In the same spirit as Global Voices, Bloggers without Borders, which has found its signal cause with the tsunami disaster. On the site, discussions are forming to coordinate the response. At present the greatest need, according to a man on the ground, is specialist labor—demolitions experts, doctors, even security to prevent medical supplies from being looted.

Following up on my notes from the Day 2 sessions at the VBB conference, here’s the newly drafted Global Voices Covenant, already translated into multiple languages:

We believe in free speech: in protecting the right to speak -- and the right to listen. We believe in universal access to the tools of speech.

To that end, we want to enable everyone who wants to speak to have the means to speak -- and everyone who wants to hear that speech, the means to listen to it.

Thanks to new tools, speech need no longer be controlled by those who own the means of publishing and distribution, or by governments that would restrict thought and communication. Now, anyone can wield the power of the press. Everyone can tell their stories to the world.

We want to build bridges across the gulfs of culture and language that divide people, so as to understand each other more fully. We want to work together more effectively, and act more powerfully.

We believe in the power of direct connection. The bond between individuals from different worlds is personal, political and powerful. We believe conversation across boundaries is essential to a future that is free, fair, prosperous and sustainable - for all citizens of this planet.

While we continue to work and speak as individuals, we also want to identify and promote our shared interests and goals. We pledge to respect, assist, teach, learn from, and listen to one other.

We are Global Voices.

And, a la Jeff Jarvis, at whose blog I found the link, here are the first words of the manifesto, as translated by grassroots effort into 19 languages:

إننا نؤمن بحريّة الكلمة: بحماية الحق في إسماع الآخرين والاستماع لهم. لكل فرد في العالم الحق في الوصول إلى أدوات التخاطب.

Wir glauben an Meinungsfreiheit: Schutz des Rechtes, seine Meinung zu äußern. Und des Rechtes, zuzuhören. Wir glauben an unbeschränkten Zugang zu den Instrumenten von Meinungsäußerung.

Creemos en la libertad de expresión, en el derecho a hablar y en el derecho a ser escuchado. Creemos en el acceso universal a todas las herramientas que contribuyen a la expresión.

Uskomme ilmaisunvapauteen: siihen, että oikeutta puhua - ja oikeutta kuunnella - tulee suojella. Uskomme siihen, että kaikilla tulee olla yhtäläinen pääsyoikeus puheen työkaluihin.

Nous croyons à la liberté d'expression, à la protection du droit de parole et du droit d'écouter. Nous croyons en l'accès universel aux outils d'expression.

Crediamo nella libertà di parola: nella protezione del diritto di parlare -- e del diritto d'ascoltare. Crediamo nell'accesso universale agli strumenti di comunicazione.

私達はフリースピーチを信じる。自由に発言する権利、そして自由に聞く権利を信じる。万人がスピーチを行うためのツールにアクセスする権利を持つことを信じる。

Nós acreditamos na liberdade de expressão: protegendo o direito de falar -- e o direito de ouvir. Nós acreditamos no acesso universal as ferramentas de expressão.

Now I guess we‘ll see how well MarsEdit copes with posting in multiple scripts… (Thanks to Jeff Jarvis for the link.)

As a subscriber of the service formerly known as AT&T Wireless, I have to give Cingular props for not fumbling the technical changeover; my service is just as good (or, at my house, as bad) as it was before. The same, sadly, can’t be said for their marketing.

My plan was a promotional deal through Microsoft, my former employer. I have a Nokia 3650 camera phone and a plan that provides me with data minutes, most of which I use in a given month. So how is it that Cingular has decided that I’d be interested in “upgrading” to a free Nokia 6010 that has a tenth of the capabilities of the phone I have now—no “M-Life,” no camera, no Symbian OS?

Either Cingular doesn’t have access to the data about me which would tell them how to market more effectively to me—unlikely, as my bill now carries their logo—or else they’re just choosing not to exploit it. Dumb, Cingular.

Here’s how to get my business as a cell phone customer: stop sending me condescending direct mail pieces that are based on the premise that my phone is a five year old piece of crap. Show me some cool technology that I don’t know about yet. Tell me how to use the phone I have to better integrate with my life. Direct mail is OK—better than marketing email pitches—but it would be better if you did it in an unobtrusive way, say a blog. Just a thought.

bbum's rants, code & references: Lego Store!. And the company’s site says there’s one in Burlington, MA. The wall of parts has to be the best aspect of the whole thing, though.

Upon reading about Google’s plans to digitize and make searchable the research libraries of UMich, Stanford, Harvard, the New York Public Library of Oxford (coverage, among other places: The New York Times, Boston Globe, Boing Boing, Joi Ito), I thought about my former coworkers at the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia. I wondered about their not being part of this announcement; the center has been involved for a long time with making public domain works available. In fact, I helped convert some texts to the center’s custom SGML format myself when I worked there ten years ago.

And many of the texts we worked with came from Project Gutenberg, the often discussed and more often ignored project to make out-of-copyright books electronically available to the public domain. I wonder, too, why their name isn’t on the announcement. And why none of the newspaper accounts even mentioned them.

Perhaps I’m reading too much into this. After all, Gutenberg’s texts are already searchable by Google. But why wouldn’t they hop into this project?

librarian.net : steal my stylesheet. The redoubtable Jessamyn West shows how HTML + CSS can be used to make a pretty decent set of slides for a talk, and releases the stylesheet she uses for this purpose under a Creative Commons license.

There’s definitely something to be said for authoring content in forms that are easily consumed across multiple platforms.

Newsweek: The Alpha Bloggers. When a publication as mainstream as Newsweek runs an article that talks about the influence of the “alpha bloggers” (whom they don’t exhaustively list but who they say (and I agree) include Doc Searls, Dave Winer, Robert Scoble, and Dan Gillmor) and they mean technology pundits, not political pundits, you know the press is waking up to the fact that bloggers write about more than the war. Nice to see, and props to Steven Levy for a good article. Too bad it took years for someone in the press to write this story.

Other mentions of the article: Steve Rubel, Donna Wentworth.

Coming in late to Global Voices, one of the tracks for Saturday’s part of the VBB conference. Sitting in the tools session. The backchannel is still active, but is fragmented since (I believe) it’s picking up backchannel from all four simultaneous sessions.

There’s a wiki for the Global Voices track on Hoder’s blog. And a fantastic set of transcripts on The Longest Now.

I actually had to leave the VBB conference just now, but for a good reason—I have a phone interview in half an hour. I should be back for some of tomorrow’s sessions.

In the meantime, look to these folks for conference coverage: Doc Weinberger, Dave, Rebecca, EthanZ, Jeff Jarvis.

A questioner points out that the Republican meetups are used to identify local candidates at the grass roots at least in New York.

Another questioner points out there are existing social institutions for conservatives (e.g. churches)—might that explain skew in MeetUp results?

Jeff jarvis asks Hoder what we should be doing to support international efforts. Hoder replies: localize blogging software! Blogger isn’t available in Chinese or other languages (true?) and this is a problem. Mixed blessing, I think. On the one hand this might mean that more people in these countries might be encouraged to write in English so we non-Chinese-speaking readers might get their perspectives. On the other hand, the ability to do blogs in double-byte characters—let alone what the text on the UI says—was the biggest complaint internally about the various ad hoc solutions available for Microsoft bloggers.

Q: Why are some voting technologies trusted and not others? A: (Pippa)—it’s not necessarily all about trust; there may be other factors.

Good comment about the influence of the campaigns on the liberal skew on Meetup.

Pippa Norris: e-voting. She’s talking about remote voting, not Diebold, thank God. Compare with all-postal voting, which also eliminates polling stations. Advantage: convenience, reach immobiles, reduce costs, streamline administration… (really???) Problems: security, data protection, secrecy, integrity, accuracy, equality, reliability; social barriers including equality of access.

In the UK e-voting was done side by side with postal voting in a controlled experiment. Postal voting showed strong returns, an average of 10% increase; e-voting actually drove some declines, apparently. Young disinclined voters weren’t encouraged to vote by the new technology, but older voters were driven by the availability of postal ballots because the mail is a familiar technology.

So the internet is an enabler of these transactions, but it doesn’t necessarily encourage them. That shouldn’t be new to anyone except die hard technologists. This is an important case study, not just for e-voting buffs but also for anyone who wants to look at technology adoption.

Hoder talks about the influence of the Internet and blogging in Iran being largely social rather than political right now. But the former VP of Iran is a blogger—trilingual. Blogging can also route around media censorship. Interesting discussion—I’m going to have to go back and read his blog to catch up.

Tom Sander on MeetUp: 1. Meetup.com is succeeding in building social ties despite being in unsociable environment. 2. It attracted different users than expected. 3. Political meetups, which are relatively rare would be better if they focused more on social ties, and in the future we may get to the point where they’re not an automatic part of the process but a considered part. Is technology part of the problem or part of the answer to helping individuals build social capital (trust and reciprocity)?

Meetup has grown from 0 to over a million members, driven largely by political meetups (though that segment is now declining). Interesting prospect because expected to attract younger unengaged folks and has low barrier to entry. BUT—not a young person’s phenomenon—young people were represented approximately proportionately. It is attracting highly educated, engaged folks, and not attracting newcomers—and there appears to be a lot of turnover from meetup to meetup. How do you build real social bonds there?

Aside: I think the value of meetups is what happens outside them. Once a month isn’t enough to get anything done anyway—look at the networks that people build, the new blogs they follow.

Doc Weinberger is sitting in front of me, btw, and says he doesn’t know if there will be a backchannel. Anyone know?

Update: asked and answered.

Joho the Blog: [VBB] Votes, Bits and Bytes: Will the Internet Draft the Next President?.

I didn’t make it to last night’s kick-off but Doc Weinberger does a killer job of summarizing the opening panel, with some real eye openers, including Joe Trippi weighing in on the importance of the net allowing people to connect vs. just “message passing”; and his statement that “one party—probably the Democrats—will go the way of the Whigs.”

Charles Ogilvy hits the first note—making sure that we don’t leave society, and the unwired, behind with technology. Are we creating bloggers or lurkers? Are we exposing candidates or constructs? What role does the Internet play in society?

Look at e-voting. Sometimes the pundits get it (i.e. predicting the vote) wrong (Dewey defeats Truman, e.g.). Haste in rushing to judge leads to things like Bush v. Gore, and creates problems for society—such as lack of confidence in state government and the judiciary (see dissenting opinion in Bush v. Gore). What about Dean, and the Internet and the press turning on him after the scream? Venezuela, where pundits miscalled the election of Chavez; this election, with leaked election polls; South Africa; the Ukraine…

And what about the impact of black box voting? Cue the Florida voting machine movie…

I’m here at the Harvard Law School for the Internet and Society 2004 conference. So far it’s “quiet… almost too quiet.” Most participants were shocked to learn that there would be no Internet access provided; I however seem to be able to get on the wireless LAN, probably from being registered at the first BloggerCon.

So far Jeff Jarvis and Dan Gillmor are among those most affected by the outage. It looks like everyone is slowly getting on line, though, somehow.

I got to congratulate Dan on his new gig—he’s leaving the Mercury to work on af citizen journalism venture that’s so new, he says, he doesn’t even know what it’s going to be yet.

Found on Plastic: the gay and Marxist subtexts of the classic Rankin-Bass Christmas TV special, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Raindeer.” This isn’t a new thought, having been discussed on at least three other blogs that I found with some lazy Googling, but it’s the most thorough explication I’ve seen.

Um, merry Christmas.

The 2004 Weblog Awards are up for voting. Lots of categories, lots of scrolling. Annoying, frankly, almost as annoying as seeing that shrill ideologue hack Michelle Malkin is currently in the top three for “best media/journalist blog,” way ahead of the far more balanced and deserving Jeff Jarvis. Let’s fix that, shall we? Mmmkay.

Scripting News: Weblogs.com needs a rewrite. If I had C skillz, I’d be there, but I don’t. Surely there must be some folks out there in the blogging community who are ready to give back…

...they could do worse than a framed print of this New Yorker cartoon for me:

(Thanks to Tin Man for the link to the searchable database of New Yorker cartoons.) I remember bringing that cartoon up in my History of the English Language class when it first came out—but I think the date in the database is wrong, since I was taking that class in the spring of 1993. I still maintain that it’s the best illustration of the difference between signifier and thing itself that I’ve seen, though cookies, e-commerce sites, and other modern invasions of privacy have pretty much eroded the core message, which was very much true in 1993.

(Yes, it’s my birthday today. I’m 32.)

In addition to the Scripting News Christmas Party, I’ll also be at the Berkman Center’s Internet & Society conference next week. This year’s theme is “Online Politics: Is the Web Just for Liberals?,” and should be just the thing to get me out of political blogging. With any luck there will be some startup type folks there as well, judging from the panelist and facilitator list (which includes Joi Ito, Scott Heiferman from Meetup, and Craig Newmark of CraigsList. Plus the usual gang—Dave Winer, Dave Weinberger, John Palfrey, Esther Dyson, Dan Gillmor… Oh, and it looks like Andrew Orlowski from the Register will be on a panel. This should be fun. :)

Anil Dash: What's in your search box?. At present, mine says "mission of burma" "peking spring", because it’s the first of a new month and I was on eMusic burning up my 40 monthly tracks, and then filling in all the missing metadata (like cover art and year).

RSS in Government: Blog -- Dictionary Word of the Year. Merriam Webster reports that, once you strip out profanity and perennial words like “effect/affect”, blog was the most-searched word this year on Dictionary.com. You can tell it’s a no-news week when I found reference to this fact on three sites I read daily. (I’m pointing to the article at RSS in Government because the original story, a Yahoo! News item, will disappear within the month, and I hate linkrot. At least this way there will be some context in my archives later.)

And how long is it before the anti-blog backlash starts? Surely the Register’s venom and new NBC anchor Brian Williams’s snide comment about bloggers in the bathroom are only the opening shots across the bow…

Boing Boing: Darrin Perry: in memoriam. Perry led the 2002 redesign of WIRED magazine, which freshened the look and feel of the aging geek bible while making it more legible.

Of all the information in the obituary, the most surprising part for me was that he was born in Madison County, North Carolina, where my father’s family is rooted.

I haven’t surveyed my friends and neighbors in the blogosphere for a while, and there have been some developments:

• Tony Pierce: a little housekeeping for your ass. Tony reports that Blook II is done, and that he may have advance copies for ordering shortly.
• And it looks like the book buzz is catching, as Scott Rosenberg is taking a hiatus from his day job at Salon to write a book.
• Speaking of Salon, “Wednesday Morning Download” columnist Thomas Bartlett (aka Doveman) got taken to task for criticising the string-heavy production on the first two Nick Drake albums in favor of the divine Pink Moon. His interlocutor throws out the following argument: “Pink Moon is the album that all of the Northeast liberal Blue State elites like. For those of you, like me, surrounded by the real people in the Red States, I recommend Drake's first album, Five Leaves Left.” While I can’t argue with Mr. Parasol Blog about the greatness of “River Man,” I’ll raise him “Fruit Tree” in response—and hope that “red state” and “blue state” make it onto the verboten words list for 2005.
• On an entirely different foot, the brilliant Merlin Mann not only writes 5ives, he is also the author of 43 Folders, which turns out to have some tremendously cool tips about a lot of OS X software that, um, I don’t really use. Though reading what he says about Quicksilver, I’m inclined to try.

I haven’t gone to our polling place yet—Lisa and I are going to do that at lunchtime—but I’m going to do some voting right now using Vote Links: I’m voting today for John Kerry and against George W. Bush. View source to see how this works, then check out the tracking page at Technorati to see how it’s going.

By the way, this is the initiative that Dave Sifry talked about on my blog over a year ago; the spec is jointly written by Kevin Marks and Tantek Çelik. I wanted to see something like this implemented several years ago—but alas, I can’t find the reference (so much for my backup brain).

New Lensday submission for Spooky. I originally planned to submit this, but decided to not go the black-on-black route.

More links that have hung around for a day or so, but refuse to get stale:

• Adam Curry’s mom has been diagnosed with cancer. Our best wishes go out to her.
• William Gibson on conservatives and fans who are surprised when he reveals his politics: “If I were to put together a truly essential thank-you list for the people who most made it possible for me to write my first six novels, I’d certainly owe as much to Ronald Reagan as to Bill Gates or Lou Reed. Reagan’s presidency put the grit in my dystopia. His presidency was the fresh kitty litter I spread for utterly crucial traction on the icey driveway of uncharted futurity. His smile was the nightmare in my back pocket.”
• A website that perfectly characterizes the zeitgeist: RegretTheError.com, a blog that picks up all the corrections of all the newspapers, news sites, and stories about media accuracy.
• A Frolic of My Own writes about dangerous cheese. “Every since 9/11 it’s been harder to get. They will hold up an entire shipping container if they think it contains even a few rounds of unpasteurized cheese,” he said. Those damned French, trying to destroy our pasteurized way of life!
• Slashdot interviews Neal Stephenson, and the author comes back in a seriously funny way. I’m waiting for William Gibson to take the bait on his blog regarding Stephenson’s claims of mortal combat: “Our third fight occurred at the Peace Arch on the U.S./Canadian border between Seattle and Vancouver. Gibson wished to retire from that sort of lifestyle that required ceaseless training in the martial arts and sleeping outdoors under the rain. He only wished to sit in his garden brushing out novels on rice paper. But honor dictated that he must fight me for a third time first. Of course the Peace Arch did not remain standing for long. Before long my sword arm hung useless at my side. One of my psi blasts kicked up a large divot of earth and rubble, uncovering a silver metallic object, hitherto buried, that seemed to have been crafted by an industrial designer. It was a nitro-veridian device that had been buried there by Sterling. We were able to fly clear before it detonated. The blast caused a seismic rupture that split off a sizable part of Canada and created what we now know as Vancouver Island. This was the last fight between me and Gibson. For both of us, by studying certain ancient prophecies, had independently arrived at the same conclusion, namely that Sterling's professed interest in industrial design was a mere cover for work in superweapons. Gibson and I formed a pact to fight Sterling. So far we have made little headway in seeking out his lair of brushed steel and white LEDs, because I had a dentist appointment and Gibson had to attend a writers' conference, but keep an eye on Slashdot for any further developments.”
• Speaking of Stephenson and his recent obsessions: he, along with James Gleick, probably would have a lot to say about the New York Public Library’s one-sidedly idolatrous portrayal of Sir Isaac Newton.
• Doc, again, nails the point home about the difference between Internet users and “media” “consumers.”
• Donna Wentworth at the Copyfight blog gives an update on the progress (or lack thereof) of the INDUCE Act in committee. It sounds like some good strong points in favor of technological innovation have been made in the hearings; hopefully they’ll be heard over the din of the industry crying out as its business model shatters around it.
• Microsoft scales back Passport. Remember Passport?
• Excellent. The brainwashing program is working. Incidentally, we’ve always been at war with Oceania.
• And our media is liberal, of course.

Some reflections on blogging, journalism, and my last post. A common cry of bloggers is that journalists don’t touch investigations with lots of hard work, uncertain payoff, and that are politically sensitive. A complaint from many liberal bloggers was that the press parroted GOP criticisms of Kerry’s war record while staying silent on George W. Bush’s service—spotty attendance and all—in the Reserves. When CBS went after the story in a big way, I cheered—until one of the memos proved a forgery. Then I fumed. Once Big Media was burned, I figured, they wouldn’t touch the story again and it would die down—even though the rest of the allegations about Bush’s record were provable.

Thankfully, this is where bloggers come in. Paul Lukasiak, aka The AWOL Project, has been collecting information and going after Bush’s Reserve record using regulations, publicly available documents, and hard work to uncover the meaning behind the codes. This is a thankless job that few journalists would touch, especially after CBS’s embarrassment; but bloggers have continued to chase the story and are turning up some valuable findings.

So what’s the problem? I think there’s a danger that a lot of us spend a lot of energy on issues like this one precisely because they’re bloggable and lend themselves to being addressed by individuals with time on their hands, rather than looking at less personal issues about the president like his health care policies and education strategies. The problem, which the Kerry campaign appears fortunately to have identified, is that health care and education are two of the three hot-button issues for voters this election. So where are all the health care bloggers? That’s something I’d like to be reading about.

Don’t get me wrong: I think the AWOL Project is doing great work, and it’s a kind of work I’ve done in the past as well (see “Hunting for the Halliburton Contract” and “How to Spend $2 Billion”). But we need to get the blogosphere past the point where we focus on one or two issues at the expense of others that might be equally valuable to explore.

So how do I deal with those links that won‘t die? In a word: bullet lists.

• Going across the country on a Segway. That probably won’t be a four-day trip.
• Evidence for the value of the Long Tail and personal publishing, from Dave Sifry of Technorati. He promises a look at corporate blogging tomorrow; can’t wait.
• Courtesy the O’Reilly sexual harassment scandal: Falafel fetish neologism of the week: hummulingus. Much better than falaphilia. Thanks, Xeni. Won’t be able to get that one out of my head.
• Vintage 1950s Peanuts pins. Aw, man. I wonder if my sister or mom still has our vintage 60s Snoopy stuffed animal… Interestingly, the blog entry says that the second volume of the complete Peanuts has been released. I guess I should call Fantagraphics and make sure they have the correct address for me…
• Josh Marshall: the biggest difference between the candidates, as illustrated by the debates, is about how to knock out terrorism. Bush thinks you’re done if you go after state sponsors. Kerry understands that sovereignty is breaking down in the post-Cold War era, which means that increasingly terrorist organizations are operating totally independently. Fantastic excerpt from Atlantic Monthly on the topic. I think this is the area where John Robb is way out ahead of everyone else.
• Teresa expanded Senator Kerry’s horizons after marriage. —In the kitchen, you dirty-minded punks.
• Farmhouse ales: they’re what’s for dinner.

Just not on my desktop. Interesting that Google Desktop Search is Windows only considering the constitution of its back end—you’d think that Linux and Mac OS X users would be home free.

Lots of coverage today: Metafilter; Battelle; Scripting News; Doc.

Some people think David Coursey’s latest column on Podcasting, in which he swoons over having Bob Edwards on his iPod but turns up his nose at the notion that someone might want to listen to a podcast from the technology’s originators, is really silly, and if you limit your imagination to audio versions of people's egomaniacal columns for eWeek, that seems perfectly reasonable. But if you look at it as another failing gasp for air by the demigods of the mass media world, who don’t understand the social impact of the technologies that surround them and the emerging world of independent content creators, it becomes really interesting.

—Please pardon the above riff on Coursey’s column, in which I’ve kept most of the last paragraph intact and substituted the targets of his spleen with my own italicized interjections, but he was too pompous not to deflate. What is it about print journalists—not all of them, thank God, but enough of them—that they all want bloggers to dry up and blow away? They seem so, I don’t know, threatened. I guess they can’t help it; they bought the hype that attention is scarce, and any attention paid to the likes of me (and Adam and Dave, or even Larry) somehow invalidates their existence.

Interesting proposition, that last one. Do print journalists and other media magnates still have authority if people stop believing they do?

Inspired by a link on Scripting News.

The piece I wrote last week on The Long Tail of blogging and the myth of attention scarcity has found some resonances in the blogosphere. Jim McGee pointed to my piece in a riff on the topic that extends to the question of attention scarcity and knowledge dissemination inside corporations:

Sure, [attention is] a problem to the mass marketer/distributor who thinks they are entitled to a portion of my and everyone else’s attention. And initially, it’s a problem for me as I learn how to find and connect to that unique mix of sources scattered throughout the entire distribution that warrant my attention. When it settles down, however, my attention ends up better spent with that unique set of trusted advisors than it does filtered through the classic lens of mass market distribution.

One of my particular interests lies in what all of this means for doing knowledge work inside organizations. The mentality of mass market distribution manifests inside organizations as a concern for control. In a mass market world or organization there is room for only one message and, frequently, only one messenger. From this industrial perspective, attention management looms as a grave threat. If I insist on routing all decisions about attention through a central node, then, of course, that node suffers from attention overload. But it does so at the expense of wasting potential attention capacity distributed throughout the organization. The only hope of tapping the available attention capacity of the organization is to give up the attachment to conventional notions of control. Put another way, the biggest obstacle to success remains the emotional needs of senior leadership to stay in control.

And Scott Rosenberg, while not explicitly referencing my piece, makes many of the same points and posits a future without blockbusters, but one in which more creators may be able to make a living:

For Klam, as for so many of us media pros, “the blogs that succeed” is synonymous with “the blogs that reach a wide audience.” But publishing a blog is a nearly cost-free effort compared with all previous personal-publishing opportunities, and that frees us all to choose different criteria for success: Maybe self-expression is enough. Or opening a conversation with a couple of new friends. Or recording a significant event in one’s life for others to find...

...[I’m] impressed by the unflagging explosion of memorable new blogging voices and contributions to the burgeoning pool of human knowledge online. This is the dark matter of the Web universe, the stuff J.D. Lasica is writing about in his book. Collectively, it outweighs all the “bright” matter of the more commercial Web sites with their vast traffic...

There's an old saying in the land of the Broadway theater, where once I tarried, that you can’t make a living there, but you can make a killing. Perhaps the Internet’s fate is to transmute the worlds of publishing and entertainment and even global trade from the hit-or-miss nightmare of a Broadway-like lottery into something more hopeful — a world where it’s a lot harder to make a killing but a lot easier to make a living. Is there anyone, outside of a few boardrooms, who’d find that a loss?

Finally, I think, we get to the bottom line. Our society has been so warped by the “mass market” and the phenomenon of the “hit” that we think that everything that is not a hit is a miss, and that the only things that create value—whether in music, film, theatre, or online—are the hits. I would argue that that’s a destructive philosophy, and one that becomes profoundly untrue as the cost of production diminishes. I think Google shows that the value of “hits” to the general Internet user is a hell of a lot smaller than the value of all the “long tail.” And NetFlix and Amazon prove it from an economic standpoint. So at some point you have to take a step back and ask: If hits are an increasingly smaller share of the total revenue opportunity, why do they get all the investment? Isn’t the multi-million-dollar blockbuster, or the record album that never recoups its production costs, an unwise investment when you consider all the other smaller successes you could have invested in?

It appears the most interesting article in the last print edition of Wired is now online. “The Long Tail” talks about movie and music consumption in terms of the power law (i.e. there are a few very popular releases followed by an infinitely long set of steadily less popular ones), but explores the economic implications of being able to provide immediate access to everything, not just the most popular releases:

What's really amazing about the Long Tail is the sheer size of it. Combine enough nonhits on the Long Tail and you’ve got a market bigger than the hits. Take books: The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon’s book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are (see “Anatomy of the Long Tail”). In other words, the potential book market may be twice as big as it appears to be, if only we can get over the economics of scarcity. Venture capitalist and former music industry consultant Kevin Laws puts it this way: “The biggest money is in the smallest sales.”

The same is true for all other aspects of the entertainment business, to one degree or another. Just compare online and offline businesses: The average Blockbuster carries fewer than 3,000 DVDs. Yet a fifth of Netflix rentals are outside its top 3,000 titles. Rhapsody streams more songs each month beyond its top 10,000 than it does its top 10,000. In each case, the market that lies outside the reach of the physical retailer is big and getting bigger.

When you think about it, most successful businesses on the Internet are about aggregating the Long Tail in one way or another. Google, for instance, makes most of its money off small advertisers (the long tail of advertising), and eBay is mostly tail as well – niche and one-off products. By overcoming the limitations of geography and scale, just as Rhapsody and Amazon have, Google and eBay have discovered new markets and expanded existing ones.

But that’s not all. You can extend this to Clay Shirky’s infamous “Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality” article. Shirky posited that online, the most famous bloggers get attention—incoming links—in something that looks like a power curve. But by extension of the principle of “the long tail,” once you get over the idea that there is a scarcity of attention online, everyone else’s blog looks more and more valuable. Why are there blog entries for just about any search you can do in Google? It’s not a bug. The individual voices of bloggers, even if they think they’re writing for no audience at all, can provide an infinite amount of interesting and valuable insight, provided someone helps you find it (that’s Rule 3 of the “long tail” phenomenon).

That’s why the most valuable services for blogs haven’t been authoring platforms—you can write a blog in Notepad and FTP it up, or you can choose from probably about a hundred different platforms written with varying degrees of professionalism—but services like Kinja, LiveJournal, Feedster, Technorati, feeds.scripting.com, and of course Google itself that help you find the valuable and interesting content.

Other stuff:

• Brent Simmons waxes ecstatic about SpaceShipOne’s X-Prize-winning second flight today. Always good to see someone reaching out a hand to touch the face of God. (See also MetaFilter.)
• Tony Pierce is turning entertainment blogger for a week. I’d suggest a link, Tony, but “Moonshot Manny” came out last week and so it isn’t news.
• Permanently open in my aggregator: special conditions reports on the Mt. St. Helens situation. The bit about “large scale uplift (10s of meters) of part of the glacier and a nearby segment of the lava dome” makes me really nervous. Glad I went to visit in 2001.
• Via Too Many Chefs, Old Kentucky Bourbon Truffles. Bourbon: it’s not just for breakfast any more!
• Speaking of bourbon… I don’t know about any other Virginia football fans, but I get nervous even linking to this. But hey, I can’t not mention that we moved into the Top 10 in the AP poll this weekend. But I must mention it very quietly; Clemson is coming…
• Fabulous video and audio mix-ups: How do you run a convention on a record of failure? (QuickTime); Bush mixtape (MP3); the Five-Minute Remix (QT or WM).
• And don’t forget Poland! Oh, wait, forget Poland.
• Q: What the hell is the FCC doing to grant money that puts high speed internet access in libraries and schools? A: Leaving children behind.

When you’re challenging the draconian DMCA, there are good days and bad days. Yesterday was both. On the good side, a federal judge issued a smackdown to Diebold for misusing the DMCA in trying to bully Swarthmore students into taking down links to material that was critical of Diebold’s voting machine security.

On the bad side, a St. Louis court ruled in favor of Blizzard in their DMCA suit, in which Blizzard sought to suppress the open source BnetD, a clone of Blizzard’s Battle.net service that enabled multiplayer options for Blizzard customers who didn’t want to use Battle.net.

What’s the commonality? Other than the DMCA, very little. Yesterday’s rulings in a nutshell say that the “safe harbor” clause of the act should not be misconstrued as an excuse for companies to send infinite numbers of takedowns, but the core anti-circumvention portion of the act stands. Even though the BnetD team was doing reverse engineering to enable compatibility with their free product.

Aaron Swartz has been such a key part of the blogging (and web services, and XML syndication) world(s) for so long that it’s always a shock to remember that he’s so young. To wit: he’s starting undergrad at Stanford this month. Today’s update finds him making some of the discoveries many of us made ten years ago, like how professors don’t always understand your insights; parties are sadly funny when you look at them as anthropological rituals (and don’t participate); and how phony patriotism is used to build group identities.

(I will note, however, that it’s grimly funny to find a leading proponent of RDF, the leading (and still mystifying) XML-based semantic taxonomy, and of Atom, which proposes an alternate notation and representation for the syndication data presented by RSS, totally baffled by the transition from the Dewey Decimal System to the Library of Congress system.)

But the series is still highly readable. The alienation of a smart autodidact confronting his peers in the brew of the most intense period of peer interaction—well, it’s awfully familiar to me, and I suspect to many of my readers as well.

It’s been a while. Here’s a quick collection of things going on across my narrow part of the blogosphere:

• Congrats to George and Becky on leaving the ranks of the renters and joining the ranks of the property owners! My sympathies on the painting joys, George. Just remember, it only gets more fun from there.
• I have heard the sound of a threepeat, and it’s “Mar’nbarry…Mar’nbarry…Mar’nbarry.” E-gads.
• Tony Pierce is on fire this week. Yesterday: “i am born and raised american the only fear i have is that there wont be enough ass for me to kick in Heaven when i get there. so yes mr bush i reject the horror stories that you continue to read us as we lay our heads to sleep. shove your terror alert warnings back in your texas spiderholes. if you cannot run for office based on policies of possibilities and probabilities then you have no business running for office in this country because this aint the home of the scared.”
• Of course, this brings to mind Garry Trudeau’s artistic reinterpretation of the terror alert color code from Sunday.
• Gotta love the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, after they rejected a motion from the DOJ asking to be allowed to file secret arguments pertaining to secret laws requiring you to show ID on airplanes. (This in Gilmore vs. Ashcroft; other case documents. Via BoingBoing.)
• The Crimson: Wordsworth Declares Bankruptcy. Chapter 11, thank goodness, and they’re staying open. Reason enough to take the T down to Harvard Square and buy some books, I think.