That's the title of a post today by Hugh McLeod.
McLeod's the guy who brought us these great drawings:
In McLeod's post today he renounces the schism between Work and Life. He's working all the time, but it's meaningful. Taking time off for recharging makes sense to him, but the idea of having a “real life” that is different from work (and having work become just the thing that finances your lifestyle) doesn't compute for McLeod.
It's not time to start thinking about OneWebDay2 yet. I do think OneWebDay2 will be more substantive, more widespread, and noisier than OneWebDay1. But we'll get going on that later.
We had to start somewhere, and it was a more than respectable start. I'm so grateful for the interest of so many people. I had an awful lot of help in making sure that visible things would happen around the world. And there are many many pictures, videos, and blogposts out there that weren't there before, and many people who thought about the web's impact on human lives yesterday that had never had that perspective before.
The idea behind OneWebDay1 was to assist the process of consciously building a worldwide view that the web is, by and large, helpful to people. I got asked many times (by non-techies) during the last 18 months why we should celebrate the impact of a medium that has such a negative impact on life — isn't it a cesspool for crime? isn't it destructive of social interaction? isn't it destructive of the fabric of society as a whole?
I hope that people who are interested in OneWebDay are interested in combatting that view and in recognizing the overwhelming potential of the internet to assist humans, to augment our lives, and to enrich our interactions. The internet is under pressure around the world from a variety of directions, and OneWebDay is designed to create counter-pressure from the people who interact online.
I learned that there are many people around the globe who appreciate this message. It's a big world out there, and it will take a while for this celebration to be as multilingual and multicultural as it should be. And it will take fundraising, marketing, and serious corporate attention to make this celebration have the impact it should. I'm in this for the long haul.
Hello, blog. I'm distracted getting ready for OneWebDay on Friday. It looks like we'll get great coverage in Korea, and we're in touch with Sir Tim Berners-Lee about being part of the London festivities, and I heard from people in China who can help get the word out. It's all very exciting.
In the meantime, I understand there was a hearing about ICANN today — I couldn't watch, but if anyone has impressions/notes of what happened please post in the comments here or send an email.
Dear blog, I assure you that I am thinking of you, but I am just distracted and delighted to be in touch with people across the globe about Friday the 22nd.
I went down to The Battery today at lunchtime to check on the wireless signal and the ambiance. The wireless wasn't working, but I've been assured that it will be working on Friday for the big event. We'll test again tomorrow.
I was standing there with wireless guy Marshall Brown, in the blazing sunlight, both of us peering at our laptop screens cradled in our elbows. We were sort of an odd sight for the tourists going by to get on the boat for the Statue of Liberty tour.
And then the Statue of Liberty spoke to me.
It was actually a woman wearing a SofL outfit — pasty greeny cloaky outfit — who had taken off her mask and crown and wanted to know what we were doing. (There are three human SofLs hanging around on tall chairs near where people get in line for the ferry.) I said that we were getting ready for an Earth Day for the web on Friday and testing for wireless. I said that Craig Newmark would be there.
“Is he famous?” the statue asked.
I said he was, I said he had started craigslist.
“Oh,” the statue said, “of course!”
Then the statue asked: “Maybe he can put all three of us up for sale on Friday!”
We agreed that she could make some money that way.
State of Play Academy, New York Law School's new virtual world law teaching academy, beta launched last week. Building on the experience of the annual State of Play conference that brings together technologists, lawyers, social scientists and other professionals to discuss virtual worlds, State of Play Academy will continue that interdisciplinary conversation online and throughout the year.
Their aim is to: 1) democratize law teaching by making it available to an open audience; and 2) understand how teaching and learning can most effectively be done within a three-dimensional, immersive and social online environment.
They're having 45-minute 'test' classes each Tuesday and Thursday at 5:30PM PST/8:30PM EST, and you are urged to join.
It's happening in There. You can download There for free. To be voice-enabled, you'll need to pay a one-time fee to There and have a microphone. If you need help getting set up, write to State of Play Academy Dean Lauren Gelman at gelman AT stanford DOT edu.
I'd be there in There if it wasn't for this, and I'll be in There when that “this” is over.
Thanks to Beth Noveck.
The London School of Economics review [warning: large pdf] of the GNSO was released today by ICANN.
ICANN's comment about the review said that the “report will be used to inform ICANN's effort to develop detailed proposals for improving the GNSO's structures and processes. ICANN's Board will work with the GNSO and the ICANN community to consider this report, along with previous reviews and public input, in a collaborative process to strengthen this key policy-making body.”
The review is refreshing. But first, a pause:
Do you know what the GNSO is or what it does? Do ICANN's processes seem difficult to understand?
I bet (unless you've been going to ICANN meetings) you don't know much about this. And the focus of the report on the impenetrability of ICANN's work is refreshing and very useful.
It's as if the LSE team went on a trip into a tangled terrain full of oral history and oddly-shaped reports. The civil and learned voice of the review expresses amazement at what they found in this strange land. 39,000 hours of work on whois, for example. Wildly varying approaches to intake, representativeness, and scope of work.
They're also amazed at what they didn't find. Coherence? Standardization? Metrics? Accessible information? Outside expertise? Listing of who's involved? Rational web sites?
I hope that everyone who's interested will participate in the processes that are coming up that will consider this review. My first, personal, take on this is that there is much to applaud in the report — particularly the recommendations that outsiders be heavily involved in task forces and the relationship of new “members” in the process be with ICANN first and a broad constituency second. Both of these recommendations will help professionalize ICANN enormously.
There is also much to applaud in the current GNSO. The Council Chair is terrific, many people work very hard as volunteers on policy issues, there is a real effort to do good work, and none of this is easy. But change is surely needed.
As an undergraduate music major a long time ago, I really hated Schenkerian analysis. It was heavily taught when I was in school. I was probably learning from the masters, but I resented it.
My memory of it is that we were told (implicitly, at least) that a piece was “really” about a simple harmonic gesture. Say, 3 to 2 to 1 (the tonic). Movements, symphonies, could be understood as “really” three or four key moves over a long period of time. These moves could be prolonged, but they would always be revealed by the diligent Schenkerian. (I undoubtedly have this completely wrong, but stay with me for a few more more paragraphs.)
From Wikipedia:
“The primary means of describing the structure of a musical passage for the Schenkerian analyst is to show hierarchical relationships among the pitches of the passage. This can be done through making reductions of the music and through a specialized symbolic form of musical notation that Schenker devised to demonstrate various prolongational techniques.
The musical reductions of Schenkerian analysis are usually arrhythmic. This reflects Schenker's belief that the deep, long-range structure of a piece of music has no particular rhythm.”
Can you imagine? Say you're 18 or 19 and you're told that that great Tchaikovsky movement (when I was a teenager I loved Tchaikovsky) is “really only” a slow move from 3 to 5. That's it, that's all that's going on, and if you were just a little more sophisticated you'd hear the key things and ignore the rest.
This is a problem with how people talk about “the internet” too.
For the telecom-trained, it's “really only” three sets of connections — from user to ISP, ISP to backbone, content provider to backbone.
For the originalist engineer, it's “really only” the protocol used to interconnect machines and networks. Once spoken, that language (knowing the protocol) says it all to the engineer. To this group, the internet is “really only” its logical architecture.
I'm not persuaded. The internet (for me, the human semantic communications part of it) is a serenade cooked up on the fly, a swirl of meaning. It's not “really only” the pipes, it's not “just like” a railroad or a broadcast network, and it's not “really” a content delivery system. There are big bossy applications out there online, but they're primitives. It's irreducible, this layer of communication, it's not a machine.
But because our minds live only through metaphors, we keep talking about transport and highways and trucks. I don't think we're well served by reducing things this time around.
VON is very big. In fact, it's an epic conference. I did my bit on net neutrality. I have to say I thought the BellSouth panelist, Jon Banks, was very good indeed.
But he kept saying, and Scott Cleland kept saying, that competition in the market for residential broadband access was very strong. Prices are lower! Service is better!
That's just not true. If competition is such a potent force, why was Verizon able to invent a new service charge to take the place of its Universal Service charge — and only back down in the face of FCC intervention and general uproar? Why are cable prices flat or going up? Why are DSL subscribers getting less bandwidth per dollar than last year? Why do 40% of zip codes in the US have a choice of only one broadband provider?
I'm not saying the network neutrality question is easy. But the broadband access market isn't competitive. I'm waiting until some state AG starts investigating whether cable and DSL providers are colluding. Go, state AG!
After our (quite polite and subdued) debate, I went out and wandered around the epic conference floor. I couldn't stay long, and it was just too big to take in quickly, and I couldn't find the lunch. I know that Jeff Jarvis gave a great speech the day before, but I had to miss that too.
Next time I go to Fall VON I'll take the month off to soak it all in.
So Tech Daily (subscription only) is reporting that Sen. Stevens thinks his bill is being held up by net neutrality issues.
(On the other hand, I've also heard that anti-net-neutrality forces are planning a vote on Sept. 25, feeling confident that they will have the 60 votes to end debate and pass the bill.)
Sen. Stevens apparently expressed frustration about the net neutrality issue in a hearing today about Chairman Martin's re-confirmation for a second term:
The lack of stricter neutrality safeguards, however, has splintered the Senate and the communications industry. The issue “may well lead to its total defeat this year after 19 months of work on that bill,” Stevens, R-Alaska, said of his measure, which his committee narrowly approved in June but which has not reached the floor.
This may be a feint, a gesture, or it may be real. Can't tell. It may signal that a large online company is about to make a deal to help the legislation through, to be the hero of all those hard-working telecom companies who have slaved away over this bill for so long.
Can't tell.
This fifth anniversary of 9/11 is a beautiful day. I saw two businessmen I know on the street outside the school, and we all said “beautiful day in New York today.”
Five years ago I was in Montevideo, Uruguay, when the attacks happened, and I remember being very glad that I was with the people that I was with when it happened. We stayed in Montevideo, watching television and sending email, for a long time. When I finally got back to my office in D.C., nothing was going on — everyone was stunned.
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On Wednesday of this week I'll be on a panel with Scott Cleland at Fall VON talking about net neutrality. I have already received a bunch of helpful email messages. If you'd like to send one too, please do.
If you have relevant information about the state of broadband access competition in the U.S. that is more recent (or better) than the July 2006 FCC report, please let me know.
