Podcasting
Thanks to a pointer from Dave Winer, I just read a longish piece from the Boston Phoenix about podcasting. And tonight at dinner it seemed as if podcasting was dominating the conversation — how to book the guests, how to keep them slightly (mentally) off-balance as you interview them on your couch, whether to interview avatars or not (and in what setting), how often to send out your podcasts, what signature jingle to use – and I know I'm falling down on the job here by not podcasting.
What's my hesitation? It took me longer than it took Bret to start blogging, and I'm clearly waaay behind him when it comes to the pod. Is this just late adoption? Or is something else going on?
I have a confession to make. Just between you and me. I haven't listened to podcasts. I just haven't. I … like …. text. I like scanning Joi's text and Joho's text and everyone else's text. I even like fonts. Maybe I don't want to be on someone else's timescale — maybe I only want to read the first lines of paragraphs and not wait for their stories and music to roll out. But I do love This American Life.
Maybe I'm really an old-media person pretending to be enthusiastic about new media. Maybe a blog was just enough old-new to be palatable for me. Dave Winer actually said this about me (publicly) at the Berkman podcasting session: “You don't have a port for podcasting.” Ouch.
Watch. In a few months I'll finally figure it out, waaay after Bret. Again.
Susan Sontag appreciation
Susan Sontag died today.
I particularly remember her essay about meeting with Thomas Mann after she read The Magic Mountain. She was 14 and a huge fan. She found it difficult to talk to the great man, but observed many things.
“In America” won the National Book Award, but in this book interview Sontag talks about many things that interested her - including illness, an interest that started with Mann but became more personal as time went on.
From The Times's obituary:
Over four decades, public response to Ms. Sontag remained irreconcilably divided. She was described, variously, as explosive, anticlimactic, original, trendy, iconoclastic, captivating, hollow, rhapsodic, naïve, sophisticated, approachable, abrasive, aloof, attention-seeking, charming, condescending, populist, puritanical, sybaritic, sincere, posturing, ascetic, voluptuary, right-wing, left-wing, mannered, formidable, brilliant, profound, superficial, ardent, bloodless, dogmatic, challenging, ambivalent, accessible, lofty, erudite, lucid, inscrutable, solipsistic, intellectual, visceral, reasoned, pretentious, portentous, maddening, lyrical, abstract, narrative, acerbic, opportunistic, chilly, effusive, careerist, sober, gimmicky, relevant, passé, facile, illogical, ambivalent, polemical, didactic, tenacious, slippery, celebratory, banal, untenable, doctrinaire, ecstatic, melancholic, humorous, humorless, deadpan, rhapsodic, aloof, glib, cantankerous and clever. No one ever called her dull.
Eternal youth
Ray Kurzweil invented the first synthesizer that sounded just like a real piano. He believes that computers will soon be smarter than humans. And now he wants to live forever. From The Times today:
“I am serious about it,” said Mr. Kurzweil, a wiry man with few lines on his face for a 56-year-old. “I think death is a tragedy. I think aging is a tragedy. And going beyond our limitations is what our species is all about.”
Kurzweil's suggestions: take a lot of supplements (he takes 250 pills a day), don't eat a lot of carbohydrates or fat, meditate, exercise. Not surprising. But the goal is to live for another 50 years. If you do that, Kurzweil confidently suspects you may be able to live forever, thanks to advances in technology. That's surprising.
There's no limit to the advice you can get on this topic. Eat almost nothing (you'll be irritated, but you'll still be alive). Be Sardinian. Drink a lot of red wine.
Last week I was a guest at a birthday party thrown by the host for himself. He got 180 friends together and sang all evening to us — songs from his past, not songs he had written — and it was really something. It was not pathetic and self-serving, although it easily could have been. It was a great evening. Two guys next to me were grousing about getting older (”it's all downhill, it's so awful“). It seems to me that if you can still sing (or do something else — write software?) and still have some friends around, it might be fine to live forever.
Personally, though, I'm not sure I'm willing to give up on bagels to get there.
Tsunami
The Post's Michael Dobbs describes his morning swim; the BBC's Roland Burek says he never felt the earthquake.
Today's post was going to be about Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev (and, in particular, their pairing in Romeo and Juliet in the early 1960s). And I thought a little Renee Fleming moment would be worth writing about, and I was going to link to a Handel-Halvorsen duo for violin and viola that seemed important earlier today. These are all beautiful and highly-structured things.
But there is nothing quite as awesome as a magnitude 8.9 earthquake. Indian authorities didn't even consider that tsunamis might follow — nothing like this had ever happened there before. There is beauty, and then there is terrible beauty.
Complex adaptive Christmas
Contnuing to work through the “internet as giant complex adaptive system” theme. The great thing is that our cells are subcritical — they're not given to bursts of chain-reaction creativity. (This allows us to avoid fusing with our food.) The universe as a whole is supracritical (chain reactions feeding into chain reactions — very creative place). Communities of cells will evolve to the boundary between supra-sub, always yearning to stay whole but wanting to be connected and fused at the same time.
All of this life-creation happens spontaneously — you just need enough density of diverse chemicals and an infusion of energy, and then order emerges. It's this spontaneously-arising order on which natural selection operates (or so says Stuart Kauffman).
And we may already be seeing spontaneously arising, pluralistic order (lots of different communities of cells, vibrating at the edge of criticality) online already. All we can do is describe it; we can't predict what will happen next.
The crucial step (the causally important step) has got to be that initial fusion of energy and diversity, plus the existence of a few semi-permeable cell walls. So what's “energy” online? I think it has to be information.
And then there's Christmas.
Blogging will be (has been) slow for a few days. Here is a poem to read that someone emailed me recently.
Geographic apology
I made a big mistake earlier today. I announced proudly that someone was from State X when in fact that person is from nearby State Y and held a key public office there for a decade.
Ouch.
I want to clear the air right now and tell everyone that I'm sorry for doing that. My excuse: I'm from California. Enough said.
Greensboro experiment
On Friday, Dec. 17, the News & Record, daily newspaper in Greensboro, NC, owned by Landmark Communications, announced that it was looking to overhaul its website (www.news-record.com) and enter a period of invention, including rapid evolution away from the standard newspaper site– into more of an online community, a public square, or something equally “transformative” in nature.
The newspaper is actively looking for input, and comments are due by Dec. 24 — Friday.
Newspapers have been very slow to do anything online that's different from…what they do offline. The brand is so important, and the editor's role is so important, that papers can't imagine changing the “product” (and loosening the editorial reins) but branding it as their own.
Here's an idea: how about (in addition to replicating the paper online, which is a valuable resource) having an entirely different community site that is branded separately but relatedly. That might help management relax. Then aggregate blogs, hold forums, have polls, have very-local-weather reports, review movies, have the best possible community events calendar, create (simple, low-barrier-to-entry) virtual worlds, assign stories collectively, have photo contests, whatever. But in a slightly different voice.
One model I like is the Time Out New York offline setup. It's got the voice of an informal blog, with regular columnists, plus all possible information about all possible events. It's overwhelming, but I can imagine that the online Greensboro version might have a more manageable amount of information. Time Out Greensboro plus The Aggregated Voice of Greensboro – with revenue coming only from large concerns placing listings. No subscriber fees or “premium” content that's hard to get to — the friendly craigslist model.
Why Internet Governance Is (or Isn't) Like Climate Change
Milton Mueller (together with a large distinguished team of academics) has put together a very short paper [pdf] suggesting that a framework of norms and principles be established for internet governance.
The team's paper should be taken seriously. They make the provocative suggestion that “The [internet governance] situation is very similar to that which was faced in dealing with climate change in the 1980's,” and so therefore innovative institutional ideas are needed — for climate change, the UN established a “framework convention” that set some key groundrules, and some similar effort (the team intimates) should be started here by the UN.
Hmm. Climate change. According to the UN,
“The average temperature of the earth's surface has risen by 0.6 degrees C since the late 1800s. It is expected to increase by another 1.4 to 5.8 degrees C by the year 2100 — a rapid and profound change. Even if the minimum predicted increase takes place, it will be larger than any century-long trend in the last 10,000 years. . . .
The current warming trend is expected to cause extinctions. Numerous plant and animal species, already weakened by pollution and loss of habitat, are not expected to survive the next 100 years. Human beings, while not threatened in this way, are likely to face mounting difficulties. Recent severe storms, floods and droughts, for example, appear to show that computer models predicting more frequent “extreme weather events” are on target.”
The internet is like the climate in that it affects everyone and doesn't obey geographical boundaries. There's a problem with the climate — it's getting hotter because of industrialization. So we have to cooperate to figure out how to turn the heat down. That's a hard problem.
But what's the “problem” with the internet? Doesn't suggesting a hybrid institutional approach modeled on climate change assume that there's a problem? And doesn't suggesting a “framework” suggest in turn that someone should be in charge — and that someone is the UN?
So — just asking questions here, guys – okay, the internet is a dynamic biosphere, fine. But I'm not convinced the internet biosphere is in trouble other than from well-meaning efforts to “govern” it. And I'm worried that the internet is more susceptible to international “governance” (closing-down) efforts — all in the name of security and protection against IP infringement — than the climate is.
We need World Net Day.
Cybercrime Convention
So what happened to ratification of the Council of Europe's Cybercrime Convention? We had a cheery hearing in June, but since then there's been senatorial silence, as far as I can tell.
The Convention makes the US domestic efforts on CALEA look tame. Puppy-like.
Each ratifier of the Convention is required to “empower its competent authorities” to “compel” service providers, “within [their] existing technical capability,” to cooperate and assist the competent authorities in the interception and recording of both “traffic data” and “content data” in realtime of communications transmitted by means of a computer system. And service providers are to be obliged to “keep confidential the fact of and any information about the execution of any power provided for” in these surveillance provisions.
These are broader requirements than any possible reading of CALEA — which specifically deals with non-content data and does not gag service providers — would support.
The Convention does say that service providers can be compelled only within their “existing technical capabilities.” As we have seen in the DOJ response in the FCC's CALEA proceeding, however, any innovator's reliance on such “existing technical capabilities” language would be misplaced. Law enforcement agencies will want pre-launch approval discretion.
Moreover, law enforcement authorities in countries that ratify the Convention undertake to provide online wiretap assistance (for both content and traffic data) to their treaty partners in the form of a “point of contact available on a 24 hour, 7 day per week basis in order to ensure the provision of immediate assistance for the purpose of investigations or proceedings concerning criminal offences related to computer systems and data, or for the collection of evidence in electronic form of a criminal offence.” The FCC may believe that because the Convention is about to be ratified it should provide the means for assisting law enforcement to carry out these international obligations.
So — is the Convention about to be ratified in the US? I have a feeling the pressure was taken off for the election period and that we'll see it come up rather quickly early in 2005. BSA, ITAA and a bunch of other trade associations recently issued supportive press releases.
It's all too much for me. I am going off to read a volume of Proust, slowly.
Patterns — Broadcast flag followup
On February 22, there will be a hearing on the FCC's jurisdiction to adopt the broadcast flag rule. (That's a really big day in my life already, because Clay Shirky is coming to talk to the advanced cyberlaw seminar that day.)
Michael Geist told us this several months ago, but I went back today and soaked it in. Canada, our sane neighbor to the north, is interested in adopting the flag regime. I poked around online and found this “priorities for 2005″ [word doc] document from the Radio Advisory Board of Canada (note cheery radio guy in picture) blithely noting that they'll be working on a standard for “recognition of the broadcast flag.”
Meanwhile, Jamie Love and Manon Ress have been bravely following and reporting on the WIPO broadcasting treaty talks. (This article is a good report of the confusion and alarm that filled the room in November when the chairman decided to ram things through and call for a straw vote so as to isolate dissenters.)
Here's my understanding of how these extra-US events fit within the strategy that brought us the November 2003 flag order: Let's do everything everywhere to make sure that no unauthorized online transmissions of our stuff can easily occur.
Let's pass state laws that prohibit the attachment of unauthorized devices to broadband networks. Let's have federal regulations that prohibit the manufacture of “noncompliant” devices. Let's have services be contributorily liable for copyright infringement. Let's promote the creation of closed circles of safe machines, all stubbornly refusing to interoperate with those unclean, unauthorized devices. Let's have our closest friends adopt the flag as well, so it comes to feel like a global inevitability. Let's create a treaty making online transmission of a particular stream of bits the exclusive province of webcasters — whether or not they had a hand in creating the material in question. With those exclusive rights in hand, and with a worldwide agreement establishing the illegality of circumventing any efforts a broadcaster/webcaster makes to protect content, we can get manufacturers all over the world to build ”compliant” devices.
The strategy is still in place, but there are some frayed bits around the edges. Some of the state laws didn't pass. Despite the MPAA's best efforts, Tivo managed to get a content protection technology approved by the FCC that permits a copy of a broadcast to be sent to a computer over the internet. Sure, the computer has to be wearing a dongle, and it's a shriveled, pale imitation of free-flowing bits, but it's something. Geist is on the case in Canada. Some influential WIPO members aren't so sure they need a broadcasting treaty, and don't like being rushed.
It's far too early to feel optimistic about February 22, so all I'm doing here is thanking Michael, Jamie, Manon, and everyone else who follows this issue around the world. We're all in this together.