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January 07, 2004

Ready, aim, fire... miss
: My old friend and colleague Jimmy Guterman keeps trying to shoot down the weblog zeppelin, but he keeps missing. In Business 2.0, he writes:

2004 will be the year that blogs go mainstream, although doing so will not have the liberating effect that today's well-known bloggers are predicting. We won't enjoy some avalanche of great new independent presses tearing down the media monoliths or something similarly utopian. We'll just get ... more voices. The volume of blogs will mean that individual ones will lose much of their impact among the technorati -- and the technorati will lose whatever little impact they're having on mainstream media. In a world where millions blog regularly, pundits like Lawrence Lessig, Clay Shirky, and Dave Winer aren't celebrities anymore. As with other Net media (from Usenet to webcams), the old-timers will whine about how the good old days were better, but the movement of blogging from an elitist activity to just another thing we all do on the Net can't be considered anything but healthy.

Right on that last thought. But I think he's wrong on the prior assumption that the forest loses the trees. Jimmy (like Shirky in the power law argument) assumes that it's the voices of the big guys being heard that matters. No, it's the din that matters. The very din that Jimmy thinks will silence the individuals is precisely what gives every individual a voice. A couple of demi-celeb webloggers won't make a difference. Thousands of them will.
And big media will end up paying attention not because of the voices of a few big guys (though that's what's getting their attention today). Instead, it is this -- to use the description of New York Times Digital's Martin Nisenholtz -- distributed publishing that will allow big media to get small, to reach down and find new information and serve new audiences, if only big media can figure out how to build the proper relationship with this new, small media.
Yes, this will be the year that blogs will go mainstream. But mainstream moved. free full fallout download

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Forbidden Iran
: I've received many requests from Iranian bloggers to promote Frontline's showing of Forbidden Iran. It's on Thursday night in New York. Check those local listings. Says PBS:

...a harrowing report from Iran, where reporter Jane Kokan risks her life to secretly film shocking evidence of a government-sponsored reign of terror. Kokan escapes the constant surveillance of Iranian authorities to record exclusive interviews detailing the systematic torture and execution of students opposed to the current regime.

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The killing fields
: Stuart Hughes marks the 25th anniversary of Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia to end the genocidal and insane rule of the Khmer Rouge. Says Stuart:

A quarter of a century on, those responsible for that dark and bloody period in Cambodia's history still have not paid for their crimes.
Many of the Khmer Rouge leaders have already died -- at peace and at liberty. Those still alive are advancing in years.
At last there are signs of some sort of justice for the estimated 1.7 million Cambodians murdered under Pol Pot's tyranny in the form of a UN sponsored tribunal.
But any convictions that follow will be too little, too late.

: I was a columnist in San Francisco then and the paper decided to make the plight of Cambodian refugees its cause. Papers are often good at that, if only in short spurts of mass sympathy. I wrote columns about it. We helped run a benefit concert with Linda Ronstadt (who was decent to me even if I had gossiped in print about her and Jerry Brown) and Joan Baez (who, you'd be surprised, has a wonderfully dark and nasty sense of humor). I went and met refugee familes who had no money and no education and no ties who suddenly landed in tiny San Francisco apartments that had nothing in common with their farms at home. The woman who took me and brought this issue to our attention was one of the most amazing people I've ever met, Mu Sochua. Back then, she fought for the lives of refugees and hoped to one day return home, though she presumed that her father (once head of Cambodia's airline) and mother were long dead.
I've thought of her often over these years and only recently looked her up on the Internet to find that she is now a minister of the Cambodian government.
And now I think of her in the context of Iraq, which suffered its brutal and insane government, which had its mass graves, which is just now trying to bring justice where injustice ruled, which is grappling with ongoing violence, which is just now starting to rebuild. Twenty-five years later, Cambodia is still going through so much of that, finding justice, rebuilding, healing.
It will take time for Iraq. It will take time for Afghanistan. But they are all so much better off today.
How could we in good conscience let the Khmer Rouge rule? How could we in good conscience have continued to let Saddam rule? And yes, how could we in any conscience have ever dealt with any of them? But how can we not help them rebuild? How can we not be patient when they are patient?
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Blog furniture
: The finest in European style.free full fallout download

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Lite green cards
: The assumed take on Bush's worker immigration reform program -- the take I heard on NPR tonight -- is that it affects farm workers and maids and their employers and, along with them, it assumes political impact from the Hispanic demographic.
But John Robb has it right, I think: This is really the answer to outsourcing. Rather than sending jobs to India, we can now keep the jobs and bring the workers here. We can reduce the risk of sending too much employment overseas. That's the essence of it. So instead of "oursourcing," the buzzphrase will be "guest worker."
"Guest worker" became a very problematic phrase in Germany after its boom busted, after the Turks wouldn't go home and Germany suddenly had a new minority in a country that doesn't deal with minorities well (understatement). America is, of course, different. We grow with immigration. We are immigration. So this gives us growth with a return policy. And the political impact may be from where you least expect it: From the working middle class, afraid all their jobs were going to be exported. Winners all around, for now.free full fallout download

: See this [via the Boston.com job blog]:

Worried about possible government reaction to the movement of U.S. technology jobs overseas, leading American computer companies are defending recent shifts in employment to Asia and elsewhere as necessary for future profits and warning policy makers against restrictions.
In a report released Wednesday, the companies said government efforts to preserve American jobs through limits on overseas trade would backfire and "could lead to retaliation from our trading partners and even an all-out trade war."
The effort by the technology industry represents an early response to their growing concerns that U.S. lawmakers may clamp down on the practice, known as "offshoring," especially during an election year.

See, that's the hot button.free full fallout download

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Free Saudi Arabia
: I love that The West Wing's plot tonight starts with unprecedented demonstrations for free speech and government in Saudi Arabia. Fiction leads fact.free full fallout download

: A zine -- "Backslash Magazine" -- gets into the White House press room. Can a blog be far behind?free full fallout download

: What the hell am I doing, blogging a TV show? I'm going to go get a life. I'm going to Taco Bell.free full fallout download

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Stories from many worlds
: Zeyad points us to a blog by a woman who's Iraqi and Canadian and much more:

My mother was beaten black and blue when her dad found out that she was dating my dad. “You are forbidden from seeing that Mohamadan (Czech speak for Muslim) ever again”, were my grandfathers instructions. So my mom married the Mohamadan and followed him around the world, first to Algeria and then to Kuwait....
My grandmother was beaten black and blue when she became pregnant with my mom. She was in a Nazi work camp and my grandfather worked in the kitchen. He used to sneak food to the starving Russian slave workers in the factory. So, if the shortest road to a man’s heart is through his stomach, then the shortest road to a woman’s heart is what? Well you can guess what happened next, they fell in love and she became pregnant. The Nazi soldiers wanted to know the name of the father so that he would be executed. When my grandmother wouldn’t tell them, they decided that they would let her have the baby and execute her after the birth. Luckily Germany lost the war on the day my mom was born. My grandparents got married and lived in the Czech republic. Hurey!
I wasn’t beaten black and blue when I met my husband, though it would have made this post more interesting. Instead, I got a long speech from my mom about how I should merry a young man from one of the nice (my mom’s speak for wealthy) Iraqi families that we know in Vancouver. I reminded my mom of the nice fiancée she left back in the Czech republic for an Iraqi political refugee that she met one day at a lakeside resort. “That was completely different”, my mom asserts. Ehm! Ehm!

She married a Palestinian raised in Israel who spoke fluent Hebrew and after they married, they ended up living in Israel for a time.
So then there's this, her story about witnessing violence and hatred from both sides:

"I am not Muslim, not Christian , not Jewish", this I declare today, knowing full well what each word means. Not Sunni, not Shea'a or any other category. I believe that all religions should come with an expiration date. Valid for consumption until, beyond this date this religion will turn into poison if consumed. Since everybody is creating god in his on images anyway, I think that from now on I will create something that I like.
When asked by friends why I no longer pray or fast I reply that living in the holy lands has cured me from religion. It always shocks people and shuts them up. After that, people tend to change the subject and talk about something else. I no longer get the speech on how as a good Muslim I should cover my head with a scarf.

Good stuff. Go read. free full fallout download

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Fore!
: So now when I see a guy with a golf bag, I'm going to fear a dirty bomb:

With huge New Year's Eve celebrations and college football bowl games only days away, the U.S. government last month dispatched scores of casually dressed nuclear scientists with sophisticated radiation detection equipment hidden in briefcases and golf bags to scour five major U.S. cities for radiological, or "dirty," bombs, according to officials involved in the emergency effort.
The call-up of Department of Energy radiation experts to Washington, New York, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Baltimore was the first since the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks....
"Government officials are surprised that people [in the United States] aren't more hyped about all this," said one source familiar with counterterrorism preparations.
Even now, hundreds of nuclear and bioweapons scientists remain on high alert at several military bases around the country, ready to fly to any trouble spot. Pharmaceutical stockpiles for responding to biological attacks are on transportable trucks at key U.S. military bases.

Laugh... cry... cower in corner... I just can't decide.
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The unsubtle spy
: Michiko Kakutani is pissed.
She suffers John le Carre's Absolute Friends and then practically sputters:

And last and most disappointing, it is a clumsy, hectoring, conspiracy-minded message-novel meant to drive home the argument that American imperialism poses a grave danger to the new world order.
The plot has been constructed to illustrate this message, and it not only feels hastily jerry-built but ridiculously contrived as well. Whereas Mr. le Carré's Smiley novels were famous for their nuanced depiction of the ambiguities of the cold war and their demythologizing of the grubby world of spying, this latest novel suffers from large heapings of sentimentality and naïveté.
It is simplistic where his earlier novels were sophisticated; dogmatic where those books were skeptical. Paradoxically enough, it also purveys the same sort of black and white moralism that Mr. le Carré's nemesis, the Bush administration, is so fond of, and it does so not by persuasively dramatizing the author's convictions but by bashing the reader over the head with dubious assertions and even more dubious scenarios.

Le Carre has been dealing in anti-American polemic of late and judging by this, it is a mad cow disease that has taken over his brain. It killed even his talent, she says.

To make matters worse, many of the people in the later sections of the book no longer converse but simply trade angry political screeds: "It was an old Colonial oil war dressed up as a crusade for Western life and liberty," one character says of the Iraq war, "and it was launched by a clique of war-hungry Judeo-Christian geopolitical fantasists who hijacked the media and exploited America's post-9/11 psychopathy."

Trips off the tongue, eh?free full fallout download

: In an accompanying interview with le Carre, there are odd moments, such as this:

He is firmly opposed to the war in Iraq and never misses a peace march. "Marching you can't pick your bedfellows," he said. "You go down there determined to stop the war, and you find yourself marching alongside Friends of Osama."

Well, don't you think that should tell you something?
He describes his book to the interviewer:

"The purpose of the story is to tell a fable, to illustrate the dangers of what we're doing," he said. The United States and Britain are conducting "a virtual crusade in which we're exporting democracy by military means."

As opposed to maintaining tyranny by military means?
The polemics have killed not only his talent but also his judgment and intelligence.
The only world le Carre could understand was the world of the cold war. Today's world, which really is about evil and good, is beyond him. He wants to complicate it. He wants to turn it into an overcomplicated fable. But it's not. Osama is bad. Saddam is bad. Blair is not. Bush is not. It's really rather obvious. free full fallout download

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Dean in 30 seconds
: The right is running an anti-Dean commercial in Iowa that's every bit as subtle as MoveOn's anti-Bush commercials. Equal time.

In the new Club for Growth ad, a farmer says, "Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading ...," as his wife finishes, "... Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs!"

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Antisocial software
: Poor David Weinberger. His PCs always break. His Skype phone starts ringing with chatty strangers. He sends out an email and causes a symposium. And he moans:

This leads me to a conclusion: The Web is more social than I am.

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The memorial
: Greg Allen sums it all up on the bathtub-in-the-bathtub memorial chosen yesterday:

Ugh. Maya Lin Strikes Again

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Entertain me
: Rafat Ali has lots of juicy pre-CES news on the entertainment front: A Microsoft video media player... and much news from Real, including a player for my Treo (you may not care but I do!) and a takeover of Rollingstone.com.free full fallout download

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Press the stewardess button once for a Number 1 and twice for a Number 2
: Qantas says under new U.S. rules, passengers may not queue up for the potty on planes and flight attendants have to check the toilets every two hours for suspicious packages.
Now, in fact, we know this is very serious business because one report of why there have been so many security-inspired flight cancellations out of Europe lately is that we got a report that a female terrorist was going to hide explosives inside herself: The Tampbomb.
Long, long ago, I urged that we all fly naked. But hell, even that wouldn't help with this threat.
This gets scarier every day; how in God's name do you stop that?
Still on the lighter note, Jill wonders how the heck they're going to police the potty queue. "I wonder how they'll organise the toilet needs of passengers. Potties? Draw a number perhaps? Sign up before departure?"
I'm thinking a lottery: Win the Potto Lotto! Or a new revenue stream for airlines that are surely going to lose yet more passengers from these fears: Sell potty passes (and create an open market for them on the plane: I have to go worse than you do, so I'll buy your pass and give you my bag of pretzels.)
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Social business
: Tim Oren, a blogging VC (there are lots of them, eh?), joins in the discussion of active social software (Friendster and its friends) vs. a passive network structure on top of the existing social software called the Internet. He says:

Weinberger also quotes Jeremy Zawodny: "Start thinking about how adding a social networking component to existing systems could improve them." Umm, in that case, folks, what you have is not a business, and not a product, but a feature.

No, think of it another way, Tim: By adding that networking component you take things on the Internet that are not now businesses -- e.g., blogging, forum communities -- and you add value and turn them into businesses by enabling targeted marketing; market research (for example, checking on what influencers are saying about music or movies or products); commerce (imagine recommendations from your Amazon friends) and more. That's the secret sauce that turns a mere burger into a Big Mac.free full fallout download

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Real liberals
: Armed Liberal takes my side. free full fallout download

: Matthew Stinson checks in, too.
: And Ed Cone.
: Now Norm.
: Plus Roger L. Simon who, of course, declares labels dead.free full fallout download

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Doing good
: Tim Oren has a good list of good things we can do for all the good guys in Iraq.free full fallout download

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Fame, no fortune
: We made The Note yesterday:

Howard Dean has NOT won over:
The editorial pages of the Washington Post , the Wall Street Journal , and New York Times ; Tom Oliphant; Joe Lockhart; Ashton Kutcher; James Carville; Gary Hart; this blogger — LINK ; or this one: LINK ; lots and lots of Clinton-Gore alums; Zell Miller.

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