governments pull the plug on the Internet.

"But Eric! The United States isn't Egypt!! You're crazy to compare the two!!"

Tell that to the 84,000 domains (mistakenly!!) seized and shut down by ICE without so much as a notification to the site operators last month.

Olympia Snowe (Republican-ME) couldn't get this pushed through in 2009 with Rockefeller (Moron-WV), so her companion in the Senate Susan Collins (also Republican-ME) from Maine is trying again in 2011? I have to ask: "What's up, Maine? What lobby do you have up there that's pushing this?"

My take on the 2009 bill can be found here, and not much has changed. Except the title, of course.

The Sound of Silence

2011-02-13T12:50:00.001-05:00

Sorry about how quiet the blog has been lately. Many of the things I like to write about are starting to bleed together in my head. I busted out some mind-mapping tools (Thanks LucidChart!), and found out why it's been so tough for me to find a toe-hold on writing lately.

I'll get to work on chopping this up into some sensible posts soon. In the meantime, please feel free to enjoy my madness.

Thanks!

-Eric

Everything is a Remix

2011-02-06T11:41:00.000-05:00

Everything is a Remix is funny, smart, (and ultimately) a deeply important series of videos about the nature of creativity in a world where access to the means of media production and distribution are ubiquitous.

I'm looking forward to where Kirby Ferguson is taking this. He's done his homework.

You should watch the videos (and consider donating!).

Check out Part 1:

Everything is a Remix from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Part 2:

Everything is a Remix Part 2 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

The Wealth of Networks

2010-12-30T19:02:00.001-05:00

I've been spending my Christmas vacation catching up on my much-neglected reading, including Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks. I haven't even escaped Chapter 1 when I run across this little gem:

For the most part[...] the state in both the United States and Europe has played a role in supporting the market-based industrial incumbents of the twentieth-century information production system at the expense of the individuals who make up the emerging networked information economy. Most state interventions have been in the form of either captured legislation catering to incumbents, or, at best, well-intentioned but wrongheaded efforts to optimize the institutional ecology for outdated modes of information and cultural production.

--Yochai Benkler, 2006 (long before the FCC adopted it's Net Neutrality rules)

It reminds us well that we are in a new time; that the either/or dynamic that defined the political discourse of the twentieth century is outmoded and should be retired; and that looking to the state to protect you from corporations (or vice versa) is foolishness.

Big Government is Big Business

A very Happy New Year to everyone! Welcome to the 2nd decade of the 21st century!

Kevin Carson's _The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto_

2010-12-18T12:33:00.000-05:00

Color me flattered, I just noticed that this blog was substantially cited in Kevin Carson's book The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto. More than anything I wanted to give the book a plug, and to mention how compelling Carson's work has been over at the P2P Foundation, which is where I became most familiar with it.

If you want to check out the chapter (wonderfully titled "Babylon is Fallen") that references some of my writing on artificial scarcity and the knowledge economy, you can find it online here.

I'm fairly certain that this marks the first time this blog has ever been cited in print (aside from an occasional LaserJet printer). Thanks, Kevin.

Following the Big Dogs: Lessons in Corporate Culture from Merlin Mann

2010-12-12T14:11:00.000-05:00

I ran across Merlin Mann's talk about How to Fix Meetings. It's good, if a little long, so if you're interested in the topic, check it out. But there's one jewel of an idea that I found there that I wanted to call out:

"We aren't dumb. People chase Big Dogs"

This is an invaluable lesson when analyzing your own corporate culture. Forget the mission statements, the surveys, and the focus groups. A "culture" at an organization is the collection of unwritten rules that people either follow, or risk some level of ostracism when they don't. They are usually hard to define, and almost never written down or formalized (mostly because of how very difficult it is to pin them down, particularly from *the inside* of the organization).

But no matter what organization you're talking about, its culture can be discovered by asking "What do people see *as succeeding*". What works? What doesn't? Period. People follow the Big Dogs.

"Big Dogs" doesn't mean management, either. It means those successful people in whatever corner of the organization that are generally understood to be effective. It's about what those people do (not what they or their managers say) that we pick up on and emulate.

When you've identified the Big Dogs, and identified what they do to be successful at your organization, it's pretty easy to identify the culture.

The hard part is determining whether or not the culture you have is the culture you want.

Mike Masnick on Hollywood's Historical Hysterics

2010-10-24T10:56:00.002-04:00

I love just about everything Mike Masnick writes (even though I throw in the occasional asterisk to his techno-optimist viewpoint). He recently posted this piece on the hysteria that has surrounded Hollywood each time a new technology shows up on the scene to threaten it.

This latest example comes courtesy of Mary Pickford (), claiming that Pay TV will be "the death of the motion picture industry."

Or, in a similar vein:

Of course, this has clearly not come to pass, and I can appreciate Masnick's point about history repeating itself, but I say in the comments:

The difference between the disruption seen in 1959 and the disruption today, is that it was two different (but related) industries that were vying for control of a distribution medium. Throughout media's modern history, the reigns of power have changed hands but there was still scarcity in play (sometimes artificial, sometimes natural). The gatekeepers changed positions, but they were always gatekeepers.

The Internet removes that scarcity, and removes those gatekeepers. I'm not saying that we won't find a way to benefit from this new structure, but I am saying that it is truly novel, and not just a continuation on a historical curve. I'm not sure that history can inform us on this matter.

If one wants to look to history to help make sense of the economic and cultural disruption that the Internet is enabling, we can't just look at (historically) recent changes in the entertainment industry like they are on a predictable curve. We need to look at those technologies that fundamentally altered the world. Pay TV and VCRs don't inform us on the disruptive power of the Internet nearly so much as studying things like the printing press and the assembly line. And one of the most important lessons we can learn studying those phenomenon is that the people of the time had a horrible track record of prediction, because they couldn't see the revolutionary nature of what was right before their eyes.

As always the Techdirt comments are great, so (while comments are always welcome here) take comments over there, where the real discussion is taking place.

Why I love Charles Stross

2010-10-01T19:06:00.000-04:00

Charles Stross is a science fiction author. He keeps a blog running for a his fans, and shares a good amount of give-and-take with them about his writing process, ideas, and activities.

And he writes sentences like this:

Writing a space opera with FTL means accepting causality violation. And accepting causality violation means computing with closed timelike curves or, in simpler terms, really strong deterministic solutions to P=NP, and then some. Procedural AI hops out of the FTL hat like a demented magician's rabbit and the singularity takes a shit all over your neatly designed Napoleonics-in-Spaaaaaace boardgame table.

Read the whole thing if you're a fan. If you're not a fan, go grab some of his books and become one.

Practicing What They Preach: Jonathan Rauch on the Tea Parties

2010-09-26T10:17:00.000-04:00

Jonathan Rauch in the National Journal writes an excellent piece on the the tea parties, Inside the Tea Party's Collective Brain.

I know it's the all the rage for media outlets to try an "get inside the head" of the tea parties these days, but this article is set very much apart from the rest. It has far more to do with organizational structure than politics.

This video provides a brief synopsis:

The ideas in the article seem a lot more Clay Shirky than Glenn Beck:

"Essentially what we're doing is crowd-sourcing," says Meckler, whose vocabulary betrays his background as a lawyer specializing in Internet law. "I use the term open-source politics. This is an open-source movement." Every day, anyone and everyone is modifying the code. "The movement as a whole is smart."

Can it work? In American politics, radical decentralization has never been tried on so large a scale. Tea party activists believe that their hivelike, "organized but not organized" (as one calls it) structure is their signal innovation and secret weapon, the key to outlasting and outmaneuvering traditional political organizations and interest groups. They intend to rewrite the rule book for political organizing, turning decades of established practice upside down. If they succeed, or even half succeed, the tea party's most important legacy may be organizational, not political.

Watching both the Left and the Right wrestle with concepts central to understanding a distributed organization is fascinating, because the nature of the tea parties is just so alien to people who think that top-down hierarchy and bureaucracy are the only forms of organization possible:

From Washington's who's-in-charge-here perspective, the tea party model seem [...] bizarre. Perplexed journalists keep looking for the movement's leaders, which is like asking to meet the boss of the Internet. Baffled politicians and lobbyists can't find anyone to negotiate with.

There are lessons in this article that can both serve as a model for truly decentralized political movements, as well as function as a warning to those who would write about the tea parties as if it were just another political interest group (or even more off-target, "astroturf").

While there seems to be a natural connection between the sentiments of the tea parties' feelings towards an overly strong centralized government and a radically decentralized political movement, there's nothing here that make this kind of organization exclusive to the political Right.

Radical decentralization embodies and expresses tea partiers' mistrust of overcentralized authority, which is the very problem they set out to solve. They worry that external co-option, internal corruption, and gradual calcification — the viruses they believe ruined Washington — might in time infect them. Decentralization, they say, is inherently resistant to all three diseases.

Whether you agree with their politics or not (or whether the varied tea parties even agree with each other's politics) is beside the point. This is a pretty fundamental leap forward in organizations, and it likely won't be the last of it's kind, on the Left or the Right.

Wine Country Vacation - Monday

2010-09-07T11:30:00.001-04:00

Today we had two objectives. 1) To eat lunch at Coppola's newly redone Rustic, and 2) to round out my case of wines I was bringing back.

Coppola's Rustic, formerly Russo & Bianco, formerly Chateau Souverain. They remodeled and took the castle towers down, so the place doesn't look like the Bastille anymore.

The interior dining area is entirely new

This view hasn't changed, thank God. This is table #81. Ask for it.

Fearless Leader! He'll probably ask me to take this picture down as well.

Chris (and our waitress. Oops)

Trouble.

Some knick knacks that Coppola had laying around. :-)

The tasting room. This is the only place on earth that has more bottles of Coppola's Claret than my recycle bin.

Stepping out of the elevator to get down the hillside is a lot like entering a Holodeck when the doors open. I know, I'm a nerd.

The vinyards at UNTI. God, I love this winery's stuff.

The Barrel/Tasting room at UNTI

My favorite winery in all of California. Taldeschi.

In the tasting room Dan Taldeschi was signing bottles for some event. I insisted I wouldn't but anything that wasn't signed after that. He obliged. :-)

That's all! I'm packed up and heading back to San Francisco shortly to catch my flight back home to Detroit: City of Tomorrow[tm]. It's been a great trip with excellent food, wine, and company. That being said, 10 days is a long time to be away from home, and tonight I get to sleep in my own bed. I can't wait.

Wine Country Vacation - Sunday

2010-09-06T12:38:00.003-04:00

Today we headed into Napa for lunch with Hal and Carol Varian. They are long-time friends of my hosts, and just delightful company. Most of my trips out here seem to involve a meal with most of this crowd together. This time we were at Bouchon, which was an extraordinary place, for being so perfectly down to earth. The food was simple and perfectly prepared, the service was attentive but unobtrusive, and the wine list was extensive but not out of my league. Considering this place is about a block from Keller's French Laundry, I was a little worried.

Moreover, I had a geeks dilemma to face: I had made arrangements to visit the TWiT Cottage today and catch an airing of Leo Laporte's This Week in Tech over in Petaluma. However, the only time we could hook up with Hal and Carol for a meal was Sunday afternoon. I had to decide between Leo and TWiT, or lunch in Napa with Google's chief economist?!?! So I asked myself, WWJJD? (What Would Jeff Jarvis Do?)

Lunch it was!

To the pictures!

First, my morning run today included wild turkeys.

Why do I suddenly crave bourbon?

Across from the French Laundry is Thomas Keller's garden.

You don't get much more "locally sourced" than "across the street".

The French Laundry.

I had to mess with friends by checking in here on foursquare. There was jealous rage. Just kidding folks! I'm heading up the street to Bouchon!

The bar consists of seafood and booze. Nice way to start the afternoon!

Chris, my lovely hostess while in Northern California

Chris's dessert. Vertically oriented.

From left to right: Richard Roehl, Eric Reasons (me), Chris Roehl, Hal Varian, and Carol Varian.

Kudos to our waiter who snapped a great shot with a cell-phone camera!

Chris posing for her new Facebook profile picture.

The line for the Bouchon Bakery outside of the restaurant. The scent of baking bread coming out of that little building should be considered some sort of psychological warfare. None can resist!

That's all the adventure I could take for one day! Great food, great wine, great conversation. Time to chill out back at the Santa Rosa office. Tomorrow is my last day, and I intend to it count!

Wine Country Vacation - Saturday

2010-09-05T13:58:00.001-04:00

Okay, I remembered to take more pictures today.

Annual Heirloom Tomato Festival!

This morning's run was before the fog burned off. The vineyards don't look as pretty.

Wine Country Historic Baseball! I think the La Dee Dahs need to make a road trip!

The garden at Willi's Wine Bar, where Richard and I had lunch, tasted wines, and discussed what I was going to make for dinner. That's how you know you are food obsessed - you spend lunch talking about dinner.

After our discussion, we decided that Balletto was the winery to hit to look for something to accompany dinner. I wandered out into their vineyard for a shot.

A little fountain outside the tasting room.

Balletto! We loved these wines and grabbed a Chardonnay, a Pinot Noir and a Zin for dinner. I got two bottles of the Zin to bring home with my. My fellow Zin addicts are going to need to come over and sample this stuff when I get back - it's fantastic!

Fair Warning! Don't let your kids run free at Balletto. They mean it!

Prepping for dinner!

This shot is just to make David jealous.

It's The Knife[tm], David. It remembers you.

Chris set the table before dinner out on the back patio. This is the last picture of the day, because dinner turned out very very tasty, and we had three bottles of wine.

Wine Country Vacation - Friday

2010-09-05T13:43:00.000-04:00

I'm playing catch-up a bit, it's been a fun couple of days. I've made a conscious decision to cut down on the number of wineries I visited this trip. It saves on the budget, but it also let's me concentrate on just a few good wineries. Friday we hit only one, and it was outstanding. Hanna Winery didn't pour something in the tasting room that I didn't want to bring home. Sadly, this made me forget to take any decent pictures.

Here's the photos I did manage to take from Friday.

From the morning run along Old Redwood Highway

I have to eat here every trip. Duskie is going to be on Iron Chef this month on Sept. 15th. Everyone who's in the Michigan chapter of the Zazu fan club (you know who you are), should tune in!

Hmmm... I think someone at the office has been holding out on us!

Richard and I in front of Zazu after dinner. I am 10 lbs heavier than when I went in.

Zazu in it's entirety. So much goodness in such a small package!

VMWorld Thursday - So Long San Francisco

2010-09-03T13:53:00.000-04:00

The last day of the conference was short and sweet.

We had a great closing keynote from Pranav Mistry, as well as a few other innovators in human-machine interfaces, probably to most valuable breakout session of the whole conference, and I even squeezed in a lab. To the pictures!

Captured a great shot on my morning run.

Pranav Mistry on stage presenting.

I tried to capture the slide they kept coming back to. "Innovation!" It's everywhere.

A view of the city from the Embarcadero.

The Gold Dust Lounge. This was my base of operations for most of the trip.

Union Square had an art show on Thursday.

Another shot of the city from the Bay.

Tad's Steakhouse. This is where my room service came from. Notice my hotel right next door.

A better shot of the hotel. I'll miss you, Hotel Union Square!

Checking out.

So long San Francisco! As I type this, I am up in Santa Rosa, staying with friends. I don't know what the agenda is for the weekend yet, but I'm sure we'll get it sorted out rather quickly.

Thanks for a great conference VMWorld, and thanks for a great time, San Francisco!

VMWorld Wednesday

2010-09-02T02:46:00.001-04:00

Today I noticed three things:

1) All the good sessions ran today.

2) Lines for everything!

3) You can't do back-to-back sessions all day without burning out.

Today's sessions were not to be missed, and everybody knew it because lines starting forming 45 minutes before some sessions. VMWorld has been on their toes, however: I didn't miss any session that I wanted to hit, and the most popular sessions from Monday and Tuesday got added back to the schedule on Wednesday and Thursday so everyone would have a crack at them. This is some very nimble work for a conference this big. Well done, VMWorld!

Here's the photolog:

My morning run takes me down to ferry building and up the Embarcadero. Here's the view at sunrise.

This lovely scene is the hallway in my hotel. Creepy, but swank!

Lines! Today was the day of lines! This was the line first thing in the AM for the Labs.

More sidewalk art outside of Moscone South.

Bean-bag Alley - where people and devices go to recharge.

The line for the Active Directory session. Yes, it extends all the way into the distance. And yes, I made it into the session!

The exhibit floor! This is where geeks get our wardrobe. I have 17 T-Shirts from the conference.

VMWare Party Wagon!

VMUG!

The view from above. I snuck into the press area for a second to snap this photo from the mezzanine.

Blogger Powers, Activate!

HP. Lots of HP lovin'. Their new G7 servers running VMWare can replace 15 G4 servers. The electricity saved alone buys the new server in 3 months. Sheesh.

These guys? Not working.

Great shot of the freebie VMWare 2010 backpacks we got, though!

Say, "Cadillac"! This one's for Randall.

Well, well, well. An historic carousel, where have I spotted one of these before?

So the conference day winds down and it's time for 17,000 I.T. nerds to party. What does that look like you ask? Let me show you:

VMware Saloon on the Green.

By "Saloon" they mean: "booze + 80's cover band". I saw no swinging doors, which I thought was essential for "Saloon-ness".

Pool tables outside. Also, a picture with more than two women in it. Both novelties at this conference. More women in I.T.!

Slot Car! Slightly more popular than the 80's cover band playing.

99 Luftballoons in German was impressive, though.

867-5309

Mostly Dudes.

So, bless those VMware folk. They threw one swank-ass party. It was like one of those parties you see in movies, it was so swank. This was the "Taste of Heaven" room, with sampler foods and groovy DJ beats.

The problem? No matter how swank a party you throw, there's 17000 people, and 16900 of them are dudes.

Here we see the VMWorld attendees in our native habitat. In front of Tekken 5.

Word.

Very important iconography. Future anthropologists will be puzzling over this one for sure.

Geek Slingshot.

Geek Ball.

The other 80's cover band, INXS. Of course, they were covering their own material.

More INXS

More INXS.

INXS in excess.

Turns out, us nerds love us some INXS. Or free booze. Or Both. The concert actually got to rocking pretty hard for a bunch of I.T. folk after three days of conference-going.

Thus ends Day 3 of VMWorld. Tomorrow is the big finale! I get to make my CIO jealous because at 9AM, Pranav Mistry is presenting at the general session.

More to follow!

VMWorld Tuesday

2010-09-02T02:02:00.000-04:00

Day two of the conference, and my San Francisco adventure!

A picture is worth a thousand words, and I have lots! Let's get started:

I passed this sign on the way to the conference. My kind of breakfast specials!

The crowd lining up for day 2.All that royal blue is the EMC crowd.

Day 2 was the big keynote, and I got to see what a big crowd was really in attendance.

Sidewalk art outside Moscone South

The Ferry Building:

After the conference today, I walked down to the ferry building and did a little browsing. I got to hit Boccalone for the salumi cone, and officially knocked off my first item from "The Best Thing I Ever Ate" list.

The doors were closed up on this shop when I visited, such a pity!

Here's a view down the center of the ferry building.

The impeccably styled Imperial Tea Court

Amen, brother.

Meat pies, fruit pies... whatever.

So good.

Fungi!

Tasty Salted Pig Parts. These captions write themselves!

The Salumi cone was super-tasty, but it wasn't dinner. Off to R&G Executive Lounge for Salt & Pepper Crab in Chinatown. Ohhh soo tasty. Like all the best moments in life, I was too busy enjoying it to take pictures. Suffice it to say, I have not made a mess like that at the dinner table since I was 5.

The tunnel that separates Chinatown from my hotel in the financial district.

If you make the last turn up a stairwell in the tunnel, you come up here. Tunnel Top. The finest bar in San Francisco as far as I'm concerned. Those old afficianados of the Pelican Club will know exactly what I'm talking about.

A shame this picture didn't come out better. I'm pretty sure these folks are all regulars at Tunnel Top. Yes, that's the whole size of the bar.

Bill's shenanigans are the stuff of legend. As soon as the video of the infamous "hat swap" is up on youtube I'll post it here. Suffice it to say, there is a very disappointed Yankees fan, whose hat got replaced by a Giants hat when he wasn't looking. I'm all for hometown pride, and anyone who messes with Yankee fans are good in my book.

VMWorld Conference Day 1 (and Day 0)

2010-08-31T11:05:00.000-04:00

Not much commentary, I just wanted to lay down some photos.

I arrived early on Sunday, found my way to the Moscone center, hopped on a bus with 300 other crazy VMWorld attendees and rode out to the shore for a 5k at dusk in San Francisco. I forgot my parka.

I hit a nondescript "wine bar" for dinner. The dinner was decent enough, the wines weren't anything special. I was fed, I was tired, I was ready for bed at about 9:00PM.

Monday started the conference. It was hard to miss:

Here some photos throughout the day at VMWorld:

Social Media and Blogger Lounge:

This is where the cool people hang out and tell each other how many Twitter followers they have. You know how you can tell they're cool? The dancing little icons under the cloud. Also, they'll tell you.

Lab Thunderdome:

Okay, the labs are clearly where it's at this conference. The monitors you see facing you are just 1/4 of what's in this room. The lab text appears on the right hand monitor, the left hand monitor is a Virtualized set of machines for you to experiment with. Very nice setup, VMWorld!

Cisco's new APs are scattered around the three conference buildings, and are doing a damn fine job of keeping the public wireless network up and running. This bodes very well for my future plans, considering there's about 17,000 conference attendees and most of them have at least 2 WiFi devices each. Way to go, Cisco!

The Microsoft Exchange session was jam packed. Very interesting things from this session. Exchange used to run on one server, now it's split into roles and functions, and so Microsoft split them into distinct servers. VMWare is bringing them back together onto one physical box. The circle is now complete.

How 20th Century: e-mail and print stations.

A panel of experts. The most interesting comment? That company employees are being more productive for the company with publicly available cloud tools like facebook, youtube, gmail, and Google Apps than they are on company software, and they can't use any of these tools from inside the firewall. Apparently, everyone is having this discussion, Bennie.

Our New Overlords:

That raised dias in the middle of the Lab Thunderdome is even more ominous in person. Also, bad techno seems to be emanating from somewhere inside of it. Ominous.

Stress-Relief:

Foosball, ping-pong, pool. The usual geek pressure release valves.

So much for the conference. I'll get some pictures from the exhibit floor tonight, but I was way too wiped out for it yesterday. It was a sea of humans doing the zombie-shamble between booths with platefuls of buffet food. No thanks, time to find a real dinner.

Here we go:

Tadich Grill: California's oldest restaurant. Opened by, of course, a Yugoslavian immigrant. I am not at all surprised. My people are feeders.

Of course these pictures don't do the place justice, but the gentlemen wearing jackets are the waiters behind the counter. They were superb.

I asked the waiter to bring me, literally, food and wine, and he selected two excellent choices. A decent enough Pinot Noir along with some form of bouillabaisse with the best sourdough bread ever. Perfect dinner!

I'm off to grab a bagel and a coffee and hit Day 2! Stay tuned!

San Francisco/NorCal Dining - Need Suggestions!

2010-08-21T13:05:00.000-04:00

Hey folks, I'm heading to San Francisco at the end of the month for VMWorld, and I'm building a map of must-hit restaurants, kitchens, food stands, coffee shops, etc. I'm also heading up to see old friends in Santa Rosa for the weekend.

Are you a NorCal native? Hit my Google map and leave a suggestion or two in the comments. (Or just leave your suggestion here in the comments, if you like). Anyplace between Santa Rosa and San Francisco is fair game.

View San Francisco Food Tour in a larger map

The plan is to be at the VMWorld conference until Sept. 2nd, then head up the coast to visit wine country and friends until the 7th. I'm also going to try and make a pit-stop into the TWiT Cottage in Petaluma to catch a taping of This Week in Tech with Leo Laporte on Sunday.

Lastly, if you're in the area between 8/29 and 9/7 and want to meet up for drinks or dinner, let me know!

Reach me via the usual methods: http://www.google.com/profiles/ereasons

Performance Tax is Back Again!

2010-08-18T07:14:00.000-04:00

Good God.

It's back and worse than the last time. The "Performance Tax" idea, payola in reverse, has returned to Congress's doorstep, and it is more ridiculous than ever. As if it weren't absurd enough to have radio pay to promote your music, they have added the following absurdity:

The RIAA wants a federal mandate to put FM receivers in "cell phones, PDAs, and other portable electronics."

If it was from anybody less reputable than Ars Technica, I'd think this news was an Onion-esque spoof:

The mind boggles.

Enjoy Penny Arcade's brilliant send-up here.

Check out details on the Performance Tax from the last time it reared it's ugly head here.

Here's how you can help fight the Performance Tax.

Value vs. Capital - The Balance Sheet

2010-08-15T10:08:00.000-04:00

Mike Masnick over at Techdirt has some rock-solid analysis on Kodak, and why it's an outstanding example of the Innovator's Dilemma.

The article sent me off on a tangent in the comments about the role of disruptive technology, and the Internet in general. I asked if there were any examples of technologies that expanded capitalization in a market instead of shrunk it. I was promptly corrected (of course there were! Most technology is introduced to this effect!). Mike listed many of the basics: automobiles, telephones, computers, etc.

My question revealed my bias: I was thinking only of the Internet (which I would equate more to Mass Production than to the Automobile, in terms of historically allegorical technologies). A new product is likely to expand a market, but a new *mode of production* has vastly more complex effects.

Part of my reply:

When it comes to new technology in general, I think you're absolutely correct--they tend to increase the pie. I was thinking specifically of the Internet's effect on photography more than the digital camera's (which was enabled by the move to digital).

The effects of the digital camera may enable greater capitalization if it was the only innovation in photography, but it also enabled photography to make the jump to the Internet, whose benefits I don't think are as black-and-white[...].

While the Internet's disruption has made many a billionaire, it's certainly well on it's way to destroying some entire industries. And it seems to me, many of the institutions that are popping up to replace them don't have the same capitalization, if they have capitalization at all.

I know the Internet is adding Value, I just don't know if it's adding Value in a place where Capital can capture it.

I think the music industry is a very good example of what I was questioning. The industry is expanding, but capitalization is definitely shrinking. I know more people making a living from their music than ever before, but only because of a massive disruption of the music industry that has cost billions of dollars.

There are more players than ever getting their slice of the pie, but that pie is certainly shrinking (if the pie is measured in capital only). Lucky for them it was a really really big pie when it started to shrink.

The Internet added Value to the music industry, but it added it in a way that Capital couldn't capture it. I see this a lot when the Internet disrupts some legacy industry.

What I'm really looking for is a way to measure the change in Value vs. the change in Capital. (But traditionally, we measure Value in terms of Capital!)

If any brilliant economists/sociologists out there are reading this humble little blog, share your thoughts on this.

Crowdsourcing Curation: The Social Graph as Gatekeeper

2010-07-20T07:03:00.000-04:00

I've written before about the compromise we tacitly agree to when amateurs take over the roles formerly held by professionsals. The Internet promotes this takeover by lowering the cost of production and transmission to near zero for nearly every user, for everything from words (blogs) to pictures (Flickr) to video (YouTube).

As Clay Shirky put it so well: As freedom to produce increases, average quality necessarily goes down. For example: Thanks to Flickr, we now have access to a mind-boggling array of beautiful pictures, but that's partly because we simply have access to a mind boggling array of pictures, period. Some of these, of course, are beautiful; but there are a lot more of Aunt Bettie's 43rd picture of a bundt cake than of an Annie Leibovitz Rolling Stone cover.

It is at this point that many people interject: "This is the problem with the internet! It's full of crap!" Many would argue that without professional producers, editors, publishers, and the natural scarcity that we became accustomed to, there's a flood of low-quality material that we can't possible sift through on our own. From blogs to music to software to journalism, one of the biggest fears of the established order is how to handle the oncoming glut of mediocrity. Who shall tell us The Good from The Bad? "We need gatekeepers, and they need to be paid!"

All of this is true, to an extent. We do need ways to filter and discover content. And just because we can produce something and transmit it, doesn't mean that it's worth consuming. Luckily, the Internet not only gave us the means to produce and transmit on our own, but to curate as well. We do it every time we e-mail, share, "like", tweet, or buzz a link. For example...

How did you find this article that you're reading right now? I'm pretty sure it hasn't been published in the New York Times. No professional editor or publisher made a determination for you as to this article's quality, aside from the author himself. Did a friend send you a link? Did you see it posted to Facebook, Twitter, Buzz? The Internet has enabled us to build our social graph, and in turn, that social graph acts as an aggregate gatekeeper. The better that these systems for crowdsourcing the curation of content become, the more accurate the results will be.

This social-graph-as-curation is still relatively new, even by Internet standards. However, with tools like Buzz and Digg 4 (which allows you to see the aggregate ratings for content based on your social graph, and not the whole wide world) this technique is catching up to human publishers fast. For those areas where we don't have strong social ties, we can count on reputation systems to help us "rate the raters". These systems allow strangers to rate each other's content, giving users some idea of who to trust, without having to know them personally. Yelp has a fairly mature reputation system, where locations are rated by users, but the users are rated, in turn, by each other.

Reputation systems and the social graph allow us to crowdsource curation. I'm not ready to argue that these systems are up to replacing individual human curation (yet), but they're getting better every day, and I think they are well on their way.

A good example of manual curation vs. crowdsourced curation is the competing app markets on the Apple iPhone and Google Android phone operating systems. Apple fans complain that the Android marketplace has too many low-quality apps for any given task. They complain that it's hard to find an "official" or "sanctioned" app. On the other hand, Android fans criticise Apple for limiting their choices. They don't want to be beholden to the whims of a select few.

Apple is a monarchy, albeit with a wise and benevolent king. Android is burdgeoning democracy, inefficient and messy, but free.

Apple is the last, best example of the Industrial Age and its top-down, mass market/mass production paradigm. They deal with the big head of the curve, and eschew the long tail. They manufacture cool. They rely on "consumers", and they protect those consumers from too many choices by selecting what is worthy, and what is not.

Google Android is building itself as a platform for bottom-up innovation. Their marketplace publishes first, filters second, utilizing little more than the rankings of the community. They release tools like the App Inventor to spur creation by amateurs. They can do this because they rely on their audience to curate for itself. This process makes it messy (for now), but imagine a time when the ratings in the Android Marketplace aren't just from the community at large, but from your tailored social graph?

Consider for a moment that the Internet will only continue to increase our freedom and ability to produce content, whether they are smartphone apps, videos, music, pictures, or words. Can you imagine if Apple had to approve your videos for posting on Youtube, where every minute, 24 hours of footage are uploaded? There's no way humans could keep up! The traditional forms of curation and gatekeeping simply can not scale to meet the increase in production and transmission that the Internet allows.

Crowdsourcing is the only curatorial/editorial mechanism that can scale to match the increased ability to produce that the Internet has given us. As the former "consumers" become "producers", we're going to see better and better implementations of reputation systems, and better integration with our social graph, because they are the only mechanisms that are feasible, but also because we just love to share. Twentieth century mechanisms for curating/editing are built for a top-down, mass-production age, and they can't keep up with us, the former audience, as we make the leap into production.

My Concerns about Facebook Have Nothing to do with Privacy

2010-06-09T21:21:00.000-04:00

My concerns about Facebook have little to do with privacy.

I can see how some people would be put off by Facebook's callous attitude about their privacy, but I can't count myself amongst their number. I live pretty publicly anyway.

The recent kerfluffle has been almost entirely about privacy settings, but that's not where I fear Facebook. Instead, I'm afraid of the Like API announced at F8. I'm afraid of the walled garden creeping up around me. I'm afraid that I'll wake up one morning and someone will have taken my gloriously free Internet, and turned it into an AOL chatroom, unlinkable, unsearchable, unreachable by any means except the approved portal of Facebook.

I'm done with these gatekeepers like Zuckerberg (and Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch are right behind him)--each of them pursuing the dream of controlling what we consume.

I don't care that my browsing habits aren't private, I care that they aren't public in an open and searchable way!

Facebook drives a good amount of traffic my way, but no matter how many people "like" a status update of mine, it won't be searchable, or even reachable to someone not logged into Facebook. Facebook will allow all sorts of data in, but very little of it out in a searchable and linkable way. No, privacy is not my problem with Facebook.

I don't want to use Facebook for the same reasons I don't want to use the iPhone (the app store is a closed, proprietary, cynical construct, where the Gatekeepers bless or condemn as they see fit, for the benefit of us poor sods too feeble to choose for ourselves).

We are in the very earliest days of the new Internet ecosystem. The decisions we make now will have lasting effects on the structure of things to come. Facebook just feels like a big step backwards to me.

A step backwards towards centralized control.

A step away from the bazaar and towards the cathedral.

A step backwards towards our betters telling us what's good for us.

I want an internet that's open, searchable, linkable--not one that's governed, and certainly not one governed by the likes of Zuckerberg and Jobs.

On the FCC Comcast Ruling...

2010-04-06T20:06:00.000-04:00

The courts said today that the FCC doesn't have the jurisdiction over the Internet that they claim to, and Comcast is off the hook for packet-filtering BitTorrent traffic.

Jeff Jarvis fretted thusly in response:

Here’s the rub: On the one hand, I do not want government regulation of the internet. On the other hand, I do not want monopoly discrimination against bits on the internet. I see it as a principle that all bits are, indeed, created equal. But how is this enforced when internet service is provided by monopolies? Regulation. But I don’t want regulation. But… That is the vicious cycle of the net neutrality debate.

I completely share his sentiment, but I am far from equating these two sides (government vs. business). Here's why.

Depending on where you live, ISPs may be a monopoly, an oligopoly, or a dynamic and competitive market. Government, however, is by definition, always a monopoly. I'll take my chances with the market until we start seeing some real abuses, thanks. "But what about the BitTorrent packet-filtering from Comcast?", you may ask. Well, remember that the data to show Comcast was packet-filtering the BitTorrents came from end-users with free tools, not a federal agency. Comcast has stated pretty loudly that they had no plans to return to filtering peer-to-peer traffic, and they would be wise not to, considering the rage it would put their customers in. The end users, equipped with the Internet itself, are a pretty formidable force. And even Comcast's most captive audience won't be captive forever.

Case in point: If you were wondering why Google is lining up 5 communities to get Gigabit to the home, this is the reason. Google's certainly not going to wait around and let 1) the ISPs set the speed limit on the Internet, or 2) have the government start wading into the arena like Godzilla into Tokyo Harbor. Comcast (and other ISPs) claim they need to filter the data flowing through their networks in order to preserve speed and quality of service to the majority of their customers. This excuse will wear pretty thin when they are competing with connections 10-20 times faster than premium connections they are currently offering.

This is one area where I'm just not worried about the evil corporations. The government has never come close to showing that it can either act quickly enough or wisely enough to prevent abuses from ISPs without hindering real innovation in the process. And real competition (in the form of a trailblazing Google) is on the horizon for the ISP incumbents. Our Internet is going to be just fine, and I'd hate to have us jumping scared and inviting regulation in to combat threats that aren't really there.

The Amateur Ascendent -- The Compromise of Disruptive Innovation

2010-04-04T09:49:00.011-04:00

Dennis Yang posted "If Amateur Photographers Are As Good As Professionals, Then We Can All Be Professional Photographers" over at Techdirt recently. It's a nice article and well worth a moment of your time to read.

When I Buzzed the article, I got a comment that's really worth addressing from a friend and (quite skilled) amateur photographer. He says:

While this is true in some senses, it really only affects the middle to lower tier of talent. Just like in any other medium where technological advances have lowered the bar to entry to fields that were once the preview of only "professionals", having access to professional tools and getting professional results are not the same thing. [...] Creative talent, in many cases, is still a "get what you pay for" field, whether the masses have access to the same tools or not.

He's correct, and this is the real crux of the Information Revolution, and how it impacts our culture and economy.

***

On one hand, you have the argument from the likes of Andrew Keen: The cult of the Amateur shouldn't be too highly praised. It will hurt quality in the aggregate. These critics are correct.

On the other, you have the somewhat techno-utopian viewpoint (myself sheepishly included), convinced that the amateurs will replace much of what was previously professionally produced. They too are correct.

These two points are not mutually exclusive.

Clay Shirky probably has the best take on this phenomenon, writing recently about The Collapse of Complex Business Models. When on a conference call in the 90's with AT&T, he's asked to help them research the web-hosting business. AT&T assumes they have an advantage with 99.999% uptime, but can't figure out how to make it pay when charging the going rate of $20/month. The point is, they can't. And it doesn't matter to most customers. 99.999% uptime is nifty, but not worth the cost.

Has the quality of web-hosting suffered at this price? Absolutely. Does it matter to the average consumer? Not to most.

In short, good enough tends to win, and we're seeing this scenario played out in many markets. News, commentary, video, music, photography. Amateurs are producing goods of a quality and a price that more appropriately meets expectations.

Author Clayton Christensen refers to these technologies that cut across traditional metrics of improvement as "disruptive innovation". The Internet itself is a single massively disruptive innovation, even though its effects manifest differently in different markets. But across all the areas where the Internet does disrupt, the symptoms are similar:

* the product or service is notably inferior to it's established counterpart. It is 'amateur', compared to 'professional'.

* the product or service is considerably less expensive to the consumer in terms of money, but may be more expensive in time or labor. Consumers are more likely to value lower cost and direct control over fit and finish.

Timothy B. Lee wrote about the rise of the amateur photographer recently as well, and summarizes nicely why the lower technical barrier to entry (both in terms of equipment and distribution) is likely to curtail the practice of photographer as career:

The amateur photographer stands in relation to the professional as the Apple ][ microcomputer stood in relationship to the PDP-11 minicomputer: the PDP-11 was superior in almost every respect, but the Apple ][ was a lot cheaper and was "good enough" to be useful to millions of people. The difference is that the PDP-11 doesn't have a family to feed, and you didn't have to worry about hurting the PDP-11's feelings. People are understandably reticent about stating too bluntly that for the vast majority of photography tasks a professional just isn't worth the money. We don't want to be seen as badmouthing the skills of some very talented people, nor do we want to contemplate the prospect of thousands of photographers becoming unable to earn a living. But on the other hand, it's important to be clear about what's at stake here: the growth of Internet-enabled digital photography may be bad news for professionals (although I think it's far from clear how it will affect the long-term demand for professionals' services) but it's unmitigated good news for almost everyone else.

The argument many would make, however, is that it's *not* unmitigated good news for almost everyone else. This disruptive innovation is a trade-off, albeit one that many of us (including myself) are willing to make. But we should make no mistake, we *are* sacrificing something when we, the former audience, take over the workload from the "professionals".

Quality will go down.

Price will go down.

We will simplify.

For most, it will be good enough. For some, it won't.

Grooveshark

2010-03-06T01:25:00.003-05:00

Danielle discovered Grooveshark today, and I have to say, this may replace all my other music services/applications.

It has dozens of nifty tools like blog integration, social/sharing, predictive streaming/discovery (a la Pandora), and a massive catalog.

Go check it out!

In the meantime, enjoy some songs selected to make you happy, because we could all use a little joy right now.

Bipartisanship and Ideology

2010-03-04T07:01:00.003-05:00

Many politicians and pundits are scratching their heads, wondering why the partisan lines have been so starkly drawn during an administration that was supposed to be "post-partisan", "practical", "pragmatic". Where has all this ideological will (on both sides) come from? I think the answer is fairly straightforward: There is no bipartisanship here, because there's no middle ground here.

When the question before the American people is whether the government should take over General Motors, infuse banks with taxpayer money, take over half the housing market, and/or take over *all* of the health care industry, we're questioning the *fundamental* role of government in American life. It's an ideological question, and so the fight must be ideological.

I don't see anything wrong with that, as long people can argue about the ideas while showing a little respect to each other.

Performance Tax?

2010-02-21T07:32:00.003-05:00

When I see something like the "Performance Rights Act" (or performance tax, as most are calling it), I can draw one of two conclusions:

1) Legacy media (and their partners in government) really don't understand that there's a fundamental flaw in their business model, and are trying to use the government to hold back the coming flood.

2) Legacy media understands perfectly well the doom that they are facing, and they are simply trying to suck all the blood out of a dying beast before moving on.

There is a very big problem if the two biggest threats to your music business are having fans that want to hear your music and having those fans who want to share it with others. I truly feel bad for radio stations. Remember when record companies would *pay them* to play their music? Now they're trying to *charge them*. Astounding.

Technically, even the idea of charging radio to play music isn't quite accurate. They want to *tax* them.

Here's my suggestion to the RIAA:

If your business model has been undermined by progress, and the there's no way to market your goods, then get out of the business. Do not use your influence in Washington to extract money from a sector where you can no longer earn it. The market is giving you very important information. That information is: you aren't needed anymore. Because you used to be an industry does not mean you always will be.

The same could be said to all legacy media companies. There was a time in our history where they did not exist. There is a time in our future where they may not exist. Legacy media companies like newspapers and record companies had a business model, because they filled a need: moving the product from producer (writer/artist/musician/reporter) to consumer. Thanks to the Internet, for good or ill, this is no longer a need, hence the business model is dying.

We still need people to create, write, report, comment, perform, sing, and play. So, we need to find the business model that works for *them*, instead of the intermediaries who used to do something useful back in the 20th century.

I know we live in the age of the bailout, but if we ask the government to step in to prevent the creative destruction of every single industry that gets overturned by the Internet, that isn't progress, it's regression.

Google Buzz: Why Open APIs Matter

2010-02-17T18:27:00.004-05:00

This will be the last I say about Buzz for a while. Two posts in a row is one too many, but I really want somewhere to put down this idea so I can just link it every time I get asked the question.

Why is Buzz better than Foursquare/Facebook/Twitter/FriendFeed/etc.?

It's not. Well, it is. But it's not really in competition with them. Asking the question is treating Social Media like a zero-sum game where each social network is a silo, and there can be only one winner, at the expense of every other competitor. But Social Media is not a zero-sum game. You think we'd have learned this already, given all that we've seen in the Internet's brief history.

Once upon a time, our networks were mostly separate silos. We'd log into our favorite community, make contact with a few of our digital friends. Sometimes we'd trade deep conversation, sometimes just a few inside jokes, but mostly useless trash that just let them know we were around. Our friends would introduce us to new friends. We'd play games together, or leave each other messages when we weren't logged in at the same time.

...And then we cancelled our Prodigy account because we could access this new thing called The Internet...

Right now people think of Buzz as "one more social network". This is wrong. Buzz is not just another GEnie to compete with Prodigy or CompuServe. Buzz is HTML and HTTP! (Technically, I think of Buzz as NCSA Mosaic v0.9) Buzz is the first step towards hammering down the agreed-upon protocols that will bind our social networks together.

Some of us will use Buzz directly for social networking (just like many of us accessed the Internet directly on UNIX machines back in the day). Some of us will prefer a more mediated interface, or one we're more comfortable with and will use Facebook, or FriendFeed (just like your Mom continues to use AOL). Some social networking platforms will simply specialize in what they do best (Twitter is already terrible for conversations, but excellent for one-to-many textcasting).

Thanks to the ground forged by Buzz (and it's use of open APIs!!) we can look forward to a future where the platform you prefer to socially network is as irrelevant as the domain name in your e-mail address.

You post on Facebook, and I reply on Buzz. Your facebook post is updated with my reply and our friends on both networks see it.
You check in on foursquare, and my Buzz layer in Google Maps updates with your check-in, or I see you in my Goggles overlay.
I comment on tweets, Youtube videos, blog posts, (each on any number of different platforms) and it gets buzzed. You reply to that Buzz, and it gets linked on the original source page.
I have control of my content's privacy, publicy, or some subset in between.

Buzz doesn't add one more splintered shard to the social web, it's the first tool we've really had to start gluing it together. If we're lucky, it can knock down the barriers between the anti-social silos that social networks have become.

This is the future of social.

This is what the Buzz is about.

The Buzz about Google Buzz

2010-02-11T19:50:00.007-05:00

The title reminds me that I have an irrational fear of bees. Just sayin'. Where was I? Oh yeah...

The Buzz about Google Buzz

So a full 50% of all the buzz on day one of Google Buzz was, of course, the "Hello World!" of Social Media: "What's the big deal about this?".

Everyone else is trying to figure out if it's a threat to Facebook. Or Twitter. Or Foursquare. Or Yelp. Or Google Wave, for that matter. Here's my take on the Potential and the Perils of Buzz: What it is, what it is not, and what it may someday be.

The Potential:

1) Open Development

Google has announced that the Buzz APIs will be protected under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. This means open and shareable development. Programmers like this.

Furthermore, Buzz's APIs will take advantage of other open platforms, like OAuth, WebFinger, Salmon, and Activity Streams. What does this mean for you? Ultimately, smoother integration with many of the sites and services you already use. It won't be long before Buzzing this blog post will have you appearing in it's comment section below at the same time. This ability to aggregate conversations across platforms and media could someday be a game-changer.

You can check out all the nerdy details about the APIs here.

2) Location Awareness

By making Buzz location aware on your mobile device, it allows you to stamp your Buzz on a geographic spot in the real world. If you haven't used Buzz mobile yet, you haven't used it.

Of course, this is just the beginning. With Google Maps, Places Pages, Goggles, and Android Navigation, combining location awareness with social is a HUGE opening. If Google can seamlessly tie together all of these platforms with what people are saying in realtime, they can provide instant reviews, give businesses aggregated feedback about their service, and turn every person with a smartphone into a breaking news reporter with a worldwide audience. (More about that last one in a minute)

3) Relevance

What Google is best known for in search, is the ability to find relevant information and weed out the noise. Can you imagine a ground more fertile for that kind of expertise than social media?

The Buzz feed already jumps items that are getting lots of feedback to the top of your list - the first of Google's organic processes designed to promote the relevant over the recent. Don't care about what I ate for breakfast today? No problem, it will fall off your feed pretty quickly in the face of more interesting conversations between friends. Of course, if some buzz *really* takes off, it can get recommended to friends-of-friends. What did I say above about breaking realtime news to a global audience? Now the relevance of your buzz post can surpass the constraints of your follower list!

Of course, knowing Google, their ability to show us the relevant data will only improve over time.

4) Control in the User's Hands

Each buzz post has a simple and accessible option to select whether or not your post will be public, or private to a select group of your choosing. This feature is just wonderful. Not only does it put the power in my hands to determine who sees what I post, but it also lets us help each other keep the posts relevant. (See #3 above).

The Perils:

1) The Big Heads and the Long Tail

(I'm going to call this a conditional problem with Buzz. Whether it's a bug or a feature I'll leave to you.)

More comments --> more buzz --> higher rank --> Domination.

Watch what happens to your feed when you follow someone famous. They have 70,000 followers and hundreds of comments for each post. You'll never see anything but Ashton Kutcher's posts if you follow him. This almost necessitates limiting your buzz circle to the people you actually engage in two-way conversations with (note that your buzz following is automatically generated by people you e-mail with frequently--this is not an accident). If Buzz takes off, I think it will drive Twitter to where Twitter's been heading anyway -- towards the big head of the Long Tail. Twitter will become broad/textcasting. Oh well, it was horrible for conversations anyway.

2) Google PR Problem

People are starting to get twitchy about Google knowing everything about them. Adding in social features and location awareness isn't going to help ease the minds of those concerned about such things. Of course, If you didn't want to be social, you wouldn't be on a social network, now would you? Google's privacy options are good to protect you from prying eyes that aren't your friends, but in this case, it's Google that people are worried about, not the leering stranger.

Considering how much of my life I've pumped into Google's products, I should probably be more concerned than I am, but I believe the "Don't be Evil" jingo.

3) Fizzle

Google's known for launching potentially transformational technologies, and then wandering off like a distracted 10-year-old. If they don't put real muscle behind Buzz, it could die of atrophy. Google has a huge hill to climb if they're going to get some real mindshare away from Facebook and Foursquare. I hope they don't get discouraged very easily.

On the flipside, their products and technologies never really go away. I see Froogle everyday in Google's shopping results. Buzz has more than a touch of Sidewiki in it, and I see a lot of Wave's tech under the hood. (Brief aside: Wave isn't dead Google tech, it's just deep Google tech. It's platform/power-user stuff, and it's not for everybody.)

If Google sticks with it, and developers get crafty with the APIs, this Buzz about Buzz might actually be justified in the near future.

By the way, you can follow my Buzz here:

http://profiles.google.com/ereasons

From Left to Right: Lessig Addressing Cato

2010-01-27T23:58:00.006-05:00

Watch this video of Lawrence Lessig addressing Cato on the common problems facing the Left and Right. Lessig is no right-winger, but it's impressive how well he frames his message to reveal what causes they have in common.

Publicy - A Neologism Up For Grabs

2010-01-18T14:37:00.005-05:00

One neologism up for grabs. Take it if you want it. Use it freely.

-Eric

Publicy: (Pub-lih-see):

-noun

1. The quality or state of being public.
2. The usage of Internet-based social tools to live wholly or partially in public, opening oneself up to scrutiny, and receiving criticism and/or praise.

When individuals do it, they share ambient intimacy with their social circles. (See Leisa Reichelt).

When organizations do it, they demonstrate transparency and honesty with the public, often engaging in two-way conversations with patrons and detractors alike. (Unlike "Publicity", which carries a connotation of dishonesty and manipulation of one's brand identity)

Addendum:

"Publicy" is to "Publicity" as "Privacy" is to "Secrecy"

I was looking for a word that had a more open and honest connotation than "publicity". Jeff Jarvis calls it "publicness", but the similarity between "publicy" and "privacy" is too good for me to pass up. While "secrecy" and "publicity" have opposite meanings, they both have a negative connotation. Privacy needed its counterpoint too. Hence: Publicy.

A Christmas Present

2009-12-26T00:14:00.003-05:00

What more could I ask for?

Wine. Innovation. A blow against government over-regulation. A story about a penniless Yugoslavian immigrant. Capitalism. And whooping some French ass. All from Reason.tv.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

http://reason.tv/video/show/red-white-and-sacrebleu

Adding Value, Reducing Cost

2009-11-23T17:49:00.003-05:00

I was listening to This Week in Google (Ep. 17), and I once again heard Jeff Jarvis say (quite correctly) that internet efficiencies "add value and reduce cost". Jarvis is famous for saying about the Internet-connected economy, "middlemen are doomed". Again, he's right.

Most importantly, he said that "Google kills waste". The question I have is "how much of the U.S. economy is based on waste management?"

I've gone on at length about this topic before, but I'm going to try and boil it down. If you want the long-winded version, start here.

In the Industrial economy of the 20th century, people who weren't getting paid extracting raw materials or pounding them into something useful, were being paid for coping with the inefficiencies inherent to acquiring the materials for, producing, promoting, or delivering, material goods. (Sure, some were being paid for handling Intellectual Property and not material goods, but I think we all know where that's heading).

The Internet is drastically reducing these inefficiencies. They are no longer inherent.

We've watched the U.S. economy move from a production-based economy to a service-based economy. Now, the Internet is making us an increasingly self-service based economy. This is the value that Jarvis is crediting the Internet for--the public is adding value for the public (for nearly free, free, or less-than-free), on top of internet platforms. We are promoting and distributing music. We are acting as our own travel agents and realtors. We are making gourmet meals in their own homes and sharing cooking tips and recipes online. We are doing our holiday shopping on the internet, away from brick-and-mortar stores and their sales staff. We are reporting the news on twitter. We are filming it on Youtube. We are providing analysis on blogs.

Inside of corporations, information technology is streamlining management and flattening the org charts, reducing the "middlemen" inside every industry. It's not just affecting the industries that act as "middlemen". It's affecting the middlemen of every industry.

So... What percentage of U.S. consumers make their livelihood as "middlemen" (in this broadened sense)? How many U.S. jobs are the "cost" that's being reduced?

Once upon a time, we were afraid that technology (in the form of automation) was going to undercut the blue-collar labor market (turns out, Southeast Asia's cheap labor beat the robots to the punch.). But in the 21st century, it's white-collar jobs that have to be aware of their tenuous position, as technology (in the form of I.T.) eliminates or reduces the need for their jobs. I say this as a warning to prepare for it, not as a call to fight in vain against it.

In the next century, we're going to find out that there's a lot of stuff we don't have to pay for that we are used to paying for. At the same time we'll find out that a lot of us are getting paid for things that don't need doing anymore (at least *as a profession*). We should work towards making this transition as smoothly as possible.

If you have a young child today, my suggestion is that you send them into medicine, engineering, education, or teach them how to drive a UPS truck. Almost any other job I can think of is one that we'll do for ourselves or for each other for free, thanks to the efficiencies the Internet is bringing us.

Education, Attention, and Maker Time

2009-11-15T11:14:00.006-05:00

Watching Meet the Press this morning, I was really struck by the honest assessment of the state of the U.S. educational system by Sharpton, Duncan, and Gingrich. President Obama has tasked these three with assessing and identifying the elements of successful K-12 education in the U.S., and empowering it.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

{Brief aside - Thank you MSNBC for this fantastic editing tool, where I can highlight the text in a transcript, and embed just the video for the highlighted portion. So easy, so powerful, so useful. I can search and edit in text, and publish and embed in video}

This led me to think of what Matt Dugener said in his TEDxDetroit talk about Michigan, and the culture we have in this state towards entrepreneurs and enterprising individuals. The whole thing is worth your time, but I want to focus on the idea that, in Michigan, we train our children to be excellent employees, but poor entrepreneurs.

Have you ever considered how we teach our children? The modern classroom is largely an artifact of the Industrial Revolution. Only for the past 150 years or so has the education of children been so formalized, largely devoid of "play", and structured. (Stefana Broadbent makes some other interesting observations about the rituals of the modern education system in her TED talk). Certainly, advanced subjects require rigorous study, but are we going about that rigorous study in the best way? Students are given sixty minutes of a subject, and then 10 minutes to switch gears into a different subject and provide their undivided attention once again.

In effect, we're conditioning our children to what Paul Graham calls the Manager's Schedule: days divided into blocks of a single hour. Graham contrasts this to the Maker's Schedule (blocks of at least half a day) where creative types get settled into a problem. If you've ever experienced what it means to be "in the zone" with a project, then you know how important the maker's schedule can be to creativity or complex problem-solving. The manager's schedule works great for mid-level management, who largely serve to role of information funnel to management above them--a function that's critically important to large, vertically-oriented organizations. However, today's fastest growing organizations aren't vertically oriented monoliths like they were in the 20th century. They're nimble, creative, innovative, and decentralized. They depend on products of the maker's schedule, not the manager's schedule.

Conditioning children to live on the manager's schedule not only robs them of the time to settle into and play with important ideas, but it conditions them for employment in vertically-integrated, highly structured organizations--exactly the kinds of organizations that are going to have the hardest time surviving in the 20th century. This kind of education makes sense for industrial society, but it runs counter to the kind of education today's students are going to need in a creative, innovative, post-industrial economy. When children have difficulty conforming to this unnatural form of learning-without-playing, we label them with learning disabilities when what we really have is a teaching disability. Worst of all, we're conditioning our children for a work environment that won't exist in a post-industrial America: an environment where work life and home life bleed into each other, the 8-hour day is a thing of the past, and complex problems aren't easily broken into simple repetitive tasks to be managed towards efficiency like an assembly-line.

We're beginning to shift from a society that values time-management skills to one that values attention-management skills. At the same time, we're training our children to neglect deeply engaging their attention with a single subject, and instead, teaching them simply how to juggle their time.

Michel Bauwens, and the Crisis of Value Theory

2009-11-11T20:40:00.003-05:00

Once upone a time, Jeff Jarvis wrote the words "bits, not atoms", and sent me down a rabbit hole that I have yet to climb out of.

I've got a statement for you to chew on with me, written by Michel Bauwens:

1) The creation of non-monetary value is exponential
2) The monetization of such value is linear

Bauwens cited one of my posts over at the P2P Foundation's blog, and tripped off the usual technological alarms that send me scrambling for any mention of my name or writings. I'm rattled by how big this man thinks, and that he'd bother to cite my writings on what I had been calling "innovation deflation."

Bauwens' post sent me off to his "Recapitulating the Crisis of Value Theory" article, where I found the statements at the top of this entry. It is a profoundly formal definition of the ideas that I was toying with when talking about innovation, efficiency, and deflation.

I don't have a great deal to say in this post (yet), but I've only begun to wrestle with Bauwens' theory, and I thought it deserved more than a Tweet. I just know that I'm going to have to come back to it, and I needed to give it a permanent home on this blog to anchor my thoughts.

Give him a read. Share your thoughts.

This is the Droid You're Looking For: Verizon Droid

2009-11-07T01:24:00.003-05:00

[Updated 11-12-2009]

I don't normally do tech reviews, but after playing with my new Droid from Verizon (Motorola, Google), I had to share some of the love. I've got about 15 friends waiting for me to do the recon work before they dive in, so I thought I'd collect my thoughts here. It also will provide a sounding board for friends who've joined the Church of Jobs, and want to yell at me for deviating from the One True Faith.

I support a great many iPhones at work, and I love the device, but the Droid makes the iPhone look a little tired. It's not necessarily a huge leap beyond the iPhone (except for the display, which really is profoundly better, with twice the iPhone's screen resolution), it's just all around more solid.

I won't review the features here, there's plenty of that data all over the web already. I will say that the actual phone is just spectacular (you know... that one app that all smartphones are still trying to do right?) . The sound is crystal clear, and I get reception in locations my last three phones didn't. This alone makes it substantially better than the iPhone for me. (Not to mention that Verizon's network beats the stuffing out of AT&T).

If you're a heavy Google user (Apps/Voice/Gmail) then you're really going to love this phone: seamless integration with your existing Gmail contacts (not to mention facebook--half my contacts in the Droid are displaying their facebook profile picture now).

Advice: Buy the dashboard mount and car charger. The turn-by-turn GPS navigation on this thing is better than most TomToms. After you get used to asking your phone to navigate you to a destination with voice commands, or to make some calls for you, you'll find that you keep talking to it, just to see what it can do. I'm going to have to give it a name if I keep this up.

Most likely, if you're new to the Droid today, you're also new to the Android OS from Google. Navigating the sea of apps for the Droid can be a bit daunting. Here's my out-of-the-box suggestions for mandatory free Apps, in no particular order:

1) Facebook: It probably came pre-installed. Mine did. Use it to sync your contacts with. It will grab your friends phone numbers from their profiles, and load you up.

2) Pandora: If you use Pandora already, sign into this app, and your radio stations are at your fingertips. Again, combined with the car dock and charger, you should get a lot of mileage out of this app.

3) NewsRob: Use Google Reader as your RSS reader? NewsRob syncs up to Google Reader, and has all the features that Reader does (Share, Star, etc).

4) Shazam: Can place the name of the song your listening to? Let Shazam identify it for you, as well as tag it in a list for your hunt down on Amazon MP3 later.

5) Google Sky Map: Augmented Reality for the night sky. This is one of those apps that dances on the border of magic and technology. Wow your friends with this one on a clear night.

6) Color Flashlight: Silly little app, but terribly handy. Gives you a bright white screen to use as a flashlight, as well as other colors/effects. Turn on the strobe. Combine with Pandora for portable Raves.

7) ShopSavvy: Another Wow-Factor app. Scan a barcode, check prices on the internet, and a store locations near you via GPS.

8) Google Calendar widget: Use Google Calendar? drop the widget onto one of your three desktops for constant schedule-at-a-glance. If you're syncing with Exchange at work, put the Corporate Calendar widget up right next to it and try and keep your work from bleeding into your play.

9) Twidroid (app) or Twidgit Lite (widget) : Twidroid is generally regarded as the best Twitter client app for the Android, but Twidgit is a widget, not an app, which I much prefer. Take your pick.

10) Google Voice: OK, this one is a big leap for people, but I was a Google Voice user before I got this phone. If you use Google Voice, this phone is heaven. Seamless integration with Google Voice mail, as well as allowing you to dial out from your Google Voice number instead of the real number of your phone. If you're not yet a Google Voice user, now may be the time to jump in. If you want visual voicemail from Verizon, you'll have to from $3/month for the privilege, and it doesn't transcribe voicemails to text like Google Voice does. Otherwise, you'll be connecting to your voicemail box like you always have, spending 45 seconds navigating phone trees to hear your friend leave you a 2 sec message saying "call me".

[Updates and Additions]

Since writing this, I've snagged a few more essentials:

Mother TED: Are you a TED addict? Get your fix directly through an app. It supports tagging, searches, etc. AND IT DOWNLOADS TED VIDEOS RIGHT TO YOUR PHONE! Seriously, what more do you want short of jacking the phone right into your skull?

Weather Channel: A great weather forecast app, with support for widgets. Set a home location and it will appear in the notification bar at the top. So tasty.

Google Listen: Are you a podcast junkie? Look for your favorites on Google Labs' Listen app. No need for syncing your subscriptions with iTunes or Zune anymore, just get them delivered directly to your phone.

WiFiScanner: This is a great app, and has let my Droid replace my netbook and kismet as my WiFi site survey tool. Returns signal strength in dbm, and has an autoscan mode forconstant data updates. Maybe this one is a bit specific to Network Engineers and WarDrivers.

RPN Calculator: Again, over on the geeky side, if you need an RPN stack to use a calculator correctly, this is it. If you don't know what Reverse Polish Notation is, then nevermind, you'll think the app is broken. :-)

gTasks: I'm still on the lookout for a better app to sync my task list from Google (preferably one with widget support). Until then, this clean little app will do the trick.

Did I miss anything? Please share your favorite apps in the comments. Or tell me all the ways that the iPhone is better, and where I can shove my Droid.

TEDxDetroit - Where Do We Go From Here?

2009-10-22T18:56:00.004-04:00

I've given myself a day of reflection on TEDxDetroit before writing about it. I wanted to 1) let my head stop spinning from all the great ideas I was exposed to, and 2) allow some time for the Kool-Aid to leave my system and give the conference a more objective treatment.

I wanted to get these thoughts down while they were fresh, but as soon as the videos are available from these talks, I'll be sure to update the post to include them. Until then, forgive me if I don't offer a complete synopsis of the talks.

First off, if you're unfamiliar with TED or the TEDx concept, take a look at this piece in TIME about the TEDxDetroit conference for a little background information, or check out Chris Spiek's synopsis at Positive Detroit. Of course, you could visit TED.com and spend some time with a few of the videos there.

Charlie Wollborg, Terry Bean, Catherine Juon, Derek Mehraban, et al. did an incredible job lining up some real heavy hitters for the conference. The speakers were truly excellent, and their talks insightful, concise, and potent. Kudos to these folks for their herculean efforts.

The AM session's highlight was Rich Sheridan (read about him in Forbes) from Menlo Innovations, talking about design, particularly when it comes to software. His talk was titled "End Human Sufferring as it Relates to Technology". He really drove home the point that most people are slow to adopt tools and software whose interface gets in the way. No matter how powerful or useful the product, the utilization won't ever happen without clean and easy design. As a technologist, I often cite that if someone needs to understand technology on my level to use it, then that technology is *broken*.

The PM session really ramped things up. Chazz Miller was electrifying, showing off all the work he's done with Public Art Workz already, and all the work that was to come. His most touching moment was talking about the inspiration for this mural in Brightmoor:

Matt Dugener (COO of Enliven Software) gave a great lecture on "Building an Enterprise Class in Michigan". It was a real eye-opener for me. He says that, in Michigan, we've taught our children for generations to be good employees, but not good employers. He also says that Michigan has tremendous economic assets, but they're all locked behind closed walls in a command-and-control structure that worked for making cars, but is anathema to innovation. Definitely give this talk a listen.

Paul Schutt, Issue Media Group, really did a nice job talking about the mechanics of media, and how they affect the Detroit area. Now, I don't go in for the media claptrap (more on that in a minute), but Schutt had hard data! (My favorite). He nimbly discussed the long tail economics of the Michigan job market, and showed us that the jobs in Michigan being created are out along that long tail, not in the Big Butt. He notes that the only thing that traditional media can pay attention to, however, is the Big Butt. When GM cuts 2,500 jobs, it's on the front page. When 20 startups employ 25 people each, it goes unnoticed. I think combining this information with what Matt Dugener said in the talk previous about command-and-control structure reveals a great nugget of Michigan truth: We're conditioned to feed ourselves as cogs to the Big Machine. Anything else seems insignificant to both ourselves (Dugener) and the Media (Schutt). Schutt then goes on to show how he's waging war on this old-style media and its shortcomings with ModelD, and the rest of the publications from the Issue Media Group.

After Schutt, poet D Blair hit the stage and offered a reading of "Detroit (While I Was Away)". I literally thought the crowd was going to rise up and carry him out of the auditorium on their shoulders. Luckily, it was captured on a Flip camera, so I can share it with you now:

TEDxDetroit video: Poet D Blair performs 'Detroit (while I was away)'

---

So fellow TEDxDetroiters, where do we go from here? So many good ideas and so much energy was harnessed and focused at TEDxDetroit, I can't stand to see it just dissipate! I'm assuming that the TEDxDetroit web site will be the clearing house for information about this event and future events, but I hope we have more than a hashtag holding us together in this journey we've embarked upon.

So what do you think? Lobby for a shared blog on the TEDxDetroit site? Discussion boards? A whole new project? Existing platforms like Motor City Connect or Facebook? Is it even worth trying to build more formal connections? I want to hear your suggestions, thoughts, and ideas. Keep sharing.

Sonoma Trip Breakdown - Day 3

2009-10-17T23:50:00.000-04:00

Up and at 'em early on Saturday. Chris had to work, but she left us a lovely note.

Richard took us up to Iron Horse for a tasting.

They had a Pinot Noir there that I consider to be my new baseline for what a Pinot Noir should be. It is the taste that I imagine when I imagine Pinot Noir. Danielle picked up a pair of Bourdeax style cabernet blends there.

After Iron Horse, it was off to the Redwood Forest for some photography. These pictures can't do the forest any justice. You feel so utterly small inside there.

We had a satisfying, yet somewhat unremarkable lunch up in Healdsburg (at least I got to see the final score on the Michigan game, ouch!), and then ducked over to Seghesio to sample the Zins.

Now, both Danielle and I are huge fans of Seghesio Zinfandel, so this was a much-anticipated stop. We were really looking forward to getting a taste of some of the zins that aren't in wide distribution. As expected, these Zins were great, but I didn't find them to be that much above and beyond what we can get from Seghesio back home. We snagged one of the bottles, and headed back to meet up with Chris after work so Chris and Danielle could hit some antique stores, while Richard and I did some tech fiddling around his house before heading back to Detroit in the A.M.

What a great trip!!

Sonoma Trip Breakdown - Day 2

2009-10-16T23:49:00.000-04:00

We started today by dropping off Chris and Danielle for some antique shopping Healdsburg, while Richard and I headed to a few tasting rooms. We started at Dry Creek Vineyards.

They were wise to practically mandate a taste of their '08 Dry Chenin Blanc, a wine that may easily be overlooked. It shouldn't be. They also had a Late Harvest Zinfandel dessert wine that was too tasty not to pick up. I bought a bottle of each.

Here are the wines of note:

* '08 Dry Creek - Dry Chenin Blanc (purchased)

* '06 Dry Creek - Dry Creek Valley Cabernet Sauvignon

* '05 Dry Creek - Dry Creek Valley Merlot

All of those should be distributed widely enough to find out of town.

* '06 Dry Creek - Late Harvest Zinfandel (purchased)

After Dry Creek, we headed across the way to an old favorite, Teldeschi.

I've had great experiences there before, and have sent a few friends to visit when I heard they were heading out this way. They make some seriously killer Zinfandel. I must've tried a dozen wines (thanks to Richard's insider status), but here's what I picked up:

* '05 Teldeschi - Dry Creek Valley Zinfandel (I got an extra for a friend who demanded that I bring a bottle back for her).

* '05 Teldeschi - Dry Creek Valley Cabernet Franc

Lastly, we zipped down the road to Unti. They normally only do tasting by appointment, but they were kind enough to squeeze us in, and we were treated like all-stars there. We got to try some truly outstanding wines. The folks at Unti really make the most of their outstanding Grenache grapes. UNTI was clearly the big hit of the trip. Not only did I pick up 3 bottles to bring home, but Richard picked up another for dinner on Friday night, and Saturday, out at Russo, we had a 5th (the '06 Barbera). Here's my pickups from UNTI:

* '06 UNTI - Dry Creek Valley Zinfandel

* '06 UNTI - Sonoma County Petit Frere

* '06 UNTI - Syrah

Time for lunch! We headed to meet with the women at Willi's Seafood Bar in Healdsburg. I enjoyed their Cucumber martini, and we passed around a half-dozen or so lunch entrees, including fried calamari, duck, baby back ribs, and crabcakes.

A stop a Big John's grocery, adn we got stocked up for dinner. We headed back to the house for a little relaxation and a few drinks. Then we fired up some music, and started prepping dinner. I made a spinach and feta salad with homemade vinaigrette made from Vincent Arroyo's Cabernet Balsamic Vinegar, and B.R. Cohn's olive oil. The main course was an old favorite, lamb chops with walnut mint pesto, and baked rosemary and garlic redskin potatoes. We had the UNTI that Richard picked up earlier in the day, and dinner at home became the highlight meal of the trip.

Sonoma Trip Breakdown - Day 1

2009-10-15T23:13:00.001-04:00

We hit B. R. Cohn for a tasting. My first visit to this very cool vineyard. Apparently B.R. Cohn was the road crew manager for the Doobie Brothers forever, so lots of fun memorabilia on the walls. They have a very friendly tasting room, and Phil showed us some great wines.

Since I've committed to making this the el-cheapo wine tour, I'm trying to make sure that all my wines come in (mostly) under $25 a bottle, and I'm bringing back only a case. I picked up two bottles at B. R. Cohn:

* B. R. Cohn - Boater's Barbera, 06

* B. R. Cohn - Syrcab, 07
(77% Syrah, 23% Cabernet Sauvignon)

I also picked up a balsamic vinegar and a jar of the kalamata tapenade.

After that, we hit the CIA for lunch in Napa. We sat right next to the Demo Kitchen and watched them prep everyone's food.

Lunch was a terrific hangar steak, amongst various other samplings. We made a quick visit to the gift shop, but resisted coming home with any new cooking implements.

After lunch, we headed back to base camp for a much needed nap, and got prepped for dinner at Zazu.

When I arrived, I declared to our hosts that there was only 3 mandatory activities for this trip 1) a stop at Teldeschi to pick up some Zin, 2) that I could make everyone dinner one night, and 3) that we would hit Zazu. Zazu is a small restaurant and farm in Sonoma that's been featured in countless wine magazines. The owner and chef, Duskie Estes, was on the Food Network Challenge a while back. My last trip to California, we had dinner here, and it was fantastic. One of my fellow travellers declared that it was the "best duck I've ever had", and the kale that was the side to my dinner is the reason that I grow kale in the garden at home. Dinner this time was no less exceptional. We dug into the black pig salumi plate and a bottle of Seghesio Zin.

A Brief Sojourn...

2009-10-13T22:29:00.002-04:00

October has been a very busy month. Tomorrow I head off to wine country in northern California to visit with some old friends. I promise to post some good pictures and tell some stories when I get back.

It's a much needed break from a very hectic year, and the first real vacation I've had since 2007. I should arrive back home refreshed and ready to tackle the rest of the year.

First up on the agenda upon my return is TEDx Detroit. I'm very excited to be going, and I can't imagine being in a more perfect open mindset for the event than fresh off of vacation, especially considering some of the company I'll be keeping out in California.

I'll be sure and share what insights I gather from TEDx Detroit with all of you here. Be warned that, should there be any posting at all through the weekend, it is likely to wander off the reservation. Work and school have both imposed strict discipline of schedule and focus lately, so for the next 5 days, I'm taking my brain off the leash and seeing where it ends up.

Peabody, Jarvis, and the New Sacred Cows

2009-09-27T10:14:00.003-04:00

Bo Peabody has a nice piece in the WaPo about the business models of Social Networks.

He's a bit more dour about their monetization schemes than I would venture, but generally is in the ballpark.

A visit from the pope may attract a large audience, but it's not a great place to make money. Likewise, social networks can successfully bring people together, but don't expect them to turn a profit

Peabody cites examples of the failure of both advertising models on social networks, and the inability of social networks to get subscribers to pay for their services. Peabody cites the experience of Tripod (a once moderately sized social network which Peabody created), and reveals that the ad revenue generated on the site was never a fraction of a percent of that which Google hauls in with targeted search ads.

This is not necessarily a failure of a social networking ad model, but a failure of the size and intelligence of the social network. I imagine that Facebook's targeted ads, based on the intelligence and the size of the network, can one day generate a decent amount of ad revenue. But neither Facebook nor Google, nor whatever comes next will generate ad revenue akin to what we were used to from the bloated an inefficient media channels of the 20th century. As long as distribution channels are relying on that outdated benchmark, they're going to be disappointed by the amount of revenue their ads generate. From my post on the idea of "Innovative Deflation":

We're told to believe in our future in a knowledge based economy, but nobody has really figured out how to make real money of it. Of those who are making money off of it (Craigslist, Google), they are making pennies per dollar in the old markets that they've upset or practically eliminated with their innovation. This isn't because we haven't found the right monetization scheme yet. It is because innovation is leading to efficiency and not growth and that is exerting deflationary pressure on bloated industries.

As far as getting paid subscribers to generate revenue for a social networking site, even the slightest barrier to entry can hinder the growth of any given social network, and this is a kiss of death in a highly competitive market. Price always trends towards the marginal cost, and for social network sites, the marginal cost is practically less than zero! The value of the system increases with each additional subscriber.

Now Peabody warns:

We need to learn from the first dot-com bust, when services that benefited society disappeared just because they didn't make money. Imagine a world without social networks, in which I could not use Facebook to share hundreds of pictures of my infant son with his grandparents and the citizens of Iran could not use Twitter to challenge their political system. If we focus simply on a profit-and-loss equation, there is a real chance we will eventually lose these invaluable services.

This is alarmist to the extreme. Venture capitalists *do* need to learn from the first dot-com bust that many things on the Internet provide value without providing profit. It's the nature of non-rival goods ("bits-not-atoms", Jeff Jarvis would say). If Facebook collapses under the weight of its own walled garden (*cough* *cough*... MySpace), something will pop up to replace it. It may be a knockoff site, it may be an open source platform, it may be nothing more than a set of APIs and open protocols, but the genie isn't getting stuffed back into the bottle any time soon. If social networking has taught us anything it's that people are motivated to create and share for reasons far beyond profit, and in a world of information abundance (as opposed to the material scarcity of the real world), they will do it for no charge.

This brings to mind Jeff Jarvis' recent SideWiki jihad. Jarvis thinks that Google SideWiki has centralized power, not distributed it. The fact is, SideWiki has moved power away from his site and out to the readers (who can use SideWiki to comment on his site, as well as grant or remove authority of SideWiki posts by voting them up or down--the classic crowdsourced form of editorializing known as a "reputation system"). He's on the receiving end of the same treatment he's been advocating against old media, and doesn't much like the perceived loss of control he had previously exercised over his site.

It feels like we're retracing our steps. The Internet has consistently produced results along the following lines:

1) It preys on the inefficiency of old media
2) It moves control, power, and authority to the end user/edge of the network
3) It promotes/enables collaboration at nearly no cost
4) It removes scarcity from the Supply-and-Demand equation where bits-not-atoms are concerned.
5) It allows the crowd to control your brand

That certain Internet tools are subject to the same combat in which they dispatched their 20th century counterparts shouldn't surprise them. It amazes me how quickly some people can free themselves of one outmoded mindset, adopt some new gewgaw as revolutionary, and then immediately fall back into protectionist mode of their *new* sacred cow. Both Peabody and Jarvis, even armed with powerful observations and keen insight into new media, seem to be flirting with this temptation.

Cautious Optimism about Google Sidewiki

2009-09-23T19:55:00.000-04:00

I can see the potential benefits of using SideWiki. As Clay Shirky said, "Every webpage is a latent community".

As far as robbing bloggers of their comment space, Google Notes can do that. Facebook does that. FriendFeed does it, etc. It's not new, and I'm not sure that it's evil. Moving power to the edge isn't just about moving it to the authorspace, be it the New York Times, or BuzzMachine. In my case, it's about moving the power to me as a commenter. And I'm just as much on the edge as the Author.

If nobody whips up a integrated comment system for WordPress and Blogger that uses SideWiki as the engine, I'll be surprised.

A quick search through the API looks like there's no way to use the API to insert comments yet, which could be a roadblock. And the fact that comments are voted up instead of threaded pretty much kills it as a discussion space.

However, I'm cautiously excited about what this may evolve into.

in reference to: Google Sidewiki: Danger « BuzzMachine (view on Google Sidewiki)

Genachowski's Net Neutrality Policy

2009-09-22T06:47:00.002-04:00

I was excited to get home and listen to Julian Genachowski's speech on the FCC's stance on Net Neutrality yesterday. If you haven't read it yet, you can find it here.

I was, and remain, cautiously optimistic about Genachowski's appointment, and President Obama's professed support of Net Neutrality. But as always, the Devil is in the details. Sadly, Genachowski's speech did little to share those details with us.

This seems to be Julian Sanchez's observation as well, though he's far more skeptical than I:

The digest version is that the open Internet is awesome (true!) and so the FCC is going to impose a “nondiscrimination” obligation on telecom providers—though Genachowski makes sure to stress this won’t be an obstacle to letting the copyright cops sniff through your packets for potentially “unauthorized” music, or otherwise interfere with “reasonable” network management practices.

If the FCC's stance amounts to protecting end-to-end best effort delivery of packets, then I can wholeheartedly support it. This is part of the underlying structure of how the Internet and TCP/IP was designed, and to quote Larry Lessig, "Code is Law". This is a more thorough description of the End-to-End principle I laid out on this blog some time ago:

When you request a webpage (be it from Google, or from my tiny website), the packets being delivered to your desktop are switched along all the intermediate pathways (by AT&T, Comcast, or whomever) *without being molested*. Every packet on the network, from end to end, queues up and shoots down the line at it's fastest possible speed. Comcast wants the right to hold up your packets in transit to make way for traffic they deem more important. This is a violation of Net Neutrality. When intermediate carriers and providers can decide what types of applications, or packets from certain sources, are given priority at the switch level, they can decide which sites perform better on your desktop. Not based on the bandwidth that you pay for...Not based on the bandwidth the website pays for... But on which content is in the *best interest of the ISP*.

I can understand the FCC's role in protecting against this, and we've already seen ISP's violate this principle in the name of "network management practices". This is a smokescreen. If an ISP can not deliver as advertised the connection speeds which it is selling, regardless of the nature or volume of the traffic generated by its own customers, then it is falsely advertising as service that it doesn't have the ability to sell. It's that simple.

Hopefully, this is the kind of violation that the FCC will focus on, but Genachowski's speech is vague enough that it doesn't fill me with much enthusiasm.

One part of the speech holds profound implications for cellphone service providers and the mobile internet:

New mobile and satellite broadband networks are getting faster every day, and extraordinary devices like smartphones and wireless data cards are making it easier to stay connected while on the go. And I note the beginnings of a trend towards openness among several participants in the mobile marketplace.

Even though each form of Internet access has unique technical characteristics, they are all are different roads to the same place. It is essential that the Internet itself remain open, however users reach it. The principles I’ve been speaking about apply to the Internet however accessed, and I will ask my fellow Commissioners to join me in confirming this.

This statement, combined with the FCC's recent probe into who rejected the Google Voice app on the iPhone, concerns me. It seems to state clearly that AT&T wouldn't be able to filter out Google Voice data from the network, but does it mean that Apple can't choose which apps run on the iPhone, something technically completely outside of network management practices? Time will tell, but if I was an iPhone lover (I'm not) I'd be worried that the FCC is messing with the curated experience that I have chosen Apple to provide for me.

Understandably, AT&T is less than thrilled with this, particularly after they dropped so much cash on an FCC auction for a portion of the airwaves specifically set aside to be run as AT&T sees fit (unlike the portion that Verizon bought, much credit due to Google, that demands end-to-end openness). More details on that story here.

One thing is certain, the FCC is making waves right now. I don't envy the service providers who must work with them, as building business plans on shifting sand is always a difficult thing. Hopefully, the FCC will develop concrete guidelines that can inform all the actors soon. The FCC's heart is is in the right place, and Genachowski is certainly smart enough about the technology not to make any boneheaded moves, but as always, it's the unintended consequences to be wary of.

Social Media Links - Video Edition

2009-08-13T22:10:00.002-04:00

Hey folks, I've been gathering a few videos up lately, and put them together in a little playlist over on Youtube. They encapsulate some of the big-picture ideas around social media. They are the starting point for a body of evidence that the social nature of the Internet is a bigger game-changer than the printing press in human history.

Enjoy, won't you?

FCC: None of Your Damn Business

2009-08-01T13:22:00.002-04:00

Erick Schonfeld writes a nice piece detailing the FCC's request to Apple, Google, and AT&T to clarify why the Google Voice application was rejected from the iPhone App Store. (h/t @ajkeen)

While I share Shonfeld's views on the importance of open pipes, I can't share his cheerleading of the FCC's inquiry: "The iPhone needs to be smashed open, and the FCC is swinging the hammer."

I think this is conceding victory to the iPhone in the handheld market way too early in the game. It is not some universal platform for access that we are all beholden to. The iPhone is what every product from Apple is: sleek, sexy, well designed, and easy to use. This extends well past the device itself and to the platforms and applications that support it, including the App Store. It is *not* open. To be open would go against the very fabric of what Apple is. Apple is more than a product or a platform; it's a lifestyle choice. Apple's market has always been to those people who don't want to peek under the hood. They want their experience to be easy, sanitized, sleek, and functional. They want whatever experience Steve Jobs wants them to have. He is their guru; their sherpa guide; their tour director for all things Tech. This is why Apple's stock takes a hit when Jobs gets ill. Without his vision, Apple doesn't have one. To quote the tweet from Andrew Keen, "Apple ecosystem good because its closed." That's true, to an extent. It's true for those who've elected to have their experience guided and moderated, and we have to leave room for that market.

So while I'm committed to an open and free Internet, I think this can be best addressed, not by the FCC dictating to Apple what it should and should not offer on their platform, but by letting Apple fill the niche it has filled since the Apple IIe: the easy-to-use moderated experience for the layman. There are plenty of competitors out there who will offer platforms of varying degrees of openness to their markets. With that openness comes complexity. Not everybody wants that, and I can understand. Those of us who want open access will seek it out. The market has room for all of our tastes, and if the FCC is willing to exert pressure on Apple to "open up", then they are just as likely to exert it on others to standardize towards some homogeneous handheld internet experience.

Anthony Bourdain on Detroit...

2009-07-29T21:39:00.002-04:00

Tony Bourdain on Detroit:

Detroit. Where just about everything cool originated. As angry as one gets looking at block after block of abandoned row houses in Baltimore and wondering how the hell that happened, it's mind boggling to see how far Detroit has been allowed to fall. But what a truly magnificent breed of crazy-ass hardcase characters have dug in there. Of all three cities we visited, Detroit, oddly enough, even while looking the jaws of death straight in the face, remains closest to being a true culinary wonderland. This is due entirely to the successive waves of migration and immigration from all over the world, when people came to MAKE things in America -- each group bringing their own food and traditions. Detroit IS the story of America, for better -- and worse, and I think we've missed that, allowed ourselves to look away. Detroit, after all, made us who we are. Literally. A country of cars, highways, car culture, upward mobility, rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and what were once, unlimited dreams. Whatever happens next, Motown, Eminem and the Stooges' "Fun House", at least, shall surely outlast the automobile.

*sniffle*

I love this town.

Here's a missing scene from the Rust Belt episode.

The Knowledge Economy That Isn't

2009-07-23T09:00:00.000-04:00

The online revolution really is just that: A Revolution.

For 15 years now, we've heard the phrase "The Internet Revolution" so often that it's a cliche, but most times, the authors throwing about the phrase didn't realize how right they were.

They never saw this coming, and many still don't. The hype about social media today sounds just like the hype about "multimedia" of 15 years ago. Is multimedia huge? Absolutely! So much so that it's practically ubiquitous today, and we don't even need to reference it as it's own entity anymore. Social media (and the Internet as a whole) will travel this same path. But what did we learn from multimedia and the dot-com bubble of the late 90's?

The Internet has greatly increased the power of the consumer, it has greatly benefited the consumer, and it has destroyed many traditional businesses in the process. I've been obsessed with this "Innovation Deflation" for weeks now, since Jeff Jarvis wrote this piece, and all the gears fell into place.

All the flap these days about how much Twitter or Facebook is worth is probably going to look pretty silly a decade from now. The answer will likely be "not much" in terms of dollars, even if it's profoundly valuable to it's users, much like the Internet itself.

So what are the signs of Innovation Deflation? They're pretty easy to spot. Look for industries that are suffering from contraction, losing revenue, cutting jobs, all while the end user or consumer is being better served. Craigslist and iTunes are the classic examples. They may be making a pretty penny, but they are supplanting entire industries that were worth tens (if not hundreds!) of times what these companies are worth.

Here are some more signals I've seen in just the last few weeks:

Marketing: Josh Bernoff at Ad Age writes:

Spending on digital marketing will double in the next 5 years, but ad budgets won’t. [...] Six out of ten marketers we surveyed agreed with the statement "we will increase budget for interactive by shifting money away from traditional marketing." Only 7% said "we have no plans to increase our marketing budget."

Unlike the last recession, digital marketing is no longer experimental. Now it looks more like advertising is inefficient, relative to digital.

(H/T Joe Trippi)

Music: Brad Stone writes an article in the New York Times titled, "Artists Find Backers as Labels Wane":

The major labels — Sony Music, Warner Music, EMI and Universal Music — no longer have such a firm grip on creating and selling professional music and minting hits with prime placement on the radio.

Much of that has to do with the rise of the Internet as a means of promoting and distributing music. Physical album sales fell 20 percent, to 362.6 million last year, according to Nielsen, while sales of individual digital tracks rose 27 percent, to 1.07 billion, failing to compensate for the drop.

Markets: James Altucher write for the Wall Street Journal, The Internet Is Dead (As An Investment):

Let's face it. Electricity greatly improved our quality of life. But I'm not going to get excited about buying a basket of utility companies. Same for the Internet. Can't live without it, but can't live with it (in my portfolio).

More importantly?

Don't just ask me. Ask the best. Nobody can figure out a business model.

It may simply be that there isn't a business model to be found. Have you run across any more examples of these efficiencies that benefit the consumer by deflating bloated and inefficient old markets? Share them in the comments!

More Mass Market Deflation

2009-07-22T07:38:00.002-04:00

Courtesy of Brad Stone at the New York Times:

Polyphonic and similar new ventures are symptomatic of deep shifts in the music business. The major labels — Sony Music, Warner Music, EMI and Universal Music — no longer have such a firm grip on creating and selling professional music and minting hits with prime placement on the radio.

Much of that has to do with the rise of the Internet as a means of promoting and distributing music. Physical album sales fell 20 percent, to 362.6 million last year, according to Nielsen, while sales of individual digital tracks rose 27 percent, to 1.07 billion, failing to compensate for the drop. Mindful of these changes, in the last few years marquee musicians like Trent Reznor, the Beastie Boys and Barenaked Ladies have created their own artist-run labels and reaped significant rewards by keeping a larger share of their revenue.

Sound familiar? In an earlier post, I wrote:

Every business model relying on intellectual property law (patent and copyright) is heading for massive deflation in our lifetimes. We've seen it with the music industry and newspapers already. The software industry is starting to feel it with the maturity of open source software, and the migration of applications to the cloud. Television, movies, and books are next. I've come to question the ability of copyright and patent law to foster innovation, but leaving that aside, the willingness of people to collaborate and share, and the tools provided for it on the internet, may render these laws obsolete.

The NYT Book Review on Chris Anderson's Free: The Future of a Radical Price

2009-07-10T20:41:00.004-04:00

One of my favorites, Virginia Postrel, offers a solid review of Chris Anderson's new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price in the New York Times.

She just nails it:

Opponents of the free-content argument too often reject the idea that free content is the future simply because they don’t want it to be true.[...]

“No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,” Samuel Johnson said, and that attitude has had a good two-century run. But the Web is full of blockheads, whether they’re rate-busting amateurs or professionals trawling for speaking gigs. All this free stuff raises the real standard of living, by making it ever easier for people to find entertainment, information and communication that pleases them.

Business strategy, however, seeks not only to create but to capture value. Free is about a phenomenon in which almost all the new value goes to consumers, not producers. It is false to assume that no price means no value. But it is equally false to argue that value implies profitability.

Enjoy the whole article, it's more than just a review. It offers Postrel's usual keen insight, helping us to read between the lines.

The Highlight Reel

2009-07-07T21:08:00.003-04:00

Mike Masnick, CEO and Founder of Techdirt, flatters me far more than I deserve, citing my recent post, Intellectual Property and Deflation of the Knowledge Economy:

The Citizen Media Law Group points us to an even better explanation of this very point, by Eric Reasons, noting that artificial scarcity is facing massive deflation. It's such a great concise way of making the point, I wish I'd thought of it:
Every business model relying on intellectual property law (patent and copyright) is heading for massive deflation in our lifetimes. We've seen it with the music industry and newspapers already. The software industry is starting to feel it with the maturity of open source software, and the migration of applications to the cloud. Television, movies, and books are next. I've come to question the ability of copyright and patent law to foster innovation, but leaving that aside, the willingness of people to collaborate and share, and the tools provided for it on the internet, may render these laws obsolete.

He then explains why he believes deflation is the right term:
Why is deflation a better descriptor? Because as businesses whose product is reliant on intellectual property shrink due to Internet-based efficiencies, consumers are reaping the rewards of these efficiencies.
Exactly. The reason old business models are at risk is because the free distribution of content is simply more efficient due to modern technology, and it's about as close to impossible to hold back economic efficiency, once enabled. Artificial scarcity is based on pretending you can hold back that efficiency.

Masnick then goes on to point out that I'm being a tad negative, in which he's absolutely right. Of course, that post was largely a reaction to all of the cheerleaders I have heard touting a "knowledge economy" as our sanctuary. I merely wanted to issue some caution not to take that point for granted.

There's some great discussion going on over there in the comments section. Dive in!

--

Joe Trippi generously linked my post (The Economic Reset Button) in his Eric Schmidt on Innovation.

I'm pretty sure it was to grab the video of Jeff Jarvis and Eric Schmidt, but still... If Howard Dean's 2004 National Campaign Manager, and author of The Revolution Will Not Be Televised wants to link you, you're gonna take it any way you can get it, and you're gonna damn well link him back.

--

Finally, a smattering of tweets for The Economic Reset Button:

@dromescu

@convagency

@luvalawa

Most notably, @williamfischer dragged @jeffjarvis over for some comments on the post. Color me flattered!

--

If I get linked by either Clay Shirky or Larry Lessig this week, I'm throwing a party.

Innovative Deflation

2009-07-05T18:38:00.011-04:00

In recent posts, I have:

...Questioned whether Intellectual Property Law spurs innovation or hinders it.

...Suggested that one need not change IP law to have it lose in the long run to the culture of free (or the "culture of participation", if you prefer Craig Newmark's lingo).

...Claimed that we shouldn't abandon traditional economies in favor of a "knowledge economy" that may not be the panacea that some claim it to be. This comes largely out of Jeff Jarvis' recent thoughts on innovation yielding efficiency more than it yields growth. I argue that this efficiency doesn't just shrink some markets in isolation, but can lead to deflation of the economy as a whole. Innovative deflation.

I wanted to dig into this last point a bit more and get a discussion going on how to substantiate or dismiss such a claim: "Is the knowledge economy ripe for growth, or is it the means by which traditional economies are shrunk?"

My argument is two-fold. First, that the Internet is an all-encompassing agent of change for the global economy, allowing efficiencies that bring down prices and increase services, but also cost jobs and lower wages, without replacing them elsewhere. Second, that it does not replace the lost jobs and wages with new equivalents, because so much of the displacement is owed to the burgeoning "culture of free", and that this trend will likely increase over time, not decrease.

The Deflationary Pressure of Internet Efficiencies

Maybe the reason we're having such a hard time finding out ways to monetize various internet services like Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube, is that they can't be monetized, (See Mark Cuban's "When You Succed With Free, You Are Going To Die By Free") or at least not at replacement rates to the industries and services that they're supplanting. This is exactly what they print media is finding out the hard way as it tries to shift to an online model.

The fact that the Internet allowed efficiencies that pressure traditional industries to shrink (as Jeff Jarvis puts it) is fairly self-evident. These examples either have happened already, or are being ushered in in the very near future:

Online music sharing prompts the RIAA into agreements with iTunes and Rhapsody, etc.
Social Networking reduces the need and efficacy of radio play for promotion of music.
Craigslist undercuts the print media's business model based around classified ads.
Online news reduces the relevance of the print media's daily news cycle, and eliminates the need for the production and delivery of news on paper.
Social Networking gives access to news events as they happen, further reducing the relevance of the daily news cycle, and the need for editorial story selection, as we editorialize for each other directly.
Retail locations reduce in scope and relevance due to online shopping.
Efficiencies in targeted online marketing greatly reduce traditional marketing's influence (whose monetization model was built around grossly inefficient metrics, such as magazine circulation, instead of click-through.)
Social Networking further reduces the efficacy of traditional advertising as we announce and review goods and services for each other.

Each of these is likely to (or already has) cost jobs and are not likely to replace them. Too many of these jobs relied on the traditional inefficiencies of their business models--inefficiencies that have been *eliminated*, not just shifted to new markets. The closer the markets are to intellectual property, the faster they fall.

Lastly, all of these displaced professionals are going to go seeking work in still-viable markets, if they can attempt the transition at all. The labor supply will increase as both knowledge markets and traditional markets restructure to take advantage of new efficiencies, and that restructuring will include taking advantage of the aforementioned increase in labor supply. Hours will be cut. Wages will fall. So too will the cost of living fall as these efficiencies are passed on the consumer. The balance between these two forces will be the key to determining how painful the transition is.

The Increasing Supply from the Culture of Free

The last time there was a major shift in the economic base was the transition to mass markets/mass production/mass media in the 20th century. It gave us lots of things that society didn't really have before, but most importantly--and I'm not joking here--it gave us weekends.

I could lay out a long argument here, but I could not do it the justice that Clay Shirky did at the Web 2.0 conference in 2008. You should immediately jump over and read the whole transcript, but here's the key passage:

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened--rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before--free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan's Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement.

Shirky lays out a whole series of examples and data that backs up his assertion that, as a culture, we are heading permanently towards more participation, and that this participation is based on our ability and desire to harness our free time not just for consumption, but for creation, and sharing.

Much of the efficiency of the Internet is based solely on the nature of the medium, but the real game changer isn't HTTP, or increasing bandwidth into our homes--no traditional industries would suffer from that if we didn't fundamentally change the way we interact with each other with the Internet, which is exactly what the culture of participation is.

Would the RIAA have opted to sell you a song for $1, even though the technology existed to do so if they weren't competing with free peer-to-peer music sharing?

Would the worlds most popular web server (Apache), or the OS it runs on (Linux) ever get written if individuals didn't collaborate with the ease that the Internet allowed them to?

These efficiencies that are causing traditional markets to shrink are largely created by our culture of participation.

Putting it All Together

The culture of participation is forcing efficiencies that can have deflationary effects on our economy. This allows us to purchase more with less, but also gives us less to purchase with, if it is forcing upon us lower wages and fewer work hours. What it may give us is *more free time* (whether we want it to or not). So if that free time is part of what allows this culture of participation to help create these efficiencies, and the efficiencies create more free time... Then you have not just deflation, but a deflationary spiral that doesn't end until the traditional economies (based on real scarcity) have absorbed the new efficiencies.

Jeff Jarvis, at the Aspen Ideas Festival, asked Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, "Is what we're going through right now more than a recession or a financial crisis, or is it a fundamental restructuring of the economy and society, going past the industrial age of mass production/media/marketing into something based on knowledge and abundance?". Kai Rysdall followed up with his own question to Schmidt: "Do you not then believe that this economy has, over the last two years, been fundamentally reset?". Schmidt's answer was:

Where's the data? Almost all the money, and all the people, and all of the capital, is *not* going to where you described [a knowledge economy]. It's going into traditional businesses and traditional industrial and service operations.

Where did the money go? To traditional enterprises based on "atoms, not bits" (to borrow one of Jeff Jarvis' excellent terms). Surely part of this is due to the heavy government involvement trying to preserve failing traditional industries in the face of innovative deflation, but a lot if it is returning private investment in the economy, trying to make their own smart decisions. The market isn't going to buy into a bubble with no solid monetization scheme, especially after the lessons learned from the dot-com bubble of 2000.

So if the knowledge economy isn't much of an economy, what economy will be left standing? While these traditional industries are likely to be greatly impacted by the kinds of efficiencies that Jarvis cited, they can't escape the laws of supply and demand because they're still based on real and scarce resources (unlike intellectual property, where supply is constricted largely due to laws and not actual scarcity) . That these are the very same industries that Schmidt cited as the beneficiaries of much of our recovering economy is no coincidence.

We're told to believe in our future in a knowledge based economy, but nobody has really figured out how to make real money of it. Of those who are making money off of it (Craigslist, Google), they are making pennies per dollar in the old markets that they've upset or practically eliminated with their innovation. This isn't because we haven't found the right monetization scheme yet. It is because innovation is leading to efficiency and not growth and that is exerting deflationary pressure on bloated industries. Moreover, it is largely being done by us, the end-user, in our free time, because we want to create and share, not just consume.

The Economic Reset Button

2009-07-02T21:11:00.005-04:00

[Update: This accidentally became a series of posts on a theme.

Does Intellectual Property Law Foster Innovation? Where I question the efficacy of patent and copyright in a socially networked world.

Intellectual Property and the Deflation of the Knowledge Economy - Where I toy with the idea that the Knowledge Economy may not turn out to be much of an economy, especially when it comes to Intellectual Property

The Economic Reset Button - (this post) Where Jeff Jarvis asks Eric Schmidt whether or not this is a fundamental shift in the economic base

Innovative Deflation - Where I ask, "Is the knowledge economy ripe for growth, or is it the means by which traditional economies are shrunk?" ]

Below is an exchange between Jeff Jarvis and Eric Schmidt at the Aspen Ideas Festival. This is a very important 5 minutes to watch. Is our economy fundamentally shifting away from mass production/mass markets towards a knowledge economy?

Moreover, if my previous assertions are anywhere near correct, is this desirable from an economic standpoint for the U.S., given our current policies? I asked if there any real money to made in a "knowledge economy" in the long run:

Because as businesses whose product is reliant on intellectual property shrink due to Internet-based efficiencies, consumers are reaping the rewards of these efficiencies. Fewer people are employed by this sector, but fewer consumers are having to pay for products previously only produced by this sector.

To quote Jeff Jarvis from a different post:

Craigslist is blamed for destroying (that’s from the publishers’ perspective) $100 billion in classified ad value, replacing it with its reported $100 million revenue.

If we outsource mass production--the parts of our economy that are actually governed by the laws of supply and demand (scarcity)--and shift it towards a knowledge economy headed for deflation (abundance), what's left?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not at all proposing trade barriers, tariffs, or other forms of ineffective protectionism. I have no illusions that the bubble of a manual labor middle class has long burst in the U.S. However, we shouldn't be clinging to it until it sinks the whole ship. Isn't there some way to decouple the costs of production labor from the product? Robotics and automation? Lower wages? Less attractive benefits? I'd rather have GM making competitive cars in America and paying out lower wages to fewer people, than having no GM at all when we realize that the knowledge economy is really becoming a knowledge commune.

Is production an all-or-nothing game in America? It seems the only option we're given is to pay for it at traditional levels and wait until U.S. production collapses in on itself or exits the country, because we're unwilling to let wages and benefits fall to meet actual demand. In short, does GM exist to make affordable and desirable cars, or does it exist to employ people?

Given the amount of current consumption of intellectual property (copyrighted material like music, software, and newsprint; patented goods like just about everything else), couldn't we take advantage of this deflation to help cushion the blow of falling wages? How much of our income is dedicated to intellectual property, and its derived products? If wages decrease at the same time as cost-of-living decreases, are we really that bad off? Deflation moves in both directions, as it were.

That isn't to say that we're not in for a rough ride no matter what. As private citizens, we're reeling in our outstanding credit and tightening our belts, as we should be. One would hope that the government would learn from our good example. Instead, it's trying to reinflate a bubble that can't hold air: The housing market; General Motors; Chrysler; "Green Technology" as a fictional oasis for labor; The whole damn finance industry that was only sustained by, and lived to sustain, our now corrected bad spending habits.

Every bit of economic policy coming out of Washington is based on trying to maintain a status quo that can not be maintained in a global marketplace. This can temporarily inflate some sectors of our economy, but ultimately will leave us with nothing but companies that make the wrong things, and people who perform the wrong jobs. You know what they say: "As GM goes, so goes the country."

Retraining for a knowledge economy is fine in the short run, but it is no panacea. Craigslist doesn't employ the number of people it displaced in the newspaper business, and we can use this as a model for many of the effects of a knowledge economy. We should let supply and demand govern costs where it can, in the land of atoms, and preserve production at some level in this country, even if it's not the level we're comfortable with. These falling wages will provide incentive (for those who are able) to move slowly into more productive areas of our economy over time, to cushion their transition with the decreasing costs of living brought on by the information age, and not find themselves jarringly displaced at the collapsing of the next bursting economic bubble.

Intellectual Property and Deflation of the Knowledge Economy

2009-06-21T11:42:00.003-04:00

[Update: This accidentally became a series of posts on a theme.

Does Intellectual Property Law Foster Innovation? Where I question the efficacy of patent and copyright in a socially networked world.

Intellectual Property and the Deflation of the Knowledge Economy - (this post) Where I toy with the idea that the Knowledge Economy may not turn out to be much of an economy, especially when it comes to Intellectual Property

The Economic Reset Button - Where Jeff Jarvis asks Eric Schmidt whether or not this is a fundamental shift in the economic base

Innovative Deflation - Where I ask, "Is the knowledge economy ripe for growth, or is it the means by which traditional economies are shrunk?" ]

Friday night I was discussing the future of intellectual property law with some friends. My argument, in a nutshell:

Every business model relying on intellectual property law (patent and copyright) is heading for massive deflation in our lifetimes. We've seen it with the music industry and newspapers already. The software industry is starting to feel it with the maturity of open source software, and the migration of applications to the cloud. Television, movies, and books are next. I've come to question the ability of copyright and patent law to foster innovation, but leaving that aside, the willingness of people to collaborate and share, and the tools provided for it on the internet, may render these laws obsolete.

Jeff Jarvis seems to be toying with some of the same ideas when he posted When Innovation Yields Efficiency last week. In it, he writes:

But as I thought through the major innovations of the last decade, many of them have not led to economic growth; they haven’t added money to the economy but left it in the economy. Thus measuring innovation’s impact in the revenue, growth, productivity, and market cap of large companies may not be valid. Instead, we are seeing innovation take money out of their pockets, leaving it with their customers.

The problem, if you can call it that, is that many of the customers are also employees that have had their jobs fall victim to efficiency. Jarvis refers to this as "efficiency" or "shrinkage", and he's right on both counts. But the better term for it is "deflation". Journalists, auto workers, record industry players, retail sales clerks, and marketing staff are forced to go looking for work in shrinking markets. These businesses are either suffering from old business models based on increasingly artificial scarcity (newspapers, music, marketing, software development), or are able to do more work with the fewer resources due to the newly created efficiency (retailers). In short, businesses relying on artificial scarcity created by intellectual property law, are businesses most susceptible to deflation.

Why is deflation a better descriptor? Because as businesses whose product is reliant on intellectual property shrink due to Internet-based efficiencies, consumers are reaping the rewards of these efficiencies. Fewer people are employed by this sector, but fewer consumers are having to pay for products previously only produced by this sector.

The knowledge based economy doesn't follow the laws of supply and demand. (Well, sort of.) First, Intellectual property are largely non-rival goods, meaning that I can "consume" news, or music, or software, and it doesn't get used up. Until recently, restrictions on production in the delivery medium (newsprint and CD's) and/or licensing restrictions on consumption have kept the law of supply and demand in place for intellectual property.

The Internet first struck a blow to the restriction on production, because the copying and transmission of IP became nearly free. Now, with the maturation of open source software, social networks, and collaborative platforms, we're moving away from licensing restrictions on consumption: social networks and news aggregators bring us news, blogs bring us opinion pieces, musicians like Nine Inch Nails and Jonathan Coulton are beginning to release their music for free. Musicians don't need the backing of recording studios any longer: They'r recording in home studios, fans spread their music via social media, and fewer people are getting new music from the radio.

Effectively, the restrictions that held supply in check for IP are slowly falling away. As effective supply rises, price plummets. Don't believe me? You probably spend less money now on music than you did 15 years ago, and your collection is larger and more varied than ever. You probably spend less time watching TV news, and less money on newspapers than you did 10 years ago, and are better informed.
I won't go so far as to say that the knowledge economy is going to be no economy at all, but it is a shrinking one in terms of money, both in terms of cost to the consumer, and in terms of the jobs produced in it.

Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine called this "The New Socialism". He's aware of the stigma attached to the word, but he justifies well:

When masses of people who own the means of production work toward a common goal and share their products in common, when they contribute labor without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge, it's not unreasonable to call that socialism.

He's right. I've always been a capitalist to the core. I have frequently defended this belief by saying that Capitalism is society's best method for the allocation of scarce resources. And I believe that now more than ever. But what happens to markets like intellectual property when "scarcity" no longer exists?

Cyberdefense and Civil Liberties

2009-06-16T07:46:00.004-04:00

Jim Harper over at Cato is still keeping an eye on the Fed's grab for cybersecurity authority.

That’s correct. “Cyber” is not a problem that affects our sovereignty or the integrity of our national boundaries. Thus, it’s not a problem for the defense or intelligence establishments to handle.

The benefits of the online world vastly outstrip the risks - sorry Senator Rockefeller. With those benefits come a variety of problems akin to graffiti, house fires, street closures, petit theft, and organized crime. Those are not best handled by centralized bureaucracies, but by the decentralized systems we use to secure the real world: property rights, contract and tort liability, private enterprise, and innovation.

I've blogged about this before, here and here, but it's worth keeping tabs on.

Does Intellectual Property Law Foster Innovation?

2009-06-14T09:11:00.008-04:00

[Update: This accidentally became a series of posts on a theme.

Does Intellectual Property Law Foster Innovation? (this post)Where I question the efficacy of patent and copyright in a socially networked world.

Intellectual Property and the Deflation of the Knowledge Economy - Where I toy with the idea that the Knowledge Economy may not turn out to be much of an economy, especially when it comes to Intellectual Property

The Economic Reset Button - Where Jeff Jarvis asks Eric Schmidt whether or not this is a fundamental shift in the economic base

Innovative Deflation - Where I ask, "Is the knowledge economy ripe for growth, or is it the means by which traditional economies are shrunk?" ]

Patent and copyright were established in this country under the assumption that the limited-term monopoly rights for creators foster innovation. The promise of exclusive reward to a creator for some set period of time provides incentive to pursue the overhead costs of research, invention, and innovation. But can we take that mechanism as a given? Does IP law really spur innovation? It may not be as clear as we think in the socially networked age.

Thomas Jefferson once asked this very question in a letter to Isaac McPherson:

It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.

In their book Against Intellectual Monopoly, Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine lay down a pretty thorough argument that the granting of patent to James Watt for an innovation he made with the Newcomen steam engine delayed further innovation (and the onset of the Industrial Revolution) by 20 years:

Once Watt’s patents were secured and production started, a substantial portion of his energy was devoted to fending off rival inventors. In 1782, Watt secured an additional patent, made “necessary in consequence of ... having been so unfairly
anticipated, by [Matthew] Wasborough in the crank motion.” More dramatically, in the 1790s, when the superior Hornblower engine was put into production, Boulton and Watt went after him with the full force of the legal system.

During the period of Watt’s patents the U.K. added about 750 horsepower of steam engines per year. In the thirty years following Watt’s patents, additional horsepower was added at a rate of more than 4,000 per year. Moreover, the fuel efficiency of steam engines changed little during the period of Watt’s patent;
while between 1810 and 1835 it is estimated to have increased by a factor of five.

After the expiration of Watt’s patents, not only was there an explosion in the production and efficiency of engines, but steam power came into its own as the driving force of the industrial revolution. Over a thirty year period steam engines were modified and improved as crucial innovations such as the steam train, the
steamboat and the steam jenny came into wide usage. The key innovation was the high-pressure steam engine – development of which had been blocked by Watt’s strategic use of his patent.

These things may call us to question the efficacy of intellectual property law, but the advent of the Internet may make this point moot regardless. Legally protected intellectual property are now having to compete with free, collaborative, openly created intellectual property. And it's damned hard to compete with free. Intellectual property is essentially being rendered a commodity.

New efficiencies arise that threaten these business models, but the efficiency is passed to the consumer. Instead of listening to radio to hear new artists, they are being recommended by our friends, and streamed to us on facebook, youtube, and from the artists own websites. Instead of buying whole CD's for the 2 or 3 songs we like, we now purchase music a la carte, for less than $1 a track. These are new efficiencies in the music business... efficiencies the RIAA would rather not have had to deal with. They enjoyed the economic bubble that supported their business model just the way it was, thank you very much. It is only in the face of music sharing on the Internet that they were forced to change, to the benefit of consumers. They could no longer command consumption at the levels capable of sustaining their economic bubble. Thus, there is massive deflation in the music industry in terms of money, yet all of our music collections are larger and more varied than they've ever been, and we've paid less for more.

This is the future for all businesses that rely on intellectual property. More variety, more innovation, greater availability, and less money involved.

P.J. O'Rourke

2009-06-02T17:19:00.002-04:00

The opening incantation of P.J. O'Rourke's new book,
Driving Like Crazy: Thirty Years of Vehicular Hell-Bending:

The feminists grabbed our women,
The liberals banned our guns,
The health cops snuffed our cigarettes,
The bailout has our funds,
The laws of Breathalyzing
Put an end to our roadside bars,
Circle the Fords and Chevys, boys,
THEY'RE COMING TO TAKE OUR CARS.

Now THAT, my friends, is poetry.

The Data Set...

2009-05-08T07:28:00.002-04:00

I'm going to try and put all this together later, but here's what I'm working with.

1) Fed mistreats bond-holders in Chrysler deal in favor of unions. How likely is it that bond holders will want to offer up any additional capital for companies in bed with the Fed?

2) Stress tests say banks need $75 billion, and their going to have to raise it on the private market. Robert Gibbs, White House Press Secretary:

For those institutions needing more capital, “everyone involved will be looking for banks to raise this through either private means or the selling of some assets that they have or that they control,” Gibbs added.

Side note: GMAC is one of the banks that needs money.

3) Treasury Auction of bonds yesterday draws fewer buyers than expected. Yield on bonds jump to move the treasury bonds. This indicates a potential problem for future borrowing by the Fed to finance deficit spending.

So, the Obama administration is tipping the scales against capital holders in companies where it has a stake, driving capital away. Then it says that companies need capital and they're going to raise it privately. And finally, the government bailing out companies that can't raise their own capital is, in turn, having trouble raising capital itself; precipitating the need to raise interest rates just to borrow.

Anyone want to help me connect these dots?

Good For Me, But Not For Thee...

2009-05-06T23:27:00.004-04:00

This is too good. A 22-year old student placed a false quote on Wikipedia, and it was reproduced in the obituary in countless "legitimate" newspapers around the world.

Maureen Dowd. Twit? You Decide.

2009-04-25T10:21:00.002-04:00

Maureen Dowd follows the litany of professional chattering class members thumbing their noses at Twitter.

In an oh-so-clever twist, she interviews Biz Stone and Evan Williams, creators of Twitter, in a format that allows for only 140 characters in the questions or answers. (She even used the same title as one of my blog posts on the same subject, which probably means I wasn't being clever enough.) It's one of her more insipid articles, second only in recent memory to the article asking whether Michelle Obama should stop showing off her biceps.

Why did you think the answer to e-mail was a new kind of e-mail?

Fritinancy gives an excellent sendup of Ms. Dowd's article, rewriting it was if Dowd was interviewing Alexander Graham Bell.

Why did you think the answer to telegrams was a noisy new telegram?

Read Maureen Dowd, then read Fritinancy. Too good.

Social Media: That's How We Roll...

2009-04-23T19:23:00.002-04:00

I'm about to break the fourth wall, here. Something I specifically avoid most of the time on this blog, but this example is just too good not to document. Forgive me just this once, but I'm going to mention my day job.

I get home from work today, and I hit my RSS feeds in Google Reader. Most of these are typical subscriptions, but a few are Google-driven blog searches. The one that searches blog posts for mention of "The Henry Ford" (where I am the network engineer), strikes this post on Re*Move. The first line?

Joe and I have decamped this week quite a lot to the cafe in the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, because the wifi's so much faster than the Dearborn Inn, where we've been staying.

Hehe. You're welcome fellas.

They go on to say:

Proving the power of Twitter to get people together, we tweeted we were here and yesterday were soon joined by Carrie Nolan, a PR manager from the museum, who came to say hi and tell us how things are going.

Check out their video interview with Carrie for details on the impromptu Tweet hookup. (Plus, of course, more over-the-top love for our WiFi.)

I just *love* having all of our hard work (on the network, on the public WiFi, and on all of our social media efforts) rewarded. Heaping piles of kudos on Carrie!

Make it Google Friendly

2009-04-21T18:39:00.003-04:00

Martin Belam, Information Architect for the Guardian, UK, on the principles guiding the Guardian's online presence:

That URLs should be PERMANENT, that all content should be uniquely ADDRESSABLE, that multiple routes to content make everything DISCOVERABLE, and that everything should be as OPEN as possible.

Looks like he's promoting Jeff Jarvis' model of searchability, Search Engine Optimization, and making the site as easy to search, link, and share as possible.

This philosophy should guide all Internet Development, everywhere. Particularly for information rich sites like news organizations. These principles maximize your chances of landed on the coveted first page of search engine results.

Read the whole piece here.

Time for Tea...

2009-04-18T11:19:00.003-04:00

I've been watching must of the post-game analysis on the nationwide Tea Parties this week, and I'm a little embarrassed for the Media. Someone has to be embarrassed for them, because they themselves are pretty shameless.

Red Eye had a nice send-up of CNN and MSNBC's adolescent humor:

CNN's Susan Roesgen went after protesters with the MoveOn.org talking points memo in hand. I expect this crap from MSNBC, but CNN?

On the flipside over at Fox News, the network is quick to jump on the coattails of the movement, and all but take credit for it. Neil Cavuto hit the Sacramento Tea Party, and Sean Hannity decided to take his show to the Tea Party in Atlanta. Newt Gingrich joined him from the one in New York. The Republican party, starved for leadership and a message is trying to glom onto this movement. But RNC Chairman Michael Steele was allegedly rebuffed by the Chicago Tea Party organizers.

This attention from conservative media led some of the liberal (nay, mainstream) media to question the grass-roots nature of these protests. Nancy Pelosi went on to call it astroturfing. Of course, the further left you are, the less likely you are to comprehend spontaneous organization, and the more likely you are to see the need for a technocratic guiding hand behind every action people take. Hey, that's why you need a planned economy, right?

Many people of various conservative flavors have brought their own baggage with them, but the gist of the Tea Parties was a direct protest to out-of-control government spending and a planned economy. You'll notice in many of the pictures, that people are complaining of things like generational theft, hyperinflation, bailouts, the stimulus package, and public control over private companies. To think that these protesters are simply angry over their current tax burden is to mistake them greatly. They know that Obama has cut middle-class taxes. But they also know it's unsustainable, and their children and grandchildren will have to pay the bill for a government-directed economy mis-allocating resources trying re-inflate a bubble of false properity.

I have been watching this movement since it's start in February, before it was even called a Tea Party (that name came from Rick Santelli's now infamous CNBC rant). Back then it was just a gathering of folks opposed to the stimulus bill. Michelle Malkin has a wonderfully documented timeline of the phenomenon.

What I really want you to note is how out-of-touch the media is (on both sides). Nobody at CNN, Fox News, or MSNBC, can even properly characterize what the protests mean to the protesters and organizers. The Right grabs the coattails in search of an identity, while the Left just makes dick jokes.

These protests started with web-savvy citizens. Bloggers, and Twitterers. Google Maps mashups, and Facebook groups. Concerned citizens who now have the organizational tools and social networks available to them that didn't exist even 5 years ago. Media people who are dismissive of the Tea Parties have asked repeatedly "where were these people 8 years ago". For certain, many people were roused by the difference in magnitude of proposed government spending under Obama as compared to Bush (Frying pan. Fire). But the real answer isn't that they were silent because they liked the borrow-and-spend conservatism of George W. Bush. The answer is simply: They weren't on Facebook yet.

The organization of the Tea Parties was spread out, disorganized, messy, chaotic, and beautiful. It's a real display of spontaneous organization and distributed democracy.

Consider this for a moment: a quarter of a million Americans, without so much as a 503(c) organization like MoveOn.org backing them (let alone, celebrities, mainstream traditional media, or a political party) pulled off simultaneous protests in 700 different cities with no confrontations with authorities, no arrests, and no destroyed property.

Do you really want to dismiss the magnitude of this event? Over a year ago, I wrote

The changes the Internet has wrought in our economy and our personal lives is about to come crashing over Washington D.C.

When someone talks about the sweeping changes that the Internet is going to bring to politics, they are usually talking about recent or near-term trends like Online voting, scandal scoops from the Blogosphere, or tapping into internet-based campaign contributions. These symptoms are certainly novel, but they are just that... symptoms. The real sea change is occurring in the populace now. We expect to have a voice, not just in the "strongly agree/somewhat disagree" opinion polls, but in shaping and driving opinion and dialogue[...]

Mark my words, it may not seem like it right now, but this is a milestone event in the transformation of American politics. Citizens are starting to realize that they have the power to direct the public discourse, and that traditional media is ignoring them, if not mocking them. This doesn't bode well for future of traditional media, or for the politicians who only know how to play the game with 20th century rules.

Update:
The Other McCain points out that David Axelrod's response to the Tea Parties hits the usual talking points: "Where were these protesters 8 years ago?". "But the President has cut taxes for 95% of Americans!". RSM's response is as concise as it could be:

What you, David Axelrod, don't understand is that those of us who support a growth-oriented economic policy aren't in favor of tax cuts on a "more-money-for-me" basis. It's not about who gets what, it's about increasing prosperity by expanding liberty.

Another Year Older... Another Year Wiser...

2009-04-16T19:18:00.002-04:00

Sorry I haven't posted in a few days. This is traditionally a very busy time at my job, and I've got a few side projects that have been sucking up some time as well. When you live in Michigan in this economy, you never *ever* complain about having too much work...

Also, today is my 34th birthday, and I've been squeezing in some celebration time with friends and loved ones, making sure that these 34 years have been actual *living*, not just *surviving*.

I have not, as some have joked, "gone underground" due to the Department of Homeland Security report out this week that may consider my "Internet Chatter" in favor of free markets indicative of my right-wing extremism. :-) (Incidentally, DHS, I am pro-choice, pro gay marriage, pro open borders, and non-interventionist in foreign policy.)

I have many posts brewing for your reading pleasure, including:

* Reflections on Alexis de Tocqueville and Erich Fromm (!?!)

* A love-filled missive on why I think that the preservation of Individual Liberty is the highest duty of our government

* Why I just love a good Tea Party

* Thoughts on the future of the music industry, long-tail niche markets, and patronage

* More on newspapers, reputation systems, and the editorial role we all play for each other

But while I get cracking on those upcoming posts, I'll share Shelly Roche and Michelle Lee Muccio with you (okay, Rockwell, Schiff, and The Judge are in there too, but who am I kidding?):

You Always Hurt The Ones You Love

2009-04-05T17:06:00.001-04:00

I often write of the unintended consequences of government intervention in markets. Most of these unintended consequences stem from regulations (or selective de-regulation) that results in a government putting its thumb on the scales of the market, and distorting real prices. The general mechanism is as follows:

1) Price is determined in the market for a given good.

2) The price for this good is too high for some people to pay.

3) The government wishes these people to have that good as well, and creates a subsidy for these people to acquire the good.

4) The price of the good rises, because it is guaranteed a market based on the subsidy, establishing a new, higher, baseline price for the good.

4a) The more desirable the good, the more likely it is that the increase in price will match the increase in subsidy. Thus pricing more people out of the market for it, and creating more need for government subsidy.

5) Go to step 1.

---They Can Have Any Color They Want, So Long As It's Green---

Michael G. Franc tipped me off to March 30th's Dept. of Transportation press release:

U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood announced today that the Department of Transportation has posted the new fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks for the 2011 model year…

On January 26, 2009, President Barack Obama directed the Department of Transportation to review relevant legal, technological, and scientific considerations associated with establishing more stringent fuel economy standards, and to finalize the 2011 model year standard by the end of March.

He goes on to quote the Detroit News:

Stricter fuel economy standards….for the 2011 model year will cost struggling auto companies nearly $1.5 billion and boost the cost of passenger vehicles an average of $64 for cars and $126 for light trucks.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said the additional vehicle cost will be recouped by buyers of pickups, SUVs and minivans, through fuel savings, in an average of 7.7 years. Passenger car buyers will recover that cost in an average of 4.4 years.

In a recent post I ask if consumers really will recoup these costs? I don't think so. It is more likely that the price of gasoline will rise to make up the ground we "gained". Remember that oil production is largely controlled to match an acceptable level of profit for oil companies. To many of us, however, the amount of gas we consume is largely a fixed cost (see step 4a), and can't be easily adjusted without purchasing yet another car.

Go to step 1.

How many times do we have to watch this cycle repeated, from college tuition prices, to health care costs, to energy prices? Even when our hearts are in the right place, we're hurting the very people we are trying to help the most when we close our eyes and try to wish away the laws of supply and demand.

From the Senator Who Wishes The Internet Was Never Built

2009-04-05T10:51:00.002-04:00

A few weeks back, I posted a link to Sen. Rockefeller flubbing his way through a speech on cybersecurity where he says "It almost makes you ask the question, 'Would it have been better if we had never invented the Internet?'"

Sen. Rockefeller(D-W. Virginia) and Sen. Snowe(R-Maine) introduced a bill on April 1 called "The Cybersecurity Act of 2009". Rockefeller is concerned that "critical infrastructure" could be harmed in Internet attacks. I agree with Jim Harper over at the Cato Institute, that this is a reason to keep key infrastructure off the Internet--something most financial institutions, water and sewer services, and electrical grid operators already do. But in the Washington Post, Rockefeller says:

"People say this is a military or intelligence concern, but it's a lot more than that, it suddenly gets into the realm of traffic lights and rail networks and water and electricity."

Instead of arguing that key physical infrastructure should pursue the cautious and prudent course by not relying on the Internet, Rockefeller thinks that federalizing internet security will do the trick. Or, as Jim Harper phrases it:

But in the debate over raising the bridge or lowering the river, Rockefeller is choosing the policy that most enthuses and involves him: Get critical infrastructure onto the Internet and get the government into the cyber security business.

That’s a recipe for disaster. The right answer is to warn the operators of key infrastructure to keep critical functions off the Internet and let markets and tort law hold them responsible should they fail to maintain themselves operational.

Roy Mark over at eweek lays out the full details of the 51-page bill:

According to the bill's language, the president would have broad authority to designate various private networks as a "critical infrastructure system or network" and, with no other review, "may declare a cyber-security emergency and order the limitation or shutdown of Internet traffic to and from" the designated the private-sector system or network.

He goes on to say:

The bill would also impose mandates for designated private networks and systems, including standardized security software, testing, licensing and certification of cyber-security professionals.

It seems that the government isn't content with just running banks and auto companies, now it wants to standardize how private companies implement Internet security, as well as reserve the right to cut off portions of the Internet without so much as a word from Congress or the courts.

I'm certain that Sen. Rockefeller didn't mean to say it this way, but here's the direct transcription of his words on March 24th:

[Two former Directors of National Intelligence] have labeled cybersecurity perpetrated through the internet as the #1 national hazard of attack on the homeland.

I couldn't have said it better myself, Senator.

Calling the Shot - Halfway there

2009-03-31T23:24:00.003-04:00

Yesterday I posted about the Wagoner firing being a smokescreen--a bit of PR to throw a scapegoat before an angry mob weary of bailouts.

Here are the options:

Option 1) GM can build more inexpensive fuel-efficient green cars
Option 2) GM can preserve UAW jobs, contracts, and legacy commitments
Option 3) GM can be profitable

Pick two.

The math doesn't work out any other way. It is an impossibility.

Analysis:

Option #1 is pretty much a given under the current administration and Congress. CAFE standards and a near religious-like zealousness amongst the Democratic party base has pretty much settled this issue.

I failed to state that, even though wildly improbable, my preferred method of dealing with this is that we back off the environmental jihad, and let American car companies make cars Americans want and turn a profit. However, GM building more fuel-efficient cars is a federal mandate, because anthropogenic climate change is for all intents and purposes a secular religion, and not to be questioned.

The American auto companies, saddled with higher labor costs and legacy costs compared to overseas competitors, were only staying afloat because of the higher profit margins on vans, full-size trucks, and SUVs--exactly the kinds of things that ever more stringent federal environmental controls make it harder and more costly to produce. In turn, this eats away the profit margins on those vehicles, leaving U.S. auto manufacturers no choice but to cut labor rates to be competitive in the small-car market (sacrificing option #2, above). Caught between a rock (CAFE standards) and a hard place (the UAW), they can sacrifice neither option #1 or #2, both deemed sacred by the current administration and congress.

Alas, GM has to surrender any hope for option #3 (turning a profit).

Michael G. Franc points out that the smokescreen obscured even more than I originally thought. On the same day that Wagoner ~~was fired by the President~~ stepped down from GM, a DOT press release stated:

U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood announced today that the Department of Transportation has posted the new fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks for the 2011 model year…

Yep. Looks like a pretty safe bet that the government won't ease up fuel efficiency standards. The Detroit News goes on to report:

Stricter fuel economy standards… for the 2011 model year will cost struggling auto companies nearly $1.5 billion and boost the cost of passenger vehicles an average of $64 for cars and $126 for light trucks.

Will you recoup those costs in fuel savings over time? See my next post.

#UPDATE#
Ok, see "a future post". Not my "next post". I'm still hammering this one out. -ER

Calling the Shot...

2009-03-30T22:33:00.002-04:00

Today the newspapers were free in Detroit. Not on the web, I mean free. Paper.

They picked a helluva day to give away papers. Everyone had one in their hand today. The big red letters jumped off the page:

U.S. SHREDS AUTO PLANS

I have to agree with James Lileks who sent this out on Twitter today:

Maybe I’m old-school, but “President fires CEO” looks as wrong as “Pope fires Missile.” Does not compute.

The President has warned that filing bankruptcy may be necessary for GM and Chrysler, but I think this is just hot air, at least as far as GM is concerned. I mentioned that a Green American auto market is a pipe dream back in 2008 before the first bailouts, but I'll sum it up here.

Here are the options:

Option 1) GM can build more inexpensive fuel-efficient green cars
Option 2) GM can preserve UAW jobs, contracts, and legacy commitments
Option 3) GM can be profitable

Pick two.

The math doesn't work out any other way. It is an impossibility.

Analysis:

Option #1 is pretty much a given under the current administration and Congress. CAFE standards and a near religious-like zealousness amongst the Democratic party base has pretty much settled this issue. So it largely comes down to a choice between Option #2 and Option #3. That choice is between continued bailouts of GM, or GM filing bankruptcy and shredding its union and dealer contracts (mostly union).

Anyone here think that given the choice between 1) destroying one of the nation's largest unions or 2) shelling out taxpayer money to prop up a failing business, President Obama will choose to let the UAW go down? I didn't think so.

The dismissal of Rick Wagoner is just a distraction. The Obama Administration needed a head on a pike to show to the bailout-weary masses. They had to talk tough with threats of bankruptcy to sound credible. What they did was shovel $6 billion more dollars into GM, and throw a sacrificial lamb to the angry mob. This bought them another 60 days, during which time they hope that some of the bailout/stimulus/TARP/TALF/TARPII/Geithner-printing-a-trillion-dollars-quantitative-easing fatigue dissipates, and the mob gets tired of toting those pitchforks and torches around.

At which time, they will trot out a restructuring plan that looks a whole lot like the one they have on hand, tell us all that it's a lot better now, and fork over more taxpayer money to GM. All without having done anything that will allow GM to emerge from this as a competent, competitive corporation.

I don't like the options any more than you do. I *live* in this town. I know a lot of UAW workers. Just about everybody I know is bound to the auto companies in some way. Dear friends are out of work. Many more have moved away. To say that these people are "hurting" right now is a shameful understatement. But in the long run, setting up GM as a permanent ward of the state is not a viable option. I'd like to believe that Chapter 13 restructuring is really on the table, and that *some* of the American auto industry and its jobs may be preserved, but I can't really believe it.

The current administration will instead put GM on life support, injecting wasted bailout after wasted bailout, until the voters demand that they pull the plug. Who knows how many billions of dollars on down the road that will be, and what kind of irreversible damage will be done by then to the American auto industry.

Smash the Collective!

2009-03-26T22:32:00.003-04:00

It's one thing for Daniel Hannan to have done it.

It's another thing for him to realize that he had done it.

It's yet another thing for him to realize what it means that he had done it.

And it is icing on the cake that he did it with an assault on state-controlled economies.

He managed hurl a single well placed stone, and put a crack in collectivist notions of media, politics, and economy with just one shot. A British libertarian hurling well-pointed words at the Prime Minister may not be common, but it's not earth-shattering either. What's amazing is that it ginned up enough interest on the Internet that I've seen it on just about every news program tonight all the way over here on the other side of the Atlantic. Left to their own devices, the European press would never have covered it, let alone the American press. But, as Hannan writes in his blog today:

When I woke up this morning, my phone was clogged with texts, my email inbox with messages. Overnight, the YouTube clip of my remarks had attracted over 36,000 hits. By today, it was the most watched video in Britain.

How did it happen, in the absence of any media coverage? The answer is that political reporters no longer get to decide what's news. The days when a minister gave briefings to a dozen lobby correspondents, and thereby dictated the next day's headlines, are over. Now, a thousand bloggers decide for themselves what is interesting.

As I said in one of my first posts to this blog, almost a year ago:

When someone talks about the sweeping changes that the Internet is going to bring to politics, they are usually talking about recent or near-term trends like Online voting, scandal scoops from the Blogosphere, or tapping into internet-based campaign contributions. These symptoms are certainly novel, but they are just that... symptoms. The real sea change is occurring in the populace now. We expect to have a voice, not just in the "strongly agree/somewhat disagree" opinion polls, but in shaping and driving opinion and dialogue, and in oversight of a truly transparent government.

I'm getting pretty tired of hearing of this phenomenon as being "viral". With the professional opining class becoming ever more irrelevant, and traditional media lagging behind instead of leading the public discourse, I think we can start calling the old model "stagnant" media, and stop attaching the foul connotations of the epithet "viral" to the emerging media reality. Now that our natural desire to share, produce, comment, and converse has an avenue on the Internet, the time is coming soon when social media waves like this one are no longer the exception, but the norm.

The Difference Between Consumerism and Capitalism

2009-03-26T00:11:00.002-04:00

Listen to every word.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

I couldn't have agreed more when I posted this last year.

All The News That's Too Big To Fail...

2009-03-24T23:02:00.002-04:00

Sen. Banjamin Cardin introduces the newspaper bailout bill.

I said it about the banks, I said it about the car companies, and it goes double for newspapers: Capitalism without failure is like Christianity without Hell.

I have heard for the past year that capitalism has failed. What has failed is our understanding of capitalism. Investment banks shouldn't leverage themselves 40-to-1. No government oversight caught this problem. But the market did. And when it was revealed that the emperor had no clothes, the investment banks failed for their hubris and stupidity, only to be put on life support by the even greater hubris and stupidity of our government.

Every time I hear a politician talking about how there was insufficient oversight of the banking industry, I hear it as an admission that planned economies can not work. Because there can never be enough oversight in a free and dynamic market. There is too much to oversee.

The housing market was an artificial bubble for much of the past decade. So what happened? It burst. In the face of everything that the government (Republicans and Democrats alike) tried to do to continue to prop it up and inflate it, it burst. It was a lie and thanks to the market, Truth prevailed. The markets could no longer withstand the pile of lies that the bubble was built on. Once the first domino was tipped, everything built on that shaky ground came collapsing down.

When a business fails, it is the market telling it that its services are no longer necessary. Is it painful? Yes. Does it effect us in ways we do not like? Absolutely. But that doesn't mean we can continue to build on shifting sand, just because we liked the view. We must learn from failures, and build on higher ground. Businesses fail for a reason. Find the mistakes that caused that failure and correct for them. Build a better business. When your immune system kills off an infection, don't try and save the virus.

So Senator Cardin wants to save newspapers. Not journalism. Not news media. Papers.

Because newspaper profits have been falling in recent years, "no substantial loss of federal revenue" was expected under the legislation, Cardin's office said in a statement.

Anyone believe that? Does that statement even make sense?

"We are losing our newspaper industry," Cardin said. "The economy has caused an immediate problem, but the business model for newspapers, based on circulation and advertising revenue, is broken, and that is a real tragedy for communities across the nation and for our democracy.

Newspaper subscriptions and advertising have shrunk dramatically in the past few years as Americans have turned more and more to the Internet or television for information.

The business model is broken. News is important to America, and many organizations like Politico and Slate are finding ways to support themselves with online ad revenue. As a blogger, I have a deeper vested interest in protecting good journalism more than most. But I won't take your money to do it.

More importantly, I take exception to the idea that our democracy needs a protected delivery medium to thrive. Good journalism isn't only to be found on paper. We need to realize that "news" and "paper" are separate words. A free people, making free decisions, have decided that paper is no longer the preferred delivery method for their news. So Senator Cardin proposes that we tax them to build a mandatory market, just because newspapers have become accustomed to a certain profit level that can no longer be sustained when exposed to direct competition from far more efficient online advertising.

If Cardin were in office 100 years ago, he'd probably support a tax exemption for buggy whips.

h/t K-Lo, a phrase that William never though he'd see at the tail end of one of my posts.

Rockefeller. Moron.

2009-03-24T22:31:00.002-04:00

Jim Harper over at Cato lays out just how ridiculous Senator Jay Rockefeller's argument is. Even when the worlds best hackers take out some website like the DOJ or the CIA, it's their websites. That's like taking out their radio commercials. It's not critical infrastructure. Rest easy, the important stuff is locked safely away from the Internet freaky-freakies.

I love me my Internets, but folks, we don't build critical infrastructure onto it, nor should we. To quote Harper, quoting Tim Lee:

[S]ome mission-critical activities, including voting and banking, are carried out via the Internet in some places. But to the extent that that’s true, the lesson of the Estonian attacks isn’t that the Internet is “critical infrastructure” on par with electricity and water, but that it’s stupid to build “critical infrastructure” on top of the public Internet. There’s a reason that banks maintain dedicated infrastructure for financial transactions, that the power grid has a dedicated communications infrastructure, and that computer security experts are all but unanimous that Internet voting is a bad idea.

The internet is made for easy access to worldwide data. In all data security, there is a trade-off between sharing data, and protecting data. It is a sliding scale, and it is absolutely impossible to have it both ways. The internet is reasonably secure, but not secure enough to start risking real critical infrastructure to it. So of course, we don't. And I don't foresee us doing so at any time in the near future.

H/T James Effing Madison

2009-03-24T07:08:00.002-04:00

Fed 44:

Bills of attainder, ex-post-facto laws, and laws impairing the obligation of contracts, are contrary to the first principles of the social compact, and to every principle of sound legislation. The two former are expressly prohibited by the declarations prefixed to some of the State constitutions, and all of them are prohibited by the spirit and scope of these fundamental charters. Our own experience has taught us, nevertheless, that additional fences against these dangers ought not to be omitted. Very properly, therefore, have the convention added this constitutional bulwark in favor of personal security and private rights; and I am much deceived if they have not, in so doing, as faithfully consulted the genuine sentiments as the undoubted interests of their constituents. The sober people of America are weary of the fluctuating policy which has directed the public councils. They have seen with regret and indignation that sudden changes and legislative interferences, in cases affecting personal rights, become jobs in the hands of enterprising and influential speculators, and snares to the more-industrious and less informed part of the community. They have seen, too, that one legislative interference is but the first link of a long chain of repetitions, every subsequent interference being naturally produced by the effects of the preceding.

Damn. I'm not done rereading Tocqueville yet and Skanderbeg sends me scrambling for one of my 3 copies of _The Federalist Papers_. (I know that Professor Rosano is responsible for me having two of them, based on the cramped notes I have scribbled in the margins. I'm baffled by the third.)

Hat tip, Skanderbeg, and uh, yeah, 18th century blogger James Madison.

Tax the Rich!!

2009-03-23T22:54:00.002-04:00

Tasty segment on Morning Joe today.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Believe me, if you think that a highly progressive tax on individuals or businesses is soaking the rich, you are mistaken. It's only soaking the upper-middle class and small business owners. (You know, 3/4 of the job creation in this country.)

Sure it's looks real good to the unaware electorate when they're told that the rich are being taxed more, but the truth is, they are not. The more complicated and progressive the tax code, the more loopholes the really rich can slide through.

Meanwhile, small business, now "rich" by the current administration's definition, gets lit up, because they're too busy creating jobs, wealth, product, and services to devise creative ways to avoid taxation, yet aren't big enough to lobby for a loophole or an earmark.

(More) Singing the Strong, Light Works of Engineers

2009-03-23T22:19:00.002-04:00

Huzzah, Engineers!

I've been crudely paraphrasing Samuel C. Florman for about a decade now when it comes to mitigating man's impact on the environment: It won't be the neo-Luddites turning out lights and hugging trees that protect our environment, it will be scientists and engineers who devise the technology, and innovators who perfect it and make it affordable and desirable.

Hopefully they will grow fat and rich on the gifts that their minds make to mankind. Provided that they're not compelled to Go Galt before then.

Cramer v. Stewart and Influence Peddling

2009-03-22T14:39:00.003-04:00

Over on Big Hollywood, Dan Gifford puts together a nice piece about the now-fading flop between Jim Cramer and Jon Stewart. I've been a fan of both "Mad Money" and "The Daily Show" for some time now, and saw much of the brouhaha as it developed.

I couldn't figure out why Stewart would go after Santelli, when he's didn't just tee off on mortgage bailouts, but corporate bailouts as well. It's fine for Jon Stewart to call Santelli wrong, but Stewart made him out to be a hypocrite, which is patently unfair.

Then Cramer got in on the action, because Stewart's assault on Santelli had enough splash damage for all of CNBC. Like usual, Stewart's writers cherry-picked some segments from all across CNBC, and set them up out of context to look damning. It's funny, but it's not journalism. (Something Stewart will ardently agree with, when it works to his defense.) Cramer took exception, because he's been watchdogging Wall Street pretty loudly.

So Cramer goes on Stewart's show, and pretty much ties himself to the post and allows the public flogging. He's got an arsenal of evidence on his side, and he offers no defense whatsoever. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why he'd do that, and I still can't.

Gifford's piece lays out some of that evidence nicely, and so much more about the position that news organizations like CNBC are in when they have to trade influence for access (a problem facing all news organizations, not just financial ones).

Give a read.

Sunday Smackdown

2009-03-22T12:06:00.002-04:00

I love my DVR. It lets me hit a party on Friday night, and still not miss the finale of Battlestar Galactica.

More importantly (marginally) is that my DVR solves one of the greatest problems of my life: Watching both Meet the Press, and This Week without David Brinkley.

Nonetheless, I am compelled to keep score and see which show shows up on top at the end of the year.

You can see the running tally here. Enjoy!

The Gormogons: Followers à Gogo!

2009-03-21T14:19:00.001-04:00

The Gormogons: Followers à Gogo!

What a kind welcome from the Gormogons! They haven't taught me the secret handshake, yet, but here's the "About Us" section of their page:

A secret society dedicated to the restoration of the Kingdom of Poland-Lithuania, the imprisonment of Esperanto speakers, and furthering the eschatological doctrine of the Return from Occultation of the Thirteenth Imam, Val Kilmer.

They're having a good time with a tournament bracket of their posts. My final four picks? Already screwed up in the first round:

Ghettoputer Region: "Canuckistan"
Ecumenical Volgi Region: "Nuclear Effing Power"
GorTechie Region: "Battlestar Galactica, New"
then, ironically, in the Czar of Muscovy Region:
"Dirk Benedict's Gonads"

Sadly, Canuckistan was struck down in the first round. :-(

Go enjoy the site. It smacks of ancient pre-HTML USENET irreverence.

What We Need Is a Diversion...

2009-03-19T22:04:00.002-04:00

The TV news couldn't talk about anything today aside from AIG bonuses. I could rant and rave about this, but my betters have shown themselves as such. If you want to read about why taxing the bonuses at 90% is irrational, stupid, tyrannical, and most likely unconstitutional, click here. My short answer? You'd have to give me a helluva bonus to get me to work at AIG or Fannie or Freddie. Either you want the bailout to succeed for these companies, or you don't. You can't have it both ways. (Of course, if you didn't have a government propping up failing institutions, you wouldn't have to worry about this, would you?)

Far more important, however, is this. The Fed is firing up the printing presses to the tune of 1.2 Trillion Dollars.

$1,200,000,000,000.00

We're gonna re-inflate this bubble with, well, inflation. Here's hoping that the monetary folks are right, and that it's much easier to halt inflation than it is to halt deflation.

The point is, we're not even talking about it. Congress and the mainstream media are busy handing out pitchforks and torches to go after AIG employees, instead.

Best quote of the day, from Chris Edwards over at Cato:

Aside from the dangers to liberty from overzealous members of Congress, there are issues of priorities here. While Congress has been busy with this particular inquisition, the Federal Reserve is moving ahead with a new plan to shower the economy with a massive $1.2 trillion cash infusion–an amount 7,200 times greater than the $165 million of AIG retention bonuses.

Keep your eye on the ball, people.

The Smoking Gun

2009-03-19T07:29:00.003-04:00

This can be posted pretty much without comment, but I can't help myself:

Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending

Context is everything isn't it? 10 years ago in the New York Times, this is a liberal highlight of a progressive government policy serving the minority community.

Today, you could reprint it verbatim in the NRO, and it would be a damning indictment of a meddlesome government who doesn't understand the term "unintended consequences"

EPIC = Privacy Advocates, Now With Tinfoil Hats

2009-03-19T06:56:00.005-04:00

Ryan Radia has a great post up over on the Technology Liberation Front (which is an all-around excellent site) about EPIC lobbing shots at Google.

Now, I like EPIC as much as the next libertarian-leaning privacy advocate, but this is just over-the-top:

EPIC has formally asked the Federal Trade Commission to open an investigation into Google's Cloud Computing Services -- including Gmail, Google Docs, and Picasa -- to determine "the adequacy of the privacy and security safeguards."

Google copped to the mistake, corrected it, and published the details on their official blog. EPIC's first reaction is to call for FTC regulation? *headdesk*

It's the Internet. We want reasonable control over our information, we don't want privacy to the point that we're all locked in caves, people. If the breach was so severe as to cause actual distress, then Google would face the wrath of its customers, which it isn't. Radia puts it best:

There’s no reason for the FTC to intervene every time there’s a security flub when existing liability laws combined with market pressures already give the Googles of the world a strong incentive to guard against breaches.

Security is a tremendous concern for everyone involved in cloud computing, but in the end, the only way to 100% guarantee security is to unplug a machine from the Internet. This is a bit like stopping drunk driving by getting rid of automobiles and making everyone walk.

Media in Crisis Reports on the Media in Crisis

2009-03-18T22:54:00.004-04:00

RSM tipped me off to this. Go put a nickle in his tip jar.

In Sunday's Washington Post, Kathleen Parker tosses in her two cents into the echo chamber that is The Media in Crisis talking about The Media in Crisis. I could simply tee off on her, but quite frankly, my anger reserves are running low, and pity is kicking in for traditional media folks. Instead, I'll try to share the good parts, and use the bad to illustrate the common errors that Traditional Media types are making. I'm sick of generating more heat than light.

She starts with this line:

The biggest challenge facing America's struggling newspaper industry may not be the high cost of newsprint or lost ad revenue, but ignorance stoked by drive-by punditry.

No. The biggest challenge facing newspapers is two-fold:

First, one problem that their industry solved and profited from--distributing information--is no longer a problem to be solved. Paper can not compete with the Internet as a distribution medium. This part of the issue is settled and done with.

Second, in the 20th century, traditional media became trusted voices in the only media that existed. Organizations, be they broadcast news or newspapers, that violated the trust of their customers got left behind. This is why (most) journalists take the ethical responsibility of their profession so seriously. Trust matters, regardless of the method of distribution.

Parker goes on to say:

There is surely room for media criticism, and a few bad actors in recent years have badly frayed public trust. And, yes, some newspapers are more liberal than their readership and do a lousy job of concealing it.

But it isn't that trust has been violated by newspapers, so much as newspapers now must compete on nearly even footing with non-traditional media types as trsuted voices. It's not just the bloggers like me, it's everyone. We share links and videos with our friends and families on Facebook. We collectively rate content on sites like Digg and Delicious. The voices I trust are carried to me in the same RSS feed whether they are CNN, the New York Times, or the blogs of my friends. And, forgive me, but I trust some of my friends more than I trust CNN.

Christie Hefner touches on the idea of trust in media on Morning Joe:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Traditional media has to compete with everybody we know as a trusted voice. They are not ready for this competition. It's only new beginning to creep up on them like a nagging feeling. It bubbles to surface in off-handed quips about bloggers by traditional media figures, rants against "drive-by punditry" like Parker's, or the generally clueless dismissal of technologies like Facebook or Twitter. (How many times have you heard some media type on TV poke fun at this stuff, and then promptly admit that they "just don't get it".)

Parker continues:

But the greater truth is that newspaper reporters, editors and institutions are responsible for the boots-on-the-ground grub work that produces the news stories and performs the government watchdog role so crucial to a democratic republic. Unfortunately, the chorus of media bashing from certain quarters has succeeded in convincing many Americans that they don't need newspapers.

She's absolutely correct on this point. Professional journalists are the front line of defense watching over governments and corporations that may much prefer to work well away from the public eye. But it isn't "media bashing" that's convinced Americans that they don't need newspapers. We need journalists. We need real news. We need the exact kind of boots-on-the-ground reporting that she's extolling. You can keep your paper, the printing presses, the delivery trucks, and your fluff pieces. We can do all that for ourselves now.

A younger generation, meanwhile, has little understanding or appreciation of the relationship between a free press and a free society. Pew found that just 27 percent of Americans born since 1977 read a newspaper the previous day.

Parker mistakes not reading a newspaper for not reading news. Steve Boriss wrote in 2008:

Thomas Jefferson had no interest in empowering a special class, "the press," who today present themselves as superior in their abilities to ferret out, understand, and communicate the single, correct way to look at things. Instead, he wanted our news to be filled with a multitude of alternative voices and opinions competing in a freewheeling marketplace of ideas.

Sounds to me like that's what we're headed for, both a freer press and freer society, not the opposite.

For certain, we need to find a way to keep "boots-on-the-ground" journalism alive and thriving in the face of this new media, but even meager ad-supported monetization strategies could work for real journalism if they were freed from the bonds of supporting an archaic print distribution system. As for the "drive-by punditry?" We'll make, share, and link our own, thanks. Maybe this is why Kathleen Parker, and so many traditional media types, feel so threatened?

My Econ Professor Never Prepared Me For This...

2009-03-15T19:06:00.005-04:00

Russell Roberts posts a bit of a followup to a great bloggingheads.tv appearance with Arnold Kling.

I have argued that economists generally came down on one side or the other of the stimulus package based not on their economic understanding but on their political and philosophical biases. I still believe that. I think we're in macroeconomically uncharted territory.

Give the bloggingheads video a viewing, if you're into macroeconomics.

The real reason I'm posting this here is, at one point, Kling is questioning the ability of econometrics to realistically measure real value. His claim is that much of the growth in the economy in the last 15 years isn't really growth. We have nothing to show for it. Most of that growth came from a rise in home values that weren't really there, and financial market shenanigans that also turned out to be a ponzi scheme. Then, when touting what we *do* have to show for the last 15 years--the very technology that he and Roberts were using to build, share, and host the video dialog (in short, The Internet)--that econometrics largely misses that value entirely.

This hit dangerously close to a train of thought I've been working on (and will continue to work on), largely in relation to Media's failing business model. What if it is difficult to measure the economic value of something like the Internet for the same reason that it's so hard monetize and form a business model around?

Sure, there are business that benefit greatly from the internet, and wouldn't exist without it. Dell and Amazon come to mind. To a large extent, many businesses have gained efficiencies from the Internet in ways large and small. But there are some markets that are going to be broken entirely by it.

The newspaper and recording industries, for starters.

Imagine for a moment, that you own a car. A friend of yours expresses their desire to own one just like it. Further imagine that there is some mechanism in your garage that lets you to, with nothing more than a press of a button, pop out an exact duplicate that your friend could take home. To further extend this analogy, what if there were some mechanism by which you could press a button, and let thousands of friends and strangers alike create a duplicate of your car whenever they felt like it? How long would traditional car companies remain in business?

(A brief aside on the idea of Ford hypothetically copyrighting cars, in the event that such a mechanism is ever built: Copyright is a magnificent creation that introduces market-like forces into the realm of information, where they do not natively exist. Copyright may provide market incentives for the creation of intellectual property, but it must be noted that it is an artificial convention, not a real material one. Furthermore, we can see the problems that this artificial construct has when it rubs up against the real world, as it is doing right now with the Media in all it's forms.)

I'm a strong advocate of free markets, obviously. Markets are the mechanism by which society directs the usage of scarce resources to its best advantage. This works great for material goods, but what happens when resources aren't scarce? What happens when they are near-free, such as the duplication and distribution of music and journalism?

Let's face it, until we get the replicators online, nobody's downloading any cars to their garage. But in a sense, the problem facing the Media is a very special case of the problem facing much of America's economy as a whole (and I mean the kind of economy requiring resources to actually make material goods). In a global market, the resources, particularly labor, are not scarce...they're bountiful. Labor can be had cheaply through automation and foreign markets. What kind of a state does that leave American Labor in in the coming years? Moreover, if we can assume that American manufacturing is dead or dying, and American Labor with it, how do we move America into a post-manufacturing economy?

Lastly, to bring the circle of this train of thought to a close, what happens if a large portion of an American post-manufacturing economy is built to survive only in an environment where the only artificial and difficult to enforce constructs like copyright, going head-to-head with the real world, are its last gatekeeper?

I am strongly encouraging comments on this post, folks. My brain is spinning with this stuff. I need more input.

(Hat tips to Russel Roberts, Arnold Kling, and Clay Shirky today.)

Eric Reasons

Vote "NO" on SOPA - An Open Letter to Congressman Thaddeus McCotter

Professor Jarvis's Homework Assignment: Jobless Future?

Jobless Recovery or Jobless Future: A Reply to Jeff Jarvis

Google+: Managing Community and Audience

Bridging the Gap: Authority, 150 connections, and the Power Law

Scarcity, Abundance, and the Knowledge Economy. Tightened Up.

Cybersecurity and "Internet Freedom" Act: Who Are They Kidding?

The Sound of Silence

Everything is a Remix

The Wealth of Networks

Kevin Carson's _The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto_

Following the Big Dogs: Lessons in Corporate Culture from Merlin Mann

Mike Masnick on Hollywood's Historical Hysterics

Why I love Charles Stross

Practicing What They Preach: Jonathan Rauch on the Tea Parties

Wine Country Vacation - Monday

Wine Country Vacation - Sunday

Wine Country Vacation - Saturday

Wine Country Vacation - Friday

VMWorld Thursday - So Long San Francisco

VMWorld Wednesday

VMWorld Tuesday

VMWorld Conference Day 1 (and Day 0)

San Francisco/NorCal Dining - Need Suggestions!

Performance Tax is Back Again!

Value vs. Capital - The Balance Sheet

Crowdsourcing Curation: The Social Graph as Gatekeeper

My Concerns about Facebook Have Nothing to do with Privacy

On the FCC Comcast Ruling...

The Amateur Ascendent -- The Compromise of Disruptive Innovation

Grooveshark

Bipartisanship and Ideology

Performance Tax?

Google Buzz: Why Open APIs Matter

The Buzz about Google Buzz

From Left to Right: Lessig Addressing Cato

Publicy - A Neologism Up For Grabs

A Christmas Present

Adding Value, Reducing Cost

Education, Attention, and Maker Time

Michel Bauwens, and the Crisis of Value Theory

This *is* the Droid You're Looking For: Verizon Droid

TEDxDetroit - Where Do We Go From Here?

Sonoma Trip Breakdown - Day 3

Sonoma Trip Breakdown - Day 2

Sonoma Trip Breakdown - Day 1

A Brief Sojourn...

Peabody, Jarvis, and the New Sacred Cows

Cautious Optimism about Google Sidewiki

Genachowski's Net Neutrality Policy

Social Media Links - Video Edition

FCC: None of Your Damn Business

Anthony Bourdain on Detroit...

The Knowledge Economy That Isn't

More Mass Market Deflation

The NYT Book Review on Chris Anderson's Free: The Future of a Radical Price

The Highlight Reel

Innovative Deflation

The Economic Reset Button

Intellectual Property and Deflation of the Knowledge Economy

Cyberdefense and Civil Liberties

Does Intellectual Property Law Foster Innovation?

P.J. O'Rourke

The Data Set...

Good For Me, But Not For Thee...

Maureen Dowd. Twit? You Decide.

Social Media: That's How We Roll...

Make it Google Friendly

Time for Tea...

Another Year Older... Another Year Wiser...

You Always Hurt The Ones You Love

From the Senator Who Wishes The Internet Was Never Built

Calling the Shot - Halfway there

Calling the Shot...

Smash the Collective!

The Difference Between Consumerism and Capitalism

All The News That's Too Big To Fail...

Rockefeller. Moron.

H/T James Effing Madison

This is the Droid You're Looking For: Verizon Droid