BuzzMachine

I twittered that I was having fun writing the chapter in my book about what a restaurant run on Googlethink might look like (besides being decorated in gaudy primary colors). Andy Carvin responded saying it might look like this: the Wiki Wiki Teriyaki restaurant in Austin. He said:

Rather than having a set menu, they just have a bunch of ingredients and invite you to bring your own. The diners, who call themselves “recipedians,” get to put together their own recipes and have them cooked. Other diners can then build on each other’s recipes and discuss them, creating a seemingly limitless array of recipes. Soon they’ll add ratings and tags to make it easier for diners to parse their options.

I got so excited that I stopped reading and immediately Googled the place. Odd, I thought, all they brag about is their sauce, not this bravely innovative way to open-source a restaurant.

Then I went back to Andy’s post and read the rest of it:

Actually, none of that is true. It’s just a restaurant with the word “wiki” in it. Twice. But how cool would that be?

Cool indeed. Andy got me without even trying.

Anyway, I have lots of ideas about an open and transparent restaurant operation, experience, and community. If you have any ideas you’d like to share, please join in. Then maybe we can pull a McDonald’s and buy the Wiki Wiki and franchise it.

Paulo Coehlo — whom I got to interview in Paris for my book and an upcoming column — is asking his readers to help him create a virtual exhibition of them reading his books making 100 million — you read right — books sold. He loves the connections with readers the internet enables.

This reminds me of what friend Annik Rubens’ fans do for her podcast, Schlaflos in Muenchen, taking pictures of their iPods wherever they are in the world to show how far the show travels:

Copy editors and subeditors appear to be headed for the pasture. They’re getting laid off. The Orange County Register said recently that it would outsource copyediting to India. Roy Greenslade tells us that CityAM is getting rid of subs and that reporters will edit their own copy. You could say that’s what we bloggers do. Except the truth is that you edit me. When I mess up, you tell me. And because this blog is more of a process — a work in progress — than a product — the world neatly packed into a box with a bow on top, as newspapers like to think of themselves — that works well.

So I’d suggest that publications should put all their articles online before publication in wiki form and enable the public to edit and annotate them (you may choose which edits to take). Why would the public do that? Why do they make Wikipedia? They’re generous if you give them a chance.

If you happened to be driving down a New Jersey street this morning and saw a tall, pencil-necked, sweaty geek “running” down the road cursing into what appeared to be thin air, that would be me. But what I was cursing was what I was hearing on my iPod: the latest edition of On the Media, which gave the worst possible memorial to the legacy of George Carlin with its report on the seven dirty words quoting a Miami TV critic who gave unquestioned credence to the so-called Parents Television Council, saying that we are a nation divided about indecency. Bullshit.

I’ve been a longtime listener and fan of OtM but I have to say that they have been driving me a bit crazy lately covering China and Russia more than American media and giving more time to political screeds than media news. Maybe they’re bored with the beat but I can’t see how they could be given that media are undergoing history, volcanic, accelerating, unsure, and profound change that will forever alter media and society. What a great time to cover media in America!

This is on my mind now because they had asked me to be on this week’s show to talk about the Associated Press. Whether or not they had me on to talk about it, that is an important story. But they said that their studio wasn’t ready (who needs a studio when you have a mic and Mac?). So instead, they ran a 20-minute archive piece about a guy who collected sounds. By this time in my run, I wasn’t cursing, I was merely muttering. What an opportunity lost. The AP story is rich with mines to explore about the new architecture of media and its interrelationships. And now the peg, the moment is gone.

This is more on my mind because I am a loyal listener and because I want to hear OtM cover all this huge change in media. I’d love to hear them get to Sam Zell to explain his plans for the Tribune (and I’ll bet they could) and to Rupert Murdoch to share his vision for the Journal. I’d like to hear them give attention to experiments in new ways to cover news — there are many. I’d want some perspective on all the layoffs in the business and what impact they have and whether there are better ways to restructure journalism. I’d be eager to have them explore new business models for news. If they’re going abroad, I’d like them to bring back ideas that would be useful for American media to borrow. I’d like them to use OtM as a laboratory for multimedia itself: video, wikis, collaborative criticism, perhaps. Maybe they should find and turn the spotlight on the next Brian Stelters and Adrian Holovatys — the young innovators who will save journalism. They could also turn their sharp pens on the media executives who are rearranging cubicles on the decks of their Titantics. They could start tracking how Arianna Huffington invades Chicago and how the Tribune reacts. They could explain how new tools — Twitter, Flip video cameras, iPhones — could be used to do journalism. I could go on listing stories I’d like to hear for a page (and remember, there is no end to pages on the web).

OtM should consider this a valentine not an attack. I want them to put their reporting and analytical talents to covering American media again. Please.

Ari Melber happens upon what could be an important moment in the history-in-the-making of participatory, self-organized online politics: Barack Obama supporters used his own network to organize a protest against his actions on telecom immunity.

Now if a campaign is going to argue that it’s truly grassroots, what is it to do with a revolt or protest from within? I’ve argued since Howard Dean’s run in 2004 that campaigns aren’t or can’t really be bottom-up when it comes to policy. They are necessarily propagandistic: This is what the candidate says. Indeed, Dean’s supporters acted like white blood cells in his blog discussions quite effectively surrounding and strangling dissent and opponents in the bloodstream. That’s the way campaigns have to work if you’re going to decide what this guy stands for and whether to vote for him, right? It’s about the message, no?

Ah, but when it’s a grassroots organization that makes you — rather than a party — and you say you’re beholden to them not to special interests and big money and lobbyists, well, then you really are beholden to them. If they rise up from within to tell you that they don’t like what you’re doing — when they use your own organizational tools to do that — then I’d say you ignore them at your peril. Live by the crowd, die by the crowd.

It so happens that I agree with Obama on this issue (and I know my view is as unpopular as his). When government forces you do to something then that force must come with immunity. The problem is not the telcos going along but the government making the demand and there being no check on that. But that’s a different debate.

I have disagreed with other things Obama has done since getting the nomination. I am profoundly disappointed in him for his decision to turn down government campaign financing. He stood on expediency not principle. I also find tragic irony in the fact that the best reason to vote for him is to turn around the Supreme Court before it is too late (if it isn’t already) and yet Obama endorsed just the kind of decision I dread coming from a right-wing court: last week’s ruling on handgun bans. So should I go into MyBarackObama and try to organize pressure groups from within who agree with me? Should I encourage my fellow Hillary Clinton supporters — now that we’re all unified — to do likewise to try to get him to promise truly universal health coverage? Why not? In the open organization, what’s yours is mine.

I find two things fascinating about this: First, we are beginning to see a campaign built openly on coalitions. Even though I disagree with them, I am happy to see the anti-immunity lobby crack the monolithic, glassy-eyed facade of the Obama fan club (the sort of people who yell at me in my comments and tell me I’m not allowed to disagree with him about anything). Thank goodness we see disagreement and discussion — democracy — inside a campaign. I believe the greatest impact the internet will have on politics will be that it enables like-minded groups to find each other and organize apart from old organizations and labels (red, blue, Republican, Democrat); we will organize around issues and priorities rather than parties. See the comments under this post.

Second, I wonder what these self-organizing groups will look like when they get into power. The Deaniacs and Joe Trippi made valiant attempts to stay organized after their campaign melted but that didn’t work. If Obama gets into the White House, though, will his supporters at MyBarackObama continue to use these tools to influence him and government? And will he have to listen because he is beholden to them?

My Guardian column this week reprises the talk of the last two weeks about The Associated Press — not so much the blog kerfuffle but the clash of media models and the fate of syndicates. The end:

Wire services, like all news organisations, must reinvent themselves. Reuters is building a consumer brand, competing with some of its customers; that’s one answer. Others: a syndicate could become a network of links to original content, a curator of the best, most reliable original reporting from any source. A syndicate could also become an advertising network supporting the best of that content. It could become a cooperative - which is how AP was founded - to report that which isn’t being reported already. It could become a platform and marketplace for reporting, enabling anyone to contribute to a larger network of news.

A bunch of anti-Obama blogs were apparently shut down on Google’s Blogspot as suspected spam. They say that Obama fans reported them as spam to get rid of them. I have no idea what the truth is. The fear online has been that false information could be spread. It’s another fear that speech can be silenced.

(I suppose I should make clear that I don’t think any official Obama campaign effort is remotely behind this if it’s true. The point, instead, is that rogues can cause trouble. This would seem to be a variation on Swiftboating but rather than try to get a message out, the goal would be to bat an opposing message down.)

My friend Neil McIntosh says he was inspired by my wonder at the British institution of the Pukka Pie (why’d anyone one to puke a pie, I asked) to explain the ritual on his blog as he did for me on my visit to London last week:

When served in a crinkly plastic bag, the top may appear cool, while the foil tray in which they rest is quite warm. Nothing, however, indicates the extraordinary heat in the centre of the pie. N00b pie eaters will dive straight in, and risk serious burns to tongue, lips and even face as the pie contents spill out. Seasoned supporters view this as something of a test; the “serious” fan would not make such a schoolboy error.

The pragmatic pie eater, therefore, may choose to wait 15-20 minutes before consuming the product, knowing that it is piping hot throughout despite its cool exterior. This waiting time is known, at least round seat M108 of the Don Rogers Stand, Swindon, as the “half life” of the Pukka pie. The pie should then be debagged and, by means of gripping the edges of the foil tray while using the index finger to push the bottom of said tray, the pie raised out its container. This allows a safer approach to the snack, all the while ensuring no gravy spills down your front.

I think he’s taking me for a N00b. Surely one can’t eat a piping-hot gravy-and-grease-filled pie as if it were something truly sensible like a hot dog. I’m betting he’s trying to trap me. I have demanded a demonstration.

I am reminded of one of my favorite Calvin Trillin pieces in The New Yorker in which he attended an oyster festival at a bayou firehouse. The firefighters tried to rile N00b oyster-haters by convincing them that REAL men preferred to consume the bivalves by sucking them up their noses. This, Trillin said, made just as much sense to an oyster-fearer as eating them in the mouth.

Neil also points us to Pukka Pie posters, which can be purchased for two quid each (that’s about $300 for us). What’s particularly striking is how they try to make the Pukka Pie into a sexual symbol. But then again, they do produce foodstuffs named after an article of stripper’s clothing.

Odd, those Brits.

Identity just got more complicated. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has decided to open up top-level domains to most any suffix we can imagine — from .com, .net, .org, .co.uk, etc. to .anything. So there will be an explosion in what we nerdily called the internet namespace.

On the one hand, this means we don’t have to all fight and scrape to grab any brand followed by a .com. But it also means there’ll be a land rush to create and sell every possible combination of words — amazon.store, amazon.book, amazon.everything (and Amazon will be faced with having to buy them all to protect its brand).
We users trying to find things could end up with an exponential rise in confusion as we try to remember more combinations of names: Where is that guy who drones on about media — jarvis.com, jarvis.pundit, jarvis.blather, jarvis.blahblahblah?

Who could win in this? Who always wins these days: Google, of course. I know many people who never bother to type in internet addresses; they find it quicker to just enter a Google search and click from there. All roads lead from Google.

Well, with more confusion in names, we’ll all end up having to search Google more often. That makes search-engine optimization even more critical as sites strive to make sure they are on the top page of search results for any relevant term. I, for example, am proud to be the seventh “jeff” on Google and I’m plotting ways to eliminate the other six. I believe that companies and brands will soon be valued not just on their cash flow and EBITDA but also on their Googlejuice.

The real limitation in namespace has been language. We have taken just about every word and pronounceable syllable in every tongue and already glued them together and tacked them onto a .com. That is why new web 2.0 companies inevitably end up with silly, made-up names these days: Dopplr, Zivity, Flickr. The internet has been killing vowels, syllables, and spaces in our languages. So it would stand to reason that this need no longer happen: Flicker.com can live peaceably beside Flicker.photo, Flicker.snapshots, even Flicker.yahoo.

But no. The truth is that when we depend on search, we will depend more heavily on unique names so those names don’t get lost in searches for common — commodity — words. So we’ll still mangle the language to create names.

Indeed, I predict that we’ll do this not just for our companies but also for our kids. For everybody needs a little SEO these days. If the internet had been around when my children were born, I shouldn’t have given them common names — Jake and Julia — but would have followed legendary rebel-rocker Frank Zappa’s example — he named his children Dwezil and Moon Unit. That way, there’d be no fight over owning DwezilJarvis.com and anyone searching for Dwezils would, I hope, find my offspring at least second on the list. Yes, in world where unique names are valued, Icelanders are screwed.

In the early days of telephones, it was assumed that we’d be bad at remembering numbers, so phone companies in some countries used words to help us recall the first few digits. KNickerbocker 5 500 became 565 500. That quaint system was dropped as phones stopped having letters printed on them and as phone numbers exploded to absurd lengths with the number of devices.

Well now imagine a world in a few weeks when you own a score of devices connected to the internet — phone, computer, TV, refrigerator, car, heating system, security system, game — each with its own unique address. Namespace will implode again. So perhaps we’ll return to the earliest system of names when John who made horseshoes in the blacksmith shop down on the high street became John Smith and that will be the Google search that finds him.

[Commissioned by and crossposted at Comment is Free; discussion underway there.]

Doing some research for a Reliable Sources segment I’m supposed to do this Sunday about George Carlin and his dirty words, I went to Google Trends and found this fascinating tidbit:

* Google searches for “fuck” and “God” are consistently equivalent.

When news of George Carlin’s death came out, however, searches for “Carlin” beat both by a factor of three.

* Search Google for his dirty words and you’ll find 31 million references for “bullshit,” 237 for “fuck,” and 671 million for “God.”

I’ll remind you that “bullshit” is political speech. And the internet is the First Amendment. George Carlin will die but his seven dirty words never will.

Barack Obama’s first two notable acts after clinching the nomination are rejecting public campaign financing and endorsing the Supreme Court’s gun decision.

He’s not making this easy.

: LATER: Howie Kurtz writes:

Barack Obama is under hostile fire for changing his position on the D.C. gun ban.

Oh, I’m sorry. He didn’t change his position, apparently. He reworded a clumsy statement.

That, at least, is what his campaign is saying. The same campaign that tried to spin his flip-flop in rejecting public financing as embracing the spirit of reform, if not the actual position he had once promised to embrace.

Is this becoming a pattern? Wouldn’t it be better for Obama to say he had thought more about such-and-such an issue and simply changed his mind? Is that verboten in American politics? Is it better to engage in linguistic pretzel-twisting in an effort to prove that you didn’t change your mind?

Regardless of what you think of the merits of yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling overturning the capital’s handgun law, it seems to me we’re entitled to a clear position by the presumed Democratic nominee. And I’m a bit confused about how the confusion came about.

The Guardian asked me to finish off their Future of Journalism series of lectures and discussions with a talk about the 10 questions we should be asking now. Talk about intimidating. These people are asking and answering questions about the future better than any news organization I know. But I never pass up a chance to visit with folks at the Guardian, and so I went and tried to come up with my list. They videoed it and I can’t imagine why anyone with a life would watch 90 minutes of me but in case you are on a desert island with internet access (can I come?) here are parts one and two (not embeddable, sorry to say). For those with lives, here’s a blog write-up of the session. And here’s my Keynote:

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: OD on me X 3: Good god, I’ve been translated into Norwegian. By the way, other posts are going to be translated regularly into Spanish. There’s no escaping a blogger’s blather.