The AROMA Party: Proud to be Insensitive

After 46 years of sensitivity to one special interest after another, I'm as sensitive as a sun burn and peeling fast. I will now be insensitive, brutish, chauvinistic, piggy, outright ignorant and obtuse.

Today I am announcing the founding of a new political party: A Rash On My Ash, also known as the AROMA Party. Our motto is: The Nose Knows!.

My campaign headquarters will open this week so send all of your surplus money to me. I promise to represent everyone:

Who was left out of the bailout but included in the tax audit,

Who can’t find a job or a bar showing local sports,

Who isn’t being sent on a tour by the State Department or LiveNation,

Who paid more in taxes than the undocumented immigrant down the street,

Who lives in a sexless marriage at least when he or she are in the same bedroom,

Who voted for the loser in any election only to watch the winner break every promise made while getting rich doing it,

Who can’t get a cab or a decent bowl of grits in Hoboken,

Who thinks teaching same sex positions to fifth graders is too much too soon and that’s what the Internet is for anyway,

Who can’t cross the border to have a baby or a better life,

Who bought health insurance only to have it canceled the day before the cancer diagnosis was confirmed,

Who is sure their current representative in Congress or their union is a corrupt jack ass but voted for them anyway because they seemed to be the smartest guy or gal in the room,

Who can’t understand why paying an extra half-grand for a Mac or iPhone that does the same thing as a PC or a Blackberry is a cool thing to do,

Who gets out of bed and drives to work in a Dodge with windows rolled down in the heat while the boss texts orders from an air conditioned Hummer on his iPhone,

Who thinks having the Bank of England in charge of printing US currency is running the American Revolution in reverse,

Who believes a mosque on ground zero is the same as a Confederate flag hanging in Ford’s Theatre,

Who is fed up and mad as Hell but has to keep taking it anyway to send a kid to a school that teaches them everything America does enslaves the rest of the world but won't accept the tuition in rupees, Euros or Loonies,

For that ever shrinking number of old white guys who can’t even pronounce Dos Equis much less be interesting,

For the squibs, the nerfs and the furries,

I shall, cross my smart ass and hope to fly, spend you money wisely … in Sweden. And remember, if you think this smells, it probably does.

I thank you and God Bless the local auto parts store and Burger King who let us have it our way.

Confessions of a Fence Sitter

When you realize that half of your friends like Brewer and Palin and the other half like Brewer and Shipley, you know why you can't throw a party and invite all of your friends. That's what Facebook is like.

Every day I watch the mounting number of cause solicitations and think they are getting even more annoying than the Farmville Send Me A Donkey's Kong messages.

Here's Common Cause, voice of the Coffee Party:


"Please, Help Free Manning and defend WikiLeaks!"

"But he gave out classified information that's getting our friend's killed? Isn't that de jure treason? Assange called our soliders 'bastards' and said he wanted to 'crush them'."

"YOU FASCIST PIG!!!"

So much for inciting civility.

The Stop The Nonsense! Save the Mosque on Ground Zero crew:


"You have to show tolerance."

"But isn't building a mosque on ground zero like building a Confederate War Memorial inside Ford's Theatre?"

"YOU RACIST PIG!!!"

So much for inciting compassion and understanding.

We'd all like to get along and have a good time, but as any nightclub owner can tell you and social media theorists claim to have discovered, some cliques should never be mixed. It isn't that they can't tolerate each other; they don't want to. Their opposition to each other is what defines them, makes them feel a part of something greater than themselves even if that something is less than fully human.

Meanwhile the White House is facing the very real possibility that after bailing out Wall Street while Americans lose jobs and sueing the State of Arizona while undocumented immigrants come to the US for free health care in the emergency wards, they may indeed be a historical but one term presidency.

In the words of Gomer Pyle, "Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!"

As a Southerner growing up in Alabama, I thought the words to Kumbayah were "Come by, y'all!" Imagine my surprise when as an adult I read the Gullah translation to discover they actually do mean "Come by here".

That at least is ... comforting. If we all sing it, Arizonans have to tolerate illegal immigrants and New Yorkers have to tolerate that mosque near the spot where three thousand people were murdered. We are a great nation. We tolerate everything.

Almost...

There is a wonderful movie making the rounds: Agora. It stars Rachel Weisz and tells the story of Hypatia of Alexandria. The story is about the burning of the libraries and the murder of Hypatia, the librarian as the Christians, Jews and pagans vowed for power and dominance while the Roman Empire fell around them. It seems I have to wait until it comes out on DVD in October because the movie is unwelcome by the American movie distributors who fear it will offend Christians and Jews. Pagans don't count. Meanwhile, years after the Pope asked the Saudi royals and the Yemenis to allow Christian churches in their countries for the over million Christians there, they are rebuked.

So much for open mindedness and freedom of expression. But we are The Good Guys.

In the 70s we were up to our hips in Iranian and Saudi students who told us as soon as they got home they would overthrow the Shah and kick us off the peninsula. We smiled thinking of course they wouldn't do that. Imagine our surprise when announcing intent indeed proved to be the best predictor of future behavior. So while the Germans are closing the mosque in Germany where the 911 attacks were planned because the members are collecting funds and planning for future attacks while the Taliban kills ten medical team members for "spying for the Americans and preaching Christianity", the Mayor of New York is telling the New Yorkers to be 'tolerant'.

We want to be. We do. It's just that past announcements of intentions to destroy the West once and for all keep being released from alQaeda known to raise funds in American mosques. This may not be one of those but who do we believe? Should we bend over backwards to understand or submit to the feeling that some people will screw us in any position we take? Sophisticates tell us that is paranoia but they also told us the Ayatollah could be trusted, the Saudis and Pakistanis are our allies, and tobacco didn't cause cancer.

They also claim Dylan is a good singer. Ok, that one was hokey on the face of it but it's right up there with Apple Supports Open Source. Ya gotta wonder.

One can't stay on the fence or pick a side to climb down. It seems one has to walk to the end of it and jump to the next back yard. But truth is often stranger than fiction and just when you think you know which side someone is on, well, you see this. Roll another one, Lawrence.

The Face of American Racism

Eric Holder of the Department of Justice announced today that racism in the American Grizzly population has reached intolerable proportions and that suit will be filed to redress this sickening development. "This legacy of hate and violence against the human race as evidenced by the desire of these animals to attack and consume humans is not in keeping with the high aspirations of the American public or our administration." The bear currently incarcerated in a Montana bear cage had no comment but her representative stated that she expects to be vindicated when the full accounting of the incident leading up to this miscarriage of justice is made public.

Anonymity and Blizzard

There is a minor tempest stirring about Blizzard exposing real identities in their forums removing the customary anonymity. It seems to upset women the most. They don't want to be treated differently for being women. Somehow the hypocrisy of that escapes them but one can counsel those who as Duran Duran said in Barbarella, "... find horrible the idea that one could do to me that which I do to others." In other words, if you are in a game where bad behavior is the norm, you're supporting bad behavior and accept that is what you are supporting or get out. The dustup over the Streamy's this year is an excellent example of what happens when 'wink-wink' suddenly bursts out of the privacy of production rooms and into real-time. Then those promoting that behavior get caught up close and personal, and the time for cute protests are over. You made the bed, as they say.

Some time ago I made it clear that anonymous postings would be o-filed here at LaMammals. Why? People used anonymity to cause harm for political and work reasons. Since I couldn't filter fairly, I decided the best policy was a transparent one that was easy to implement.

I understand better than some the problems of a real public personna, yet I've pretty consistently followed the rule that I won't use pseudonyms and if I am in an environment where a pseudonym is assumed, I think the better course is to get the hell out of that environment.

Do you require a face mask to go ice skating? A public identity at a public event is assumed. What is it about gaming on a public server that requires anonymity? You can’t choose who you ice skate with in a public rink but the dangers of someone taking an inordinate interest in you there are likely higher than in a game. Will people track down an ice skater? They certainly will and have. Should the rink be held responsible? Certainly not.

This brouhaha says more about gamer culture than civil rights. Marketing wise, it may not be wise because when targeting a demographic for a sale, one usually doesn’t try to cure them of say racism along with the sale. On the other hand, providing a room where people in hoods and robes can come and freely commit acts of racism is frowned upon and likely the owner of the establishment would find themselves party to a legal action.

Is a game forum diffferent from such a room?

General Stanley McChrystal

General McChrystal offered his resignation and it was accepted. He was not fired. As a friend notes on another blog where I posted the following as a response, there is a significant difference in the career of a soldier who has done all that was asked of him.

We train these men to be the best soldiers in the world, which is to say the best killers. If we ask a man or a woman to do that, to lead other men and women to do that, then letting them retire with honor is the decent ending for a career.

Still, it seems to me if the goals are to reshape cultures as said, then we should use the means that worked for us when we were being invited to do this instead of kicking the doors in to get one set of guys then hanging around to tell the rest how to live. I can’t think of any examples in our history where the latter strategy has ever worked.

When we have been invited to share, we do quite well. When people come to our country for education and opportunity, we do quite well. When they buy or steal our culture, we do quite well. When we innovate and share our innovations, we do extraordinarily well.

We are a strong and prosperous nation. We have been before this generation, a reliable ally and a fierce protector of the rights of the common man. When we have used our military strength to obtain prosperity, we have always sacrificed the strength of what has made our country great: our belief in ourselves as a good and decent nation. Many great friendships have been made and sustained by acting well and by encouragement, but never by our proseletyzing our way of life and belief. It is by giving of our knowledge and spirit, by fair dinkum as my mates in Oz say, that we prosper as an honorable people.

The honorable soldiers we train to protect that are too blunt a sword to be used to obtain our prosperity or to shape a culture. We train them to protect the walls and we do not dishonor them for the ambiguity into which they are finally placed by a mission that cannot be reconciled to our beliefs but have meaning in protecting life.

I’ll buy him a drink or a meal anytime anywhere.

Meanwhile, let's get the hell out of Afghanistan. We are asking our soldiers to subdue and reshape a culture, not win a war. We are fighting counter-insurgency which is another word for fighting a faction of the indigenous culture while dealing with the next least worse faction than them. We pay them money to not fight each other or fight the faction we're there to kill, but worse, our enemies are paid by our friends whom we gave the money to fight them. If knowing that we ask our soldiers to fight, we're truly frakked. As Hackworth taught, in it to win or out of it.

VietNamization. What? Really? AGAIN???

I Don't Wanta Know - Lyrics and Link To MP3

A song about a fellow who realizes the beautiful mysterious woman he married is actually a vampire. She keeps him alive because, well, she loves him and he feels the same way, but she is what she is and all he can say is, I don't wanta know.

Much of modern life is too much like this fellow's problem: it may not kill us but it hurts.

I Don’t Wanta Know – Len Bullard

June 12, 2010

Whose idea was it to burn the candles low
Who couldn’t wait to watch me … walk out the door
What wicked thirst is this that makes you act so mean
Walking around with a red dress on
Nothing for me but a sniff and a moan
Keeping the best for the backdoor man
Hiding the Bible in the bedside stand

But I don’t wanta know
I don’t wanta ever feel that feeling again
I don’t wanta know
Hunting at night with a knife and a bow
Leaving them out in the cold down low
Disturbing the peace with a hot lawman
Catching a break from any CatchAsCatch can
But I don’t wanta know
I don’t wanta know

I’ve heard you brag that you have never had to lie
Get your way with nothing but a smile
A moonlit shadow swallows up the northern sky
Sucking the blood from the heart of a man
Stylishly cruel? Oh you know that you can.
Cutting him up if he gives you a fight
Making it in by the end of the night

But I don’t wanta know
I don’t wanta ever feel that feeling again
I don’t wanta know
If you’re that hungry for a bite to the bone
First, ask your sister if I’m alone
If the time ain’t right just be prepared
If you’re raring up honey
Well I ain’t scared
Cause I don’t wanta know. I don’t wanta know.

http://home.hiwaay.net/~cbullard/mp3/IDontWantaKnow.mp3

Snake Oil And Jimmy Carter's Sweater: Ready to Respond

Jimmy Carter's sweater is a phrase used in politics to indicate an earnest response rendered silly by the context in which it is offered. It asks for minimal discomfort when the political opponent is claiming you need suffer not at all.

It is common effort versus snake oil. I'm in a business where snake oil solutions, technology as a solution instead of enabler is a way of life.

Some say Obama failed with his speech. Exactly how so? He told us the truth, same as Jimmy Carter. We didn't listen to Jimmy. How'd that work out for us?

Obama gave us a broad agenda with three quantifiable goals:

1. Stop the leak.
2. Clean the water.
3. Get off the oil addiction.

If he's asking us, that's to use the modern yak, crowd sourcing solutions. The first isn't as amenable to crowd sourcing. The second is but relies on resources and organization.

We'll come back to that: that is the cross-jurisdictional communications problem. Years after Mike Chertoff stood there waving the early drafts of the National Response Framework/National Incident Management System (NRF/NIMS) and considerable capital investment, we haven't established a basic communications system that can enable us to establish scalable command and control. There are potential solutions that can be fielded, but that covers products I work on and this isn't an advertisement. Happy to discuss them but not in this blog.

But and Nota Bene: ALL of the oil industry response plans are straw, carbon copied, incompetent filings for mission critical response systems. Say Federal fraud. NRF/NIMS for an event of this type is a hollow suit. This is serious and heads will and must roll for that.

That leaves oil addiction and this is very amenable to crowd sourcing. A friend of mine did some math based on government figures: we are getting 6.8% of our oil consumed in the US from offshore drilling. Another web site shows that 1 billion spent on insulating 75,000 homes equals the amount of energy spilled into the Gulf currently at a current cost of 40 billion dollars. If you are one of those with retirement funds in BP or any other oil company stock, you may want to pay attention to those figures. That's money invested with no R&D. Off the shelf.

Try to think of the problem not in an either-or culture ninja whack context. For a moment put down the pitchforks, let Frankenstein turn the grindstone, and let's ask ourselves if we can start reducing our economic and cultural reliance on oil.

Imagine church missions to insulate homes. Start in your own pews and work your way down the street. See if the Methodists and Baptists meet in the middle of if the Catholics can get there first. Don't ignore; compete.

Imagine MADD Against Plastics. Again, why do I have all these plastic bags and whatever are they good for except filling the landfill? Go through your house and count the things you use that require plastic or other petroleum products. It is a sobering exercise.

Imagine empty recycle containers because the house consumes all the energy it ingests in any form.

Imagine wikipedia for disaster response, Redress the expertise imbalance of government over big money: not big gov vs small gov but Smart Gov vs Merely Technically-enabled Gov. If industry experts wrote open source, freely sharable, always inspectable response plans, for example, instead of "oh just use this copy; it worked for the other guys", we can address part of the problem of industry owning all the smarts and government being merely a forms processor that writes checks.

We can do this, meanwhile, please Mr. President, more Carter's Pills!

Big Government or Smart Goverment

It's an expertise problem. Drop the 'big government' distraction for a moment and consider the amount of training and background required to evaluate the technical details in a seemingly simple response plan that BP would be required to file by regulation. The way government run and regulated industries work, there have to be not simply GS employees (civil servants, job for life, hiring favoring social engineering goals as well as on the job performance), but real technical experts in the field who maintain their expertise given a changing industry even if their job is to read reports and sign off on them.

And before we run down the 'lazy gov workers' rabbit trails, how many of you can still do your ninth grade children's algebra assignments? Compare NASA in the days when Marshall had the complete fabrication facilities for a Saturn vs the manage-at-a-distance style now where as much of the thought work, testing and assembly is outsourced to contractors. Once expertise is lost, it is very expensive to get it back and as a result, the average government civil servant becomes expert at the process, knowing which forms have to filed, which signatures have to be obtained, bottom line costs and their own performance bonuses given objectives handed down by political processes, not technical adaptations to changes in the technology or the market.

The problem of the 'big gov' topic is it doesn't actually address the problem of 'smart government', 'trained government' and innovative government. You will never be able to regulate a complex technical industry listening to politicians instead of scientists and engineers when it comes time to make the decisions about technical risks. Physics and chemistry don't recognize the supremacy of money.

Quit playing football with your environment for the sake of bragging rights. That is how the BPs of the world shuck you for gumbo and feed you your own entrails. Demand smarter government instead of the uptown klan.

When Both Sides Quote Woody Guthrie

When both sides of the dispute are quoting Woody Guthrie, you have a real American smackdown. Once the oil well is capped, this is the next catastrophe in the making.

BP and the Big Spill: Resilience

I am reposting some comments made elsewhere so they don't get lost in the blizzard. The noise levels about the disaster are not helping. The "Bush Would Have Been Skinned" or "Obama is an idiot" discussions don't help. Obama has no magic fairy dust for this. No one does. There is blame but we need facts and that takes time. Time is what we don't have right now.

Spy Vs Spy doesn't help.

"Out! We need no urging to hate humans! But for now, only a fool fights on a burning ship." (Kang: Star Trek)" (props to Steve DeRose)

It's one of the worst habits we've acquired: have a disaster and instead of facing the work, immediately apportioning blame. There is time for that after the fire is out. The Federal government is responsible for responding but doesn't have the resources or expertise. The Feds can't handle a deep sea capping operation. There will be some investigation required to understand BP's actions in that it appears they responded to save the well instead of capping it immediately. Flawed risk analysis often sources in flawed goals. Later. Cap the well first. Get the boats in the water first.

The way the DHS/FEMA protocols work is by organized panarchical Emergency Support Functions (ESF). There are fifteen ESFs. It is a strict chain of authorities, State Federal Local and Tribal agencies and protocols. Unless a fire is built under them, they can react slowly but usually it is an issue of recognizing the incident type and marshalling the resources to respond. An unfortunate side effect of putting FEMA under DHS is it is reponsive to terrorism but a bit slower to react to other incident types. The State is in charge until the President declares otherwise. The most serious problem is this is organized around resources (think equipment, personnel, funding). The States don''t have the resources for this particular incident type and neither do the Feds. BP holds most of the marbles and BP had not planned for it so the resources were obtained and applied far later than an incident of this type demanded.

Here is a diagram illustrating the process by which the various authorities activate by presidential directive.

Another problem is the public safety industry products are centered in high cost dispatch systems for local agencies. These are good for real-time dispatch to house fires, traffic accidents, crimes, and so on but wholly unsuitable for cross-jurisdiction event-driven response. A different approach is required and the systems here are just coming on the market. In this aspect, the BP spill is more like 9/11 than Katrina. Fast reactions across the multiple authorities and agencies are required. CAD systems are lousy at this for technical and organizational reasons.

You can't touch your elbow with the fingers on the same arm. IOW, a system based on pre-placed configured assets has to understand the incident type before it happens. We can simulate and play what-if, but the fixed arm length is having the resources in place because all of the response plans ultimately come down to dispatching resources to specific detailed situations and these are spread out across agencies and jurisdictions as I describe above. To repeat, neither the Feds nor DoD have the resources or the expertise to handle oil spills in this specific situation. They have never seen this and Valdez only applies insofar as it is oil and it is washing up. As you go up the chain of authority, the knowledge gets thinner but the responsibility gets greater. That is why the advisors have to be very well-trained, the information has to be very current (real time if possible), and the locations of resources identified in advance. Then you have to have a communications system that seamlessly puts all of that together. Think $$$.

The key word is resilience: coherent response in the face of novelty. The public safety folk have become very resilient responding to and mitigating acts of terrorism, conducting mass evacuations, etc. They are adapting as fast as they can to this novel situation but unfortunately not fast enough to avoid the catastrophe unfolding before you. Also keep in mind, BP is not an American company. Coordination with foreign governments and companies is ESF#15 and that is handled by the State Department. Post-event, some learning in that function may be necessary. I doubt the State Department is practiced at this kind of work and practice is the sine qua non of disaster response.

ESF#10 organizes Oil and Hazardous Materials response. It is a specialized response and requires analysis given failures in the current incident. Important to note here is Volunteer Registration and deployment. In 9/11, volunteers appeared everywhere ready to help. It's a noble instinct; however, not everyone who shows up are a) who they claim to be and b) trained to the work. As a result, there are standards for Volunteer handling and these require positive identification and proof of skills. This enables response crews to vette and badge these volunteers. Why are the shrimpers denied access to the Gulf? Very few are trained in hazardous materials handling and are required by protocol to be trained first. What happens otherwise? They can go into the scene and injure themselves and pose a danger to others. Media plays up the fact that workers on the boat are getting ill. They have to prove it is a result of the oil but it is likely they aren't trained for the task and are not protecting themselves. Media skirts that explanation because it doesn't have the right victims.

Media IS a problem. There is an ESF for handling the media but it can't corral them or write their stories. A larger problem in our culture has been the death of professional and responsible journalism but that's a topic for another time. Simply be aware when you are seeing stories on this and other events such as the immigration problems you aren't always given the facts and even if given them, the framing is such that your emotions are being stirred instead of you critical faculties.

Critique without critical thinking is toxic. It turns you into a Weapon of Mass Distraction.

This is the good news: if everyone does their job in analyzing and documenting this, the system does learn. It is possible to enhance the safety, improve the response and adapt. This does rely on coordinated communications and here improvements in technology will be helpful. Obama did the right thing delaying or cancelling leases. That response ensures the system slows down long enough to learn even as it is adapting to the current catastrophe.

Since the nuclear option is being discussed by some, here are two videos. The first is of what is called, The Gates of Hell, the result of an accidental puncture into an underground gas cavern. This has been burning since 1971.




The second is a Soviet era film propagandizing the use of the a small kiloton nuclear device to push the surrounding earth to squeeze the well closed. I've no comment on this because emotionally it is abhorrent and technically, I'm not qualified.

Tesla's Resonator and The Web

Watching a program on Nicola Tesla a few nights ago, I am reminded of conversations I had with friends in the pre-web days of hypermedia. At the time, I was describing Tesla's experiments with resonant frequencies and observing that global hypermedia would act as a feedback system. I speculated that cultures may have communication equivalents to resonant frequencies just as material structures do and that if you could discover what these are, given the right symbol/signals pumped at the right amplitude with a feedback mechanism in place, you could literally cause a culture to fall apart or dissolve. TV never achieved that because it has built-in damping mechanisms called advertisers. Advertisers will, as Chayefsky observed in Network, drive you to become the Dream, but they usually don't turn you against each other.

They turn you against yourself.

The web on the other hand, has no constraints. It is all positive feedback. Global hypermedia worried me precisely because it enabled the formation of virtual co-located conversations with no time or space constraints that previously had slowed and damped signal propagation and feedback effects. This is one of it's much lauded characteristics. It may also be why it is toxic. Before the web, many ideas tended to stay local. Word of mouth isn't sufficient to push an idea very far without a means to amplify it and if the web is anything, it is an amplifier.

Pundits say the Blue/Red state phenomenon and the rise of the tea party is a media driven phenomenon and point to TV (eg, CNN/Fox/MSNBC). Some blame the web as well but tend to talk about blogs and punditry there.

Are we now seeing this speculation emerge in real politics? Are the formations of Blue and Red States in a time of cause du jour, of addiction to the information stimuli a direct result of the web? I am not worried about the web making us shallow. A culture that embraced pet rocks and now Sarah Palin is past worrying about that.

I am worried that it is keeping us permanently angry. And we like it. Just as the Huffington Post gets riled because of a Facebook page who's members pray for Obama to die, they conveniently forget that song a noted folk icon was singing, "I Wish George Bush Would Die" and similar ditties about Palin. Putting our political preferences down for a moment, how many people are noticining the yin/yang, back and forth, Spy Vs Spy.... frequent resonating effect at work here. Perfect mirror images of tact and tactic, call and response, angry emotion piled on angry emotion at increasing intensity and frequency?

Let's rock this house down!

What then are the resonant frequencies of our culture? For this to work, a structure has to be connected, that is, have a sharable property and a means to propagate and feedback the signal and stimulate it at some rate. What are the topics that if repeatedly fedback and stimulated will cause our culture to dissolve?

Well... race. That's one. What are the others? Anger. Natch. Love? Only occasionally. Sex? Definitely but only some topics cause dissolution because.. you can't make enough people react with enough intensity. IOW, we seldom go to war over haircuts or bad breath despite the ubiquity.

So what are the topics that if repeated at the right intensity and rate (amplitude and frequency) cause a culture to shake itself to pieces?

The web, that great jurisdiction spanning free for all because it is never censored is making it possible. Anonymity is not the cause. Anonymous posting is injurious particularly to individuals or organizations that become the targets, but in the big picture, that just ups the gain. People are perfectly willing to put their real names on hatefilled diatribes and always have been. No, the important piece that the web added to our uncivil discourse is resonant amplification. And voila! It becomes the cultural equivalent of Tesla's thumper.

Don't blame the music industry for the faults of the Internet. :)

Arlo and The People - Episode III Sailing Down The Golden River

Celebrating the last evening of their tour. I am so glad I was there for the dress rehearsals. :) To the Guthries: Sail On!!

FB Open Graph and Public Safety Applications

A strategy for implementing profitable open systems is to create variations at interfaces that act as forces on integration thus market selection. This is particularly true of web systems with a small set of mostly interoperable browser clients. The competition shifted to the plug-in protocols or application content servers. It's a natural evolution and it leads some to think high reliability is best obtained by closed systems free riding in open IP environments or at least, semi-permeable. Given local shops implementing open vocabularies, the choices made on the production floor combined with the market force of the vendor at the time/season of release create the opportunity.

Social net clients are convergence clients by fact of membership in distribution communities with overlaid meta-rules for social semantics. Social net clients are a member of cross-boundary communications client markets seen otherwise in server-side public safety systems for organizing emergency response. Change the games to resource tasks and dispatch and set up the groups and with chat, you have a basic volunteer-side emergency response system. The integration opportunities are obvious and already emerging in weather reporting and news organizations who are using the FB pages locally to keep citizens informed.

So a question would be does the OpenGraph protocol enhance the market emergence of increased integration with the classes of functions and operations over resources described in for example, the US National Response Framework with it's Emergency Support Functions? I think the answer is yes, it's a start because of the notion pages represent real world objects.

My God is a Loving God

My God is a loving God, My God
My God is a loving God, my God
Keeper of souls from the darkest obsession
Healer of hearts by the secret confession
My God is a loving God, my God

My God is a jealous God, my God
My God is a jealous God, my God
Here is the bond that I set before thee
Thou shalt have no gods here before me
My God is a jealous God, my God

Giver of life
Almighty power
Give us this day
Give us this hour
Bless us with your Eternal Love

Universes fly
We may not know why
Our lives in the palm of your hand

One God feels you
One God heals you
My God is a loving God

len bullard

Dixie Carter: How Great Thou Art

Dixie's gone. :( :( :(

She made beautiful Southern women legends by right. Designing Women was brilliant.

This is the episode I remember best because of Charlene's dilemma. It helps to know the context of the story where she performs this. In ways, it's Designing Women's finest moment.

When you can't find faith in yourself, you can sometimes find it in others who find faith in themselves by having faith in what is greater.

Domine Jesu

Last week the Hazel Green United Methodist Chancel Choir performed my composition, Domine Jesu. This is my first sacred classical work with a Latin text derived from the Jesus Prayer, a prayer of humility and a plea for forgiveness. At that service, our Choir Director's daughter, Hannah Williams performed Gabriel's Oboe by Ennio Morricone. That performance is included in the video below.

My deep appreciation and thanks to the Chancel Choir, our director, Gwyn Williams, our organist, Barry Sublett and my friend Terry Cornett, percussionist for their beautiful work on this most somber hymm.

Green Screen Paradise

The war of critics of the iPad heat up.

Some people can tune and play their guitar. Some can only play their boombox. iPad is a boombox. I'm ok with that, but I'm on the other side of the door where making software and having the freedom to access user screens sans the interference of the screen maker is important to competitive success.

Then there are the old radicals on the West Coast who traded their Grateful Dead t-shirts for open shirt dress coats and Bob Dylan blasting from earbuds, became the vendors of the over-the-counter culture and own a lot of Apple stock. They value their freedom but maintain it at the cost of the freedoms of others. They demand to be recognized as creative but cheer when that creativity is boxed. They remind me of H.G. Wells' Morlocks who fled underground and then controlled and fed on the Eloi who stayed above ground and endured. When it is a choice between their stock portfolio and their ethics, the portfolio wins every time. When Apple rings the marketing bell, they come out at night to herd the Eloi into their stewpots.

Open systems are tough to endure. Meanwhile, LA is shutting down city services for two days a week. I wonder if there is a market for garbage perfume or if they can simply green screen a paradise. Ah California: home of recyclable indignity. Here's an ode for the blowed.

It's a green screen paradise
The weather there is very nice
Bright images in focus all the time
California cats are big and fat
But, hey, they've got an app for that
Just plug right in. Enjoy that sunny clime.

With tsunamis, floods, volcanoes and drought
It's the perfect place to live no doubt
It's all the rage for the smarter set, ya know
Sliding into the sea in an earthquake zone
Thank God, Nevada's holding on
When the Santa Ana winds begin to blow.

Take a shovel when you walk the dog
Don't lose that poop in the summer fog
Concrete rivers and illegally tended lawns
Regulating collected feces
Considering exotic species
If you can't see the air you know it's gone.

The oldest trees and the largest debt
There's not a thing they don't tax yet
And still they can't believe they're out of dough
Interactive and highly polished
Can't do much but who's astonished
It's overpriced and they've sold out the show

They say politics are in need of fixing
By Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon
I think there's a slicker pig left in the sack
California is the Golden State
For give aways. They just can't wait.
We would but the Mexicans won't take'em back.

There's a rain shadow hanging on the mountain turn
When the sun goes down you can watch it burn
The girls are tan and the men are so controlled
With empty wallets, their banks are closed
A fortune blown right up their nose
They'll move to Hawaii as soon as the mansion's sold.

It's a green screen paradise
The weather there is very nice
Bright images in focus all the time
California cats are big and fat
But, hey, they've got an app for that
Just plug right in. Enjoy that sunny clime.

len bullard april 7, 2010

Get Timmy

Here is another reality check from an article at VirtualWorldsNews.com. A product launch:

“Inversoft’s software understands and analyzes how users communicate with each other, a tremendous value to our customers,” said Amy Pritchard, CEO of Metaverse Mod Squad. “In the hands of our community managers and moderators, this information not only makes us more efficient in stopping inappropriate conduct, but also allows us to channel back a wealth of information about the preferences, behaviors, and motivations of the community. These are incredible tools built by an exceptional company.”

It’s hard for me to grasp how many myths of the web this shatters or what it says about online culture. If they told me this was only being applied to the New York web scene, I might understand it, but as a much needed way to both moderate/control and harvest human behavior across the board?

T-Bone Burnett is right about this medium being cold except that the wires are just wires. All it can really be is a communications amplifier and the collective message from its users has become such that it also has to be a nanny and a snitch. Just as TV went from the great teacher to the subculture pimp, the web devolved in less than two decades from the library of Alexandria to pulp fiction.

And the technology isn’t the reason. The people using it are.

Song for Kim

The Beatles said all we need is love. Keats said, we need beauty and truth. From a life spent making art of my passion, they both were right. I wrote this song for a girl when I was twenty. A friend took her photos. A friend taught her guitar. Art is joy.

All of the men who worked on this video cared about this woman. Because of that, thirty five years later, this video could be made and given to her.

The best art we make of our own lives. This is what is true, beautiful, made of love. We take light and shadow in turn but always love, and from it emerges a greater light. Let there be light.

Song for Kim

I wrote this song when I was 20 for a wonderful girl. I sang it to her for the first time in the then trendiest restaurant in town where I was playing my first night and she was a college gal waitress. I looked up when I finished into two of the most beautiful luminous happy eyes I'd ever seen. The days of long nights playing solo in front of a fire to a room full of young college hippies were grand.

Someone asked if I would take it out of the attic.

Diane Sawyer or GMA: The Kiss of Death

Note that CNet is also running an article where newly signed bands try to refuse to social network or tweet. Note the comments are anti-social network on that announcement.

Kill The Wabbit!!

So in a single week, two trends we were promised were absolutely going to change our lives forever appear to be poised on the tip of the whiplash. True or not, it is a clue about how fragile any socially-driven technology really is. It is never about the technology itself. It is about the social perception and the enjoyment of the engagement. The first is fickle and the second is shadowed by boredom.

Note that all it took was the labels publicly telling their acts that social networks are good for their numbers. This is true. I can look at my YouTube stats and show you the exact day I started using FB to promote videos. No money involved. It was an experiment. On the other hand, Anti-The-Man sentiment is perrenial and eternal in some demographics and that happens to be the precise demographic these bands and their labels want to buy the music. Oopsie.

I have a rule of thumb: as soon as ABC Good Morning America runs a piece promoting a technology, a trend, a book, whatever, it’s on life support after that. If Diane Sawyer is into it, the hipsters are out.

Class War: Fight or Immunize?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-10456382-261.html?tag=newsLeadStoriesArea.1

The Google plan to scan books gets a Federal hearing and a lot of "low level static". Note they have a monetization plan. Note the fierce resistance.

The scare to society is or should be that the edge cases pushing back are no where near as far from the center as they once were. The kid who capped a bully at school here, followed by Amy Bishop and now a software exec with an airplane should be a warning to bullies everywhere, real or culturally perceived. The people stepping up are no longer the kid looking to steal CDs to buy crack. These are well-educated, well-trained, well-equipped and even well thought of people who like the guy in the basement finally has his red slimline stapler taken from him and says, “that’s the last straw”. When we were analyzing 9-11, the remark was made this could be controlled until it began to recruit so-called lumpen terrorists, those who emerge from the elites of a society itself as it did with Bader-Meinhoff.

So far, at least with the copyright bs, no one is taking down major labels the way Charlie decided to go after Terry Melcher. The goodness of the conversations we are having at Jon Taplin's blog is if we keep after this problem, no one ever will. At a certain point it becomes evident to the artists and their fans that a plan is starting to take shape by which they all benefit. The importance of the win-win to the overall health of the social networks that are emerging to reorganize media businesses cannot be overstated.

In most cases, class war is not an organizational event. It is more like a contagion in bad weather. It can be stopped and it can even immunize. It is important to make the right gestures up front and back them up with visible acts before it does become to the advantage of organizations to keep the conflict alive much the same as it is for RushBozo and dimBeck to keep their listeners perpetually stirred.

What if Google Managed Copyrights and Paid the Registration Fees?

What if Google Managed Copyrights and Paid the Registration Fees?

At Jon Taplin's blog is yet in another long series of debates on the woes of the publishing industries for copyright.

Most geeks know that all you have to do to fix the registration problem is enable the Save boxes to require it the first time it is saved. And that probably solves 80% of the problem of universal registration.

The licensing agencies and usual suspects want to recreate the old world in the new one of digital publishing. I'm not a player so who knows how this comes out. But the fact of derivative works and the need for multiple registration agencies to share information if that is a competitive system complicates tracking.

The question of how to assess the relative value of URI-identified resources is built into the licensing. I wonder what it is worth to and of the service systems providing very large distributed services right now to pay the licensing fees for the artists for works contributed. It protects YouTube.

Austin: Another Edge Case

“This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.” – Leonard Bernstein

Another edge case goes over the edge in Austin today, burning his bridges, his home and taking a blow against the man. I expect more. We have enough laws, we have guns,we have sufficient police and God knows, we will soon have far too much surveillance. We should pay attention to wise Leonard Bernstein who understood that the change we needed then and now is a change of heart.

Props to Daniel Bullard (The Buddha) who sent that quote my way.

Mojo Overload

Mommas and Daddies hide yo' children. Here comes Mojo Overload. TASTY!!!

A Class War: It's Not That Simple. The Case of Amy Bishop.

The disturbing signs of the class war continue to emerge.

Some are familiar with the terrible event that happened a block from where I sit writing this article. It is cliched to say driving past the campus from my office to my son's home to talk to him and his friends was surreal. To see my alma mater awash in a sea of blinking blue and red gumball machines was stupefying, maddening and grotesque. To see the students finally out of lockdown almost zombie like as they got into their cars was heartbreaking.

Yet one has to stay a little disattached. Eventually, Amy Bishop will come to trial and having that in this city will be almost impossible, but we may have to get a local jury pool and try.

There is an unsettling and as yet unanswered question in the article linked above: was this the act of an elite, a Harvard graduate who although evidently disturbed, an edge case as I call them, saw herself victimized by the small town university politics in a city rich with intellectual property holders based on genetic and Federally funded research? Did she believe that not only her teaching career was being destroyed by failure to be granted tenure, but her life's work would be appropriated by senior members of the faculty, licensed for their profit while she was being dismissed to the woodpile?

In articles at Jon Taplin's blog much is made of the problems of copyright for artists and old school fee collections agencies such as BMI and ASCAP. The problems of digital rights management are well known. In that, some ask how we came to the place where the fans would turn on artists and try to deny them a living based on collecting fees for use of their work?

What if this isn't that simple? In the writings from the copyleft and creative commons community, there are often the complaints about the ripoff of the artists by their labels, their collection agencies and so on. The notion that stealing music is a blow against The Man is pervasively held in many parts of society.

What if this is just one part of a bigger notion that class and elitism have become too entrenched? Given the economic events of the past two years, it's no use quibbling that the very wealthy are using any means at hand to maintain that wealth. That feeling of being had is very pervasive. In the case at UAH, it may be someone who believed as the article author asserts, her lessers were getting the better of her and she reacted violently. It isn't justification, but it may be a sign of a wide spread and intensifying belief powering not just this horrific event, but the last election, the tea partiers that have followed, and who knows what else yet?

Wars of class, the struggle to unseat the elite and the struggles to maintain them have been among the bloodiest in history. Like religious wars, they have a similar basis in the notion of the natural right to power or class of some select annointed. But whether it is the struggle of the annointed to reclaim rights, or of the unannointed to strip them, in a religious war the leaders are plainly recognized. In a class war, it's not that simple.

Scenes

Scenes last. Shared memories are powerful enticements to keep on keeping on. I’d say Dylan was co-opted long before Carter got to him. It’s not that important. Singer/songwriters are journalists and if they report honestly, if they are fair witnesses, they’ve done their job. They don’t need to be on the front lines and they surely don’t want to be bait to increase the crowd of innocents at a riot.

If they get wealthy and famous, they get to play that same dangerous game of survival all such must. I’ve seen the A-listers who have to watch every conversation, investigate every contact, go insular because the edge of the crowd always has a lot of desperate well intentioned but it ain’t happening wannabes and at least one or two lost whackos who might just hurt somebody.

It’s a fragile life and not just a little risky.

I looked at my neighborhood riding in from church with my daughter and wife, looked at the nice middle class houses new and brick, the beautiful country scenery, the neighbors waving and I breathed a deep satisfaction knowing I have achieved the real merit badge of the family man: I’ve provided a good life for them and to this point, they have not disappointed me.

It’s rare. It’s good. It’s real. Praise be.

Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine

Props to Simon St Laurent for passing this along. I recommend this site for anyone who needs a shot of fake schadenfreude.

Though I've never been hip or a hipster, lately I've begun to reflect on the fact I've spent most of my life naively and blissfully unaware of the extraordinarily large percentage of things I've admired, believed or followed that turned out to be fake. It seems to me that a creeping awareness of this was part of the early Sixties kick to the collective head that was quickly put to sleep by the market's astute filling of the void with new fakesters saying all the sayings that made us feel collective about our insights, thus faking us out once again.

I wonder how long any culture can tolerate being awake and aware of it's own state of fraudulent flatulence. We learned lucid dreaming only to realize that lucid wakefulness is really very painful. We self-medicate with purchasing power and will break any moral code, any promise made, any self-assurance of our own coherent being to increase our power to purchase another dose of cultural homeopathy, quack grunt control.

As Paul Simon sang, "a big bright green pleasure machine".

Agism Is the New Racism

Agism is the new racism.

The one lesson learned from the browser wars was how profitable it is to win one. That this generation is so easily led is no big surprise. Bright and shiny with a hook works on most fish most of the time. As i said, the iPad launch is the Titanic to Avatar's iceberg. Cynicism is hard, cold and following the currents of a political zeitgeist where we know what we want to believe but no longer who. The cracking noise you hear is millions of gestalts snapping and falling into the frigid waters.

Revolution? Devolution for the usual reason: new trumps established in the pop market. Not a very difficult lesson.

Avatar vs iPad: Why No One Cares

Despite all appearances, the Republicans have Obama on the run and they know it. Meanwhile, the spirit of the country continues to dissolve in the face of the reimagining campaigns of both sides. One hopes they collide in the middle like the old commercial about peanut butter and chocolate. Maybe they'll accidentally do something right but when the public has no stomach for reality and are too burned to buy the dream, we're left betting on accidents. Calling oneself "progressive" to get around being called "liberal" or "socialist" is pretty thin.

As surmised, Constellation is dead. This is how it must have felt to be the janitor at Camelot after Arthur and Mordred duked it out and the body of the king was ferried away to Avalon. Something splendid happened in these dark halls full of leaves, dust and cold winds through banging shutters.

Elsewhere some wonder why the iPad has received such a drubbing in the technical press. I have a theory: with the buying public, having been fed unreal notions and increasing levels of Spy vs Spy, all it took was the dream world of Avatar to push them into a complete and fixed state of cynicism. The Apple campaign tricks that worked wonders with the iPod and the Mac are being met with skepticism and yawns. No one cares that Steve Jobs Loves Bob Dylan. Too many know that Thomas Edison was the orignal white pig putting his name on the ideas and hard work of his employees. Too many know that the Apple technologies serve the marketing goals of content capture first and the creative freedom of the users and developers only once that capture is ensured.

Perhaps it isn't that we don't want reality; we no longer can tell what is real. As Richard Reeves points out, we thought we were the people that made the impossible happen in the Berlin Airlift only to discover we are the people who made Abu Gharib possible. It is the feeling of sleeping in slime.

People know the emperor is butt naked except they aren't laughing. When hope fails and misery seems to be at hand, despair follows, and after that, cold hard disbelief no matter the facts at hand. When John Kennedy faced this, he used the space program, which he himself did not care for or believe in as a way to reignite the imagination of a generation. It will be interesting with the cancellation of Constellation effectively killing the future of American manned space flight what kind of futuristic vision we'll be offered this time.

Social Media: The Attentivore Venn

As I was reading a comment by Stefanie Michaels that said,

"Had you only taken the time to check out our feeds, you may have been able to have a more in depth understanding of who we are... after all- that's social media."

I thought about this picture; so here is it is at the speed of tweet.

The amazing thing is she didn't know we did read them and even made a video to support them in a good natured way. Maybe these gals don't get it unless it comes from their own inner circle. It is interesting that a report from the UK asserts that 90% of the tweets come from 10% of the twitterers.

The Not So Secret Secret

The harshness of the coming year will be the far left true believers in Obama who finally realize that the cuts in Federal spending will be in their favorite programs while the ones they do not support or actively despise will receive greater funding. They will blame the usual suspects and they will be right but they will also be part of the problem.

It is rare to find those who can simultaneously be sanguine as they stare into the horror of the scene unfolding. Even the investments in innovation will be made in the companies where Wall Street investors get the upper hand fast as stock becomes available. For all the change promised, the same people will take the lion's share even as a few jobs are created here and there by boutique projects.

Change we can believe in is not always change we like.

I believe in Ford: the one company that turned down the bailout money and on that day made their employees proud to be employed.

The Republican Response

The Republican response to President Obama's speech last night follows:



and pretty much everything else that would be good for anyone not rich enough to matter.

iPad

Beyond the incalculable blunder of the name (yes, our office jokes about this are the same as yours):



UPDATE: Thanks to Rob Koberg who sent this link, that point has been illustrated humorously by someone. Gotta love the web when it reacts fast and with the right spirit.

I've heard the cooing about consumers of books. I don't need it. I don't read that often.

I've heard the speculation about audio/midi. Thanks, I've got lots of those.

I've heard the games-du-jour rants. Thanks, I don't play games.

It's very cool. No thanks. I hate my cell phone.

You can watch hi-rez movies. No thanks. I have a Very Large Flatpanel for that and I can't drive and watch dinky 4:3 TV.

You're not our target demographic. Oh thank God for that.

$499 is CHEAP. Maybe, but only $999 is functional and I don't need a cute paperweight with hi-rez sparkles even if it sparkles for ten hours.

Arlo and Felicia are getting one. Good. She can ride on the back of his Indian and read to him. He'll like that.

YAG (yet another gadget). As the fellow said at CNet, iPass.

Twitlebrity and the Suck of Locale

Scanning topics of interest, I see Dave Winer is complaining about agism, Jon Taplin is extolling the virtues of the grassroots bottom up governance style, and some bloggers are still trying to figure out how to get the most out of the Vanity Fair 6 kerfluffle.

The bottom up decentralized means devolves quickly into the attention seeking means that shuts down criticism to enhance page views against other sources that make snark a policy as a means to enhance page views. It becomes an age of celebrity, of image over substance, but worse, lots of little mobs claiming hegemony: in short, high school.

Information (data in play) has an aspect similar to gravity: all locations pull against all other locations for attention. Some call it ego. When you consider that blogs, feeds, Twitter etc. are giving rise to the dominance of the attentivores (thanks to John Cowan for that term), maybe this is just devolution doing what it does best when provided a means and opportunity.

The problem of the network community is the Panglossian notion that given means and opportunity, people tend to do the right thing. People tend to do the selfish thing if that is what the market is buying. Consider that in 1988, use of the Internet email for private messages and jokes was harshly frowned upon and even a firing offense in some companies. In 1995, we worked a discipline of parsimonious texting such that one scoured each email for excess verbiage.

Then came RSS, feeds and broadband and the war for attention was on. RSS, BTW, is Winer's creation.

In 2010, it is about the Twitlebrity, the attentivore, the world where cred is obtained by having the most followers despite adding no contribution intellectually or otherwise. It is the age of the hot chick geek and the guy who made millions spamming the system. Sure everything else is out there, but it is undifferentiated.

All networks start as flat democratized systems. Over time the importance assigned locales and topics result in attention flowing into these sinks and as a result, controls and filters emerge to direct traffic, say attention. Right now the system is in a stage of puberty where trivia reigns supreme and efforts to change that will be dismissed as unhip, old media against new, old people against the young and so on. IOW, we’re having fun so don’t be a party pooper. And by the way, if you disagree, we'll make sure nothing you post gets a single view from "our crowdsource".

That is the brave new and different, the sagacity of the 30 something leading the 15 something, to a world of, aging twitlebrities trying desperately to keep the crowd alive and at a virtual distance because, hey, we're important and we need our vacations and rest.

And that is the ground against which Jon proposes to empower yet more grassroots. I don’t disbelieve; I think the timing given the zeitgeist and general immaturity of the players may be hopelessly optimistic.

There is a rough or at least ironic justice in the Vanity Fair 6 affair. The very technologies they extol created the era of snark as journalistic policy to which they fell prey. It is the old saying about laying down with dogs and getting up with fleas. Trying to dismiss claims that they should have known better is like claiming a fake tan is noteworthy: self-seeking. That Dave claims agism is a problem a short decade and a half after a generation of young hypermedia enthusiasts ran shivs through their aging bosses is simply karma.

It's a bitch but own it.

We built the most powerful communication system in history so we could rant about age, government and who is the current most hot hottie who we are assured we must take very seriously while they tweet about their lunch. Life among the mammals, for sure.

Meanwhile, the web brought me this wonderful toy box for making videos, publishing songs and generally having fun making stuff. I got mine. May you also. ;)

Shraddha (X3D Movie)

Here is my new video. Like the other 3D derived videos, this uses X3D/VRML samples. The theme is "Shraddha", Sanskrit for "Marvelous Faith". I hope you enjoy it.

Social Media and Being Almost Famous

A career can cross a lot of paths. The two gentlemen in the photo are standing about twenty feet from my office door. One is an exec at our company and the other is one of our business partners. I'll let you figure out who they are. Hint: the short one worked for a much more famous executive and the tall one is, tall, even in sneakers.

In all the fun of the Tweety Bird posts, I've been thinking about the social media aspects of our careers. I am pointedly not a social media expert. I've been around about twice as long as the folks sporting that badge have. As a musician, one time actor, still writing and recording because it's like the breathing habit, hard to shake, I do know a little bit about media.

Take a look at this graph. It's from my YouTube insight page.



The left and right sides are different to say the least, and the number of countries where I can't imagine having fans, I do. I learn a lot from the Insight stats. A picture is worth whatever it's worth but the dramatic increase in views of my videos can't be argued with and there are only two causes: 1) posting more frequently and 2) Facebook. Of the two, the second is the engine: Facebook.

So even for the hobbyist, if you want to put work in front of people, you have to find them and Facebook is rather good for that. I've a MySpace music page as well and there is nothing like these results to be had there. Twitter? If I want a bigger first day release bounce, Twitter would be a way to get that but frankly, Twitter wastes too much time on trivia and not being a fully-developed attentivore, I don't have it to waste. Yet I know some fairly famous people (actually, some very famous people) and those relationships don't get me those kinds of results in page views. That takes real fans, friends and the mildly curious.

Social media is here to stay and for those careers that do rely on being famous or almost famous (mine doesn't), careful use of social media such as Facebook is a skill you need these days as other aspects of the media industry are collapsing. Would I go hire a social media expert for that? Possibly but probably not. It isn't that hard to figure out unless of course, Vanity Fair calls, but until then, use it while it's still free.

And have fun!

Tweety Birds: Free the VF6!!

They walked into the punch, but then as I dig around more, I realize the question is why the punch at all? It is time to call BS on the snark industry of blog journalism. They is geeks and us is geeks and they may be divas but they's our divas.

Read Everybody Sucks by the same author, Vanessa Grigoriadis. The snark chic is the culprit.

Geeks Unite! Free the VF6! ;)

Tweety Birds: It's The Web, Stupid!

While working on a creative response to this flap (dieing down but still fun), I ran across this article from the author of the Vanity Fair article that started the mole rolling, Vanessa Grigoriadis. A couple of points:

1. She isn't a hack. Vanessa can write and she is a decent journalist.

2. In the article, the environment she describes is deeply flawed, seamy, and rage addicted.

3. She admits to tweaking noses as part of the job.

Past the screeching from the Twitter crowd and their fans, it's worth reading the article to understand how the web may indeed be transforming the publishing industry and journalism, but it may be devolution at light speed.

A War On GeekSheik

Ursula leGuin resigned from the Author's Guild over their acceptance of the Google settlement regarding copyrights of published works.

A war with the self-proclaimed digital royalty of GeekSheik is coming. They are destroying the creative ecosystem and real artists are shooting back.

This is bad.

Tweety Birds: The Second Wave Off

It seems that digging the hole and standing in it is how tweety birds rest for the winter.

Digital Royalty?

I have to admit, when I heard the news I immediately called a family member and dropped a Ron Burgundy, “I don’t know how to put this, but I’m kind of a big deal.”

It's hard to expand on that. In her opinion and that of her mates, the missed opportunity was to tell the story of their success, or as Felicia Day put it, "new, different and powerful". I sense Day is moving on from the story possibly because as an entertainer, once the story quits being funny and she attempts seriousness it begins to turn into a story about young women who need to get over themselves as correspondents have been suggesting, and that's not a good image for an entertainer.

The trap is that now of those who are climbing aboard the Geek Train are using this tempest in a teapot to push their own wares as social media mavens (Digital Royalty? Really?) it spins ever more toward the silly pole and as the avatar of the story (the irony is thick here), Day gets pulled into the spotlight of this farce. Que lastima!

If they claim it is all about them, they are the attentivores as named, insipid, vapid and with none of the media savvy required by their portfolio customers. If they claim it is about Vanity Fair, they are fighting human nature's need for a good gigglefest and once again accentuating that in the media where they portray themselves as experts, they are wanting and customers beware. If they recognize they are simply the latest women to get kicked in the ass by the Lolita Effect which they are themselves exploiting, there might be a story with legs and not just the ones in the photo. It might be a broader issue about the sexualization of women getting younger every year and creating problems for all women as Amber Fenner Gray points out.

So far, they aren't that smart and perhaps their clients will take note. Day will move on because she does have serious work to do on the next season of The Guild and other projects. If she is the artist she desires to be, she'll find a way to salvage this in comedy with a point.

UPDATE: The new meme to keep it going is the article is somehow 'sexist'. They need to let this drop. a) The digital royalty appear to be begging their own status b) It's too obvious the attentivores want more of the same for their own brands c) The one of them who gets hurt is Felicia Day who will look sillier the longer this goes on for participating.

The problem of trusting the herd to keep one up on their shoulders is they are distractable and not that adverse to sacrificing one of their clients to better their own nests. It's hard to feel sympathetic. If they intend a movement to change things for women because as one commenter at Day's blog said, "The major figures aren't going to put up with this", then why bother with Vanity Fair to begin with. These ladies were already changing things before they gave into the attentivore reason for existing: to get just a bit more attention as glamour babes.

They may find out they aren't that major after this. I think they fear that and keep trying to spin this into a story where they are victims. There is some more attention to be had in that frame but frankly, I look at their photo and I look at the photos of Neda Soltan and have a hard time giving a damm.

Tweety Birds: Mama Smurf

Why put on the trench coats and have the glamour shot? I think John Cowan nailed it: attentivores.

Culture satirizes any source that takes itself more seriously than it is essential or more novel than a new version of an old model. 1.6 million people willing to give you access to their raster attention budget is as trivial or non-trivial as what that 1.6 million will do given a message from the twitter account. Marketing speak particular; it's non-trivial. It is power.

Societal importance?

What will smurfs do for a smile from the smurfette? Sometimes, quite a lot.

UPDATE: Amber comments on the Lolita Effect. In the sense that this incident is about 30 somethings, it doesn't quite apply. In the sense that the objectification of women has been brought up, it does. Do read this:

http://www.alternet.org/story/85977/

The Flight of the Tweety Birds

It appears that the Flight of the Tweety Birds is this week's cause du jour among the geek women bloggers. The claims are getting evermore snarky and meant to justify a round of 'serious' web generation mystique but don't seem to offer a basis for complaint. Instead they are the victims of old people, old business, just old. Old frightens them. It could be they were had except the article was written by someone who isn't old and isn't that tied to old media. Vanity Fair is a glamour mag and glamour mags don't take up serious topics. If they did, they'd be Playboy. Sad but so.

The claim that gets to the heart of their complaint is one made by Felicia Day, that the author of the Vanity Fair piece failed:

to celebrate a new kind of independent and liberated woman

I guess she doesn't have the awareness to notice she is practicing the same sexist agism and generationism that got her into the mess. Ok, Felicia, somehow you think you are new? Challlenge: exactly how are you the example of a new independent liberated woman? What is it you've achieved that say, Carly Fiorina hasn't? Meg Whitman? Susan Sarandon? Dolly Parton? Over a million followers on Twitter? So now you have the power to change exactly what? Your fellow bloggers say you and they want to have THAT conversation, so get on with it.

You want to sling arrows because you believe you've been trivialized. Great. Just be sure you have a full quiver and a solid stance in the saddle because you're accelerating into the curve on a running horse, not out of it. The complaints you have and that of your fellow bloggers read like Danah Boyd crying over her Twitter-wall experience at her presentation. In other words, it's infantilism vs agism and somehow none of you seem to understand if you put your sex up front, it is the topic. Smart women or men get that and run with it. Hypocrites or just plain too full-of-themselves repeat the remarks that have stereotyped you as the whiniest generation since the Jazz Age. New and different? How? Say it or STFU because there are real victims out there who need attention a lot more than a 30 something living in LA with the TwitterNation hanging on her every burp.

Compared to Neda Soltan what have you suffered lately?

Nothing is more boring than a successful anything that complains when the spotlight turns green. Like the sign at Wentzel's says, if you want a place in the sun, expect blisters. Otherwise, get over yourself, or at least take a moment to study the career of Lenny Bruce. When commedians or commediennes turn serious, the laughter stops and so does the applause.

Tweety Birds

In the new edition of Vanity Fair, some ladies of the web are photographed wearing trench coats and posing just slightly provocatively. The article has the breezy tone of snark VF is famous for and in the text follows the tone of the photo. It isn't a serious portrait or all that demeaning but the subjects have taken upon themselves to become outraged, pissed, ready to 'thump skulls' and their fans are following suit. It is the usual herd response from a generation that seeks opportunities and creates technology to increase their herdiness through their nerdiness. The article is poking fun at that and I don't think too many geeks were harmed in the production of the article.

Still:

1. They signed up for the photo. If the trenchcoat poses didn't clue them in as to what was coming, these ladies aren't quite as media savvy as claimed.

2. They need the photos. The cult of celebrity requires a persistent thumping on the skulls of the public to keep them front and center. Celebrity is a brief fling with a bull-riding machine anyway. Day, for example, is someone who rather desperately wants to be a Hollywood insider despite her reputation for being a successful outsider. That is where the career and the money are and she is not a silly woman from the cheap seats.

3. Every ten years or so, the last media darling generation gets tossed on the fire of satire and ridicule to make room for a new generation. Thus has it ever been and the geeks don't seem to be prepared for the inevitable.

So ladies and irate fans, putting up blogs about how unfair VF is, how they are ignoring your serious accomplishments (lifecaster? really?), or how the old media is just jealous of the new media (we be fast; you be slow), is what is expected of you and it will fuel the flames of support, and it will drive up the sales of that issue. Mission accomplished. It will also make put you on the path to the C-list and start the crack down the middle of the ice that holds your feeds above the waters of oblivion because the more you emphasize your serious accomplishments, the more boring you will become.

Vanity Fair and articles to follow elsewhere aren't doing this for jealousy, spite or lack of 'getting it'. They are doing it because it's time. If "what the web thinks you are, you are, deal with it" as Tim Bray wrote is the meme du jour, you have just been bathed in how that comes about and how very little control you have over it except possibly in watching your warddrobe.

Deal with that.

What Will Happen When YouTube Isn't Free

Bono has written an op-ed in the New York Times touching on the topic of music piracy. The usual counter-arguments are presented in the comments to the article and the usual lunatics tend to prevail.

Fine for now. In the near future, maybe not.

At some point the free services that the indies who give away their work rely on will no longer be free. Today YouTube is the radio. Anyone wanting to keep up in the arms race of art competition (with each other; the audience is passive) has to be able to make videos on the cheap or otherwise. Fortunately, it isn't that hard and like other tools, costs are down considerably even as skills have to catch up.

Yet like it or not, the term is 'hypermedia' not hypermedium and there are costs to producing at that level of complexity that can't be dismissed as easily as "we give away our CDs" because while one doesn't have to manufacture, one is still having to climb the complexity curve. Frankly, most bands and songwriters aren't up to the challenge.

Other costs will creep up. This will dry up a lot of what far too many rely on for entertainment sources. Having choked the life out of several industries, it will be Nebraska morning noon and night for about a decade as those with access to capital realign among themselves to control the distribution of the works of those who used these services to develop themselves during the 'everything should be free because that benefits me' period of internet market development.

Bono is right. It simply doesn't matter at the moment but he is right nonetheless. Unfortunately, he is talking to the wrong audience. He's arguing with the pig and as the old joke goes, the pig only gets irritated and he comes up smelling of sow. The people who need to understand where this is going ARE the artists and particularly the young ones just getting into what is left of the music business.

A Christmas Carol: Marley's Ghost

Merry Christmas! I made my Christmas card. I hope it suits and brings good cheer. There is an extra treat at the end.

Buyer's Remorse

Don't get into the habit of the Republicans with Clinton: every time Bush made a misstep, the Republicans would cite something from Clinton and say 'this is better than that'. It may be but successful governance unlike some politics is about what is Next more than What Just Happened. I'm a Democrat and I say Obama is losing his support faster than the Titanic lost passengers. With all the first class advantages he has or had, he is too stupid to find a life vest or too proud to swim.

The problem of learning from history is that those who do are never in the majority when the time comes to use that knowledge. Among those that didn't learn, those that refused to learn, those that refuse to remember and those that are too young to know and have only the glossy reimaginings of those who pretend otherwise, perhaps the last are most to blame because they have the energy to act on a dream but not the real grit to see through it.

Of the rest, they were lost to cause at birth.

Politics is about individuals and unless the character is there by dint of experience, the substance is not no matter how compelling a dream they sell. A puffpiece bio and two years in the Senate do not a President make. Hillary was our best shot and Democrats aimed it at her head. Que lastima.

http://home.hiwaay.net/~cbullard/mp3/CursesFoiledAgain.mp3

So You Wanta Start A Rock 'n Roll Band

Sometimes I get asked why I still record my songs and release them on YouTube for essentially free. The truth is I enjoy it and it's a lot of fun. I listened to Arlo Guthrie talk about the music business at The Church two months ago and as a veteran he described how marvelous it is that the young musicians no longer had to sell their souls to the entertainment industry. I listened to Sam Phillips (the female singer, not the dead Elvis producer) explain how despite the time she worked with T-Bone Burnett and thrived, she really likes the immediacy of the web that enables her to release straight to the public.

In other words, while most of us believe we really want a major label deal and the instant riches and fame that flow from that, veterans of the industry seem to think otherwise. Why?

Here are two articles that you should read to understand the economics of the deal. Once you understand this, then step back and ask why you really want to be in that business if this is the probable outcome. Meanwhile, I'll go back to making my homebrew videos. I never expect any measure of real success except insofar as I still enjoy the heck out of it.

How Major Labels Cook The Books

The Problem With Music

Here is a new homebrew video.

Silent Night

An early Christmas card before it is too late...

According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, 1.35 million U.S. children are homeless on any given night. (2000)

Families with children are the fastest growing segment of the homeless population, accounting for almost 41% of the nation's homeless. (2005)

In 2003, children under the age of 18 accounted for 39% of the homeless population.

42% of homeless children are under the age of five.

http://www.misd.net/Homeless/statistics.htm