Doc Searls Weblog

Just trying to make stuff happen

  • Happy to have been there

     

    Hassle House poster panel

    That’s what many thought when they first saw the poster for Hassle House, in Durham, North Carolina, back in ’76 or so. As soon as any of the posters went up, they disappeared, becoming instant collectors’ items. At the time, all I wanted was to hire the cartoonist who did it, so he could illustrate some of the ads I was creating for a local audio shop. That cartoonist was the polymath Ray Simone, who went on to become the creative leader of Hodskins Simone & Searls (HS&S), the advertising agency I co-founded with Ray and David Hodskins, in 1978, and which thrived in North Carolina and Silicon Valley for the next two decades.

    When I put up Remembering Ray, which (among much else) expressed my wish to re-surface the Hassle House poster, Jay Cunningham said in a comment that he could scan his copy. Which he did, and the results are here. In another comment Rob Gringle gives more of the back-story than I had known at the time.

    Before HS&S, David and Ray were both with a small “mutilple media studio” called Solar Plexus Enterprises, which grew out of the Duke Media Center. Also there was Helen Hudson Whiting, who was a first-rate epicure as well as the fastest and most capable typesetter I had ever known. I just looked Helen up and found this nice write-up from Duke Magazine Books:

    In Helen’s Kitchen: A Philosophy of Food

    By Helen Hudson Whiting. Regulator Bookshop, 2000. 241 pages. $17.95.

    In the text below is this:

    Helen Hudson Whiting ’75 was, among other things, a bookseller and co-owner of Durham’s Regulator Bookshop, a reader, a writer, and an amateur chef. For nineteen years, she wrote food commentaries for Triangle area publications: first for WDBS-FM’s The Guide, and then for The Independent.

    In Helen’s Kitchen, organized posthumously and edited by her friends and colleagues, features an eclectic selection of these columns, as well as remembrances from people who knew Whiting and cherished her enterprising, adventurous culinary attitude and her zest for pleasure and her keen intellect.

    I worked with Ray, Helen and David at Solar Plexus before we founded HS&S, and Helen continued to work alongside the new agency, doing most of our typesetting. So she became a good friend as well.

    But that’s not my point here. My point is that ours was a special community, and at the beginning of many things, although we didn’t know it at the time.

    At Ray’s memorial gathering in Pacifica last Sunday, Steve Tulsky made that point beautifully. He said our artsy-hippie community in Durham and Chapel Hill back then was a special group. Much was born there, in music, art, performance, writing, publishing, business, events, and other fields. The Independent, modeled by The Guide, is still going strong. So is the Regulator Bookshop. WDBS is long gone. So are WQDR and WRDU (as what they were then, anyway), which carried forward the radio torch WDBS lit when it went on in 1971. But their spirits survive in Good Radio everywhere. The Festival for the Eno, still going strong, began as the Folklife Festival, in 1976, on the country’s bicentennial. WDBS was highly involved, as the station broadcasting the many musical acts playing there. (Perhaps some old tapes still survive.)

    While I was working with David, Ray and Helen at Solar Plexus in ’77, I also worked with the Psychical Research Foundation, which studied scientifically evidence for life after death, and was located at Duke University. The PRF spun off of the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man, led by J. B. Rhine, who launched the whole parapsychology field out of research he conducted at Duke in the 1930. Among the many decendents of that work is the Institute of Noetic Sciences, headed by Marilyn Schlitz, another member of our community back in the decade.

    Here’s another weird connection. One of the central institutions of that time in Durham was the Durham Bulls single-A baseball team, which played at an old athletic field surrounded by brick tobacco warehouses. It was a special team at a special time and place. You might remember the movie about it.

    Anyway, I just wanted to bring back to the foreground some of what we’ve lost or forgotten from that wonderful formative period in so many lives, and in so many ways.

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  • What I’d like to say on the subway

    Subway car interior

    When I was young, New York subways were dirty, noisy and with little risk of improvement. But, even if the maps weren’t readable (as with this 1972 example), there were lots of them.

    Now the subways are much nicer, on the whole, and being improved. But there is now a paucity of maps. In fact, I notice an inverse relationship between the number of maps and the number and size of ads in subways and on subway cars. Some of the cars, such as the one above, have an all-advertising decor, in addition to the usual cards in frames.

    Since loud panhandlers are also common past the threshold of annoyance in subway cars, I found myself yesterday tempted to stand up and say,

    “EXCUSE ME, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. I’M NOT HERE TO ASK FOR YOUR MONEY, BUT JUST TO DRAW YOUR ATTENTION TO A SHORTAGE OF SUBWAY MAPS AND AN ABUNDANCE OF ADVERTISING. THANK YOU VERY MUCH AND HAVE A GOOD DAY.”

    … and then sit down. Who knows? Might help.

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  • No 2 SOPA

    Today I’m in solidarity with Web publishers everywhere joining the fight against new laws that are bad for business — and everything else — on the Internet.

    I made my case in If you hate big government, fight SOPA. A vigorous dialog followed in the comments under that. Here’s the opening paragraph:

    Nobody who opposes Big Government and favors degregulation should favor the Stop Online Piracy Act, better known as SOPA, or H.R. 3261. It’s a big new can of worms that will cripple use of the Net, slow innovation on it, clog the courts with lawsuits, employ litigators in perpetuity and deliver copyright maximalists in the “content” business a hollow victory for the ages.

    I also said this:

    SOPA is a test for principle for members of Congress. If you wish to save the Internet, vote against it. If you wish to fight Big Government, vote against it. If you wish to protect friends in the “content” production and distribution business at extreme cost to every other business in the world, vote for it. If you care more about a few businesses you can name and nothing about all the rest of them — which will be whiplashed by the unintended consequences of a bill that limits what can be done on the Internet while not comprehending the Internet at all — vote for it.

    This is the pro-business case. There are other cases, but I don’t see many people making the pure business one, so that’s why I took the business angle.

    The best summary case I’ve read since then is this one from the EFF.

    The best detailed legal case (for and against) is A close look at the Stop Online Piracy Act bill, by Jonathan @Zittrain. The original, from early December, is here.

    Not finally, here are a pile of links from Zemanta:

    Oh, and the U.S. Supreme Court just make it cool for any former copyright holder to pull their free’d works out of the public domain. The vote was 6-2, with Kagan recused and Breyer and Alito dissenting. Lyle Denniston in the SCOTUS blog:

    In a historic ruling on Congress’s power to give authors and composers monopoly power over their creations, the Supreme Court on Tuesday broadly upheld the national legislature’s authority to withdraw works from the public domain and put them back under a copyright shield.   While the ruling at several points stressed that it was a narrow embrace of Congress’s authority simply to harmonize U.S. law with the practice of other nations, the decision’s treatment of works that had entered the public domain in the U.S. was a far more sweeping outcome.

    No one, the Court said flatly, obtains any personal right under the Constitution to copy or perform a work just because it has come out from under earlier copyright protection, so no one can object if copyright is later restored.  Any legal rights that exist belong only to the author or composer, the ruling said.  If anyone wants to resume the use or performance of a work after it regains copyright, they must pay for the privilege, the decision made clear.

    IMHO, the U.S. has become devoutly propertarian, even at the expense of opportunity to create fresh property from borrowed and remixed works in the public domain. One more way the public domain, and its friendliness to markets, is widely misunderstood.

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  • Remembering Judith

    I got to know Judith Burton when she was still Judith Clarke and Senior VP Corporate Marketing for Novell, in 1987. Novell had just bought a company called CXI, which had been a client of Hodskins Simone & Searls, the Palo Alto advertising agency in which I was a partner. By that time HS&S had come to specialize in communications technology clients, and the chance to do something with Novell as well seemed more than opportune, since it was clear that Novell was smarter about comms than just about anybody at that time.

    So David Hodskins came up with the idea of putting together a “connectivity consortium” made up of Novell and several other HS&S clients. In seeing connectivity as a hot topic on the horizon, David was way ahead of everybody’s time. But that made it perfect for the two most forward-thinking minds at Novell: Judith and Craig Burton, who would later become her husband.

    I didn’t know Craig before I pitched Judith on the connectivity consortium idea — and she took the bait. She brought Craig to our first meeting, and the two of them together blew my mind. Judith saw no boundaries to what could be done with marketing, and Craig saw the Big Picture of connectivity better than anybody I had ever met, before or since.

    In the short term, over subsequent conversations and meetings, I saw how it was that Novell changed the networking conversation so quickly and completely. It was during these learnings that I came up with the “markets are conversations” line that became the first thesis of The Cluetrain Manifesto, more than a decade later. Because Novell was busy proving it, more than any other company in technology at that time.

    Just a few years earlier, the network conversation was mostly about “pipes and protocols.” Data Communications and Communications Week were the leading trade pubs in the space, fat with stories and ads that pushed and compared the virtues of Ethernet vs. Token Ring and bus vs. ring vs. star topologies. Every vendor sold whole networks from the wires on up, including everything that ran on those wires, file servers, network interface cards in the backs of PCs, and applications. If you bought a Sytek or a Corvus network, you couldn’t use anybody else’s hardware, software or wiring. Every vendor had its own silo (or, in some cases, such as IBM’s, an assortment of silos). And it occurred to almost nobody that there should be a choice other than silos and lock-ins.

    It was Craig Burton’s idea make Novell’s NetWare a “Network Operating System” (NOS) that could run on everybody’s hardware and wiring. NetWare thus became a new platform for network services that could run everywhere, starting with group file storage (the first local “cloud,” you might say), and printing.

    But nobody talked about networking on Novell’s terms until Judith Clarke literally invented whole new venues for network conversations. These included a magazine (LAN Times), a trade show (NetWorld), a reseller channel and a class of networking professionals (Certified Netware Engineers, or CNEs). By the end of the Eighties the world talked about networking in terms of capabilities and services rather than of pipes and protocols.

    One move that stands out for me was Novell’s decision to drop its grandfathered position at the center of the Comdex show floor (this was when Comdex was one of the biggest trade shows on Earth) and rent ballroom space next door on the ground floor of the Las Vegas Hilton. So rather than show stuff off on the floor with everybody else, Novell set up a storefront and business meeting space right where the traffic was thickest. And it worked.

    As Craig put it to me a few days ago, “She changed the industry in the way she approached people and ideas, taking a podunk company in Provo and making it look like it owned the planet — which, in many ways, it did. And she unselfishly gave credit to everybody else all along the way.”

    Novell began to slide after Judith and Craig left the company, in 1989. With the Burtons gone, Novell forgot where it came from. While Judith and Craig liked to zig where Microsoft zagged, and to embrace Microsoft’s — and everybody else’s — platforms and technologies, Novell CEO Ray Noorda preferred to attack Microsoft head-on, by acquiring already-lame competitors (remember WordPerfect?) and failing over and over to make a dent in Microsoft’s hull. It was sad to watch.

    For reasons I forget, the connectivity consortium didn’t happen, but I got to be close friends of both Judith and Craig, and have remained so ever since. I also consulted the couple after they left Novell to co-found The Burton Group with Jamie Lewis, another brilliant Novell veteran.

    A few years later Judith and Craig moved on to consulting on their own. (Under Jamie’s continued leadership The Burton Group was sold to Gartner a couple years ago.) Craig especially has been a steady source of original thinking on countless subjects. Judith sometimes participated in projects with Craig, but mostly focused on philanthropic and civic projects, and time with family. (Here is her Linkedin profile.)

    On Tuesday of this week she collapsed at her home, and died later in the hospital. Her death is a shock to everybody. Even though she hit a few medical bumps this past year, she seemed to be doing better. And she was just 66. Being 64 myself, I consider that age way too young for life’s end.

    My heart aches for Craig, and for Judith’s kids and grandkids, whom she adored. In my own memory, her amazing blue eyes, bright smile and sweet voice persist. She was a beautiful woman, as well as a smart, creative and loving one. The picture above gives just a hint toward all of that.

    It does bother me a bit that her death has not made bigger news. If she had passed during her heyday at Novell, the news would have been huge. But then, the news ain’t what it used to be, and will continue to evolve away from the old top-down few-to-many systems. The Internet is everybody’s connectivity consortium now.

    We didn’t end up needing Data Communications, Comms Week, LAN Times, NetWorld, Comdex or countless other once-sturdy institutions that were obsoleted by something Craig and Judith both saw coming long before it arrived: the ability of anybody to connect with anybody, outside of any one company’s system for trapping customers and users.

    Judith’s work back in the decade helped make the future in which we now all live and thrive. We’ll miss her, but we won’t miss each other. To Judith, all of us were the people networks were for. And now we have that, regardless of how hard any company or government works to lock us back into silos or limit what we can do in them. Had she been less loving, I doubt she would have seen that, or worked so well at what she did for all of us.

    [Later…] Here is an email from Jamie Lewis that fell through the cracks when it arrived (apologies for that):

    I first met Judith in 1984, when I was working for a publication for PC retailers. I was writing about PC networking, so I inevitably met both her and Craig in my coverage of Novell. I started getting to know Judith in 1985, when the magazine I was working for folded, and Novell offered me a job in the corporate marketing department.

    As many people know, there’s a very long list of things Judith did in making Novell the company it was in its hey day. She founded the LAN Times, a corporate newspaper devoted to networking. (Yes, it sounds obvious today. But in 1983, not so much. And there are more than a few technology writers still working today that earned their chops writing for the LAN Times.) She created the NetWorld tradeshow. (Again, obvious or even antiquated in today’s context, but then, it was the first of its kind.) She built a PR and marketing machine, complete with relentless press tours, events, and other efforts to get the NetWare word out.

    The list goes on. But that list is just that—a list. While most, if not all, of the stuff on that list was important, innovative, and impactful, it really doesn’t do the woman justice to simply enumerate things on a list. She was more than the sum of the items on that list.

    If you look the word “dynamic” up in the dictionary, you’ll find Judith’s picture there. When she walked into the room, the room changed. She commanded attention. She ran the show. She exuded authority and confidence. This could rub some people the wrong way, but it is what made her successful. That she accomplished what she did in a time and place that wasn’t exactly ideal for a career-oriented woman says a lot about her resolve.

    And that gets to the most important thing I learned from her, something that I think was at the heart of why Novell did so well during her tenure. Simply put, it’s this: Have the balls to act like who or what you want to become. If you wait until you are that to start acting like that, you’ll never be that.

    It’s clear how this approach worked so well for Novell. When I joined, Novell had about 250 employees. Its revenues were microscopic in comparison to the “big guys” – IBM, Digital Equipment and, later, Microsoft – that it was challenging while simultaneously doing battle with a host of similarly sized companies on the other.

    But I can’t tell you how many times I heard people say, “Wow, I thought Novell was a lot bigger than that,” when they heard how many employees we had, or what annual revenues were at the time. Novell in every way looked and behaved like it belonged in the big leagues—like a much bigger company—due in large part to Judith’s skills in marketing and communications. It’s a mistake to underestimate how important this was to Novell’s success.

    The fact that NetWare was a great product certainly helped. But we all know that the information technology market is littered with the corpses of companies that had great technology but didn’t know how to market it or sell it. Judith’s ability to position Novell played no small part in ensuring the success of what was a very good product. Because Novell acted like it belonged in the big leagues, it did belong. This raised the customers’ comfort level, making it easier for them to bet on a small company for such an important product. It also forced much larger companies, such as DEC and IBM, to treat Novell as a peer.

    I can distinctly remember when I realized how important this was. We were in final competition with DEC for a very large deal with a very large company. A Fortune 200 company. If we got the business, it would be a major win, a win at the “corporate standard” level, the kind of win that would be a major milestone. During the final stages of the competition, DEC issued a 30-page white paper that we later subtitled “why NetWare causes cancer in rats”. The sales person on the account phoned me in an absolute panic. The paper was full of misinformation, she said, and she was afraid the customer was going to believe it. I told her that we first needed to thank DEC for establishing Novell as a legitimate competitor in the eyes of the customer. We would respond to the paper, I said, but would be careful not to spoil the big favor DEC had just done for us. We did respond, but in the high road fashion that Judith (and Craig) established as our modus operandi, the approach that drove my initial answer to the call. And we won the business.

    That positioning also made Novell look superior in comparison to the companies that were much closer to it in size and revenue. 3Com was our nemesis, the one company that everyone in our company loved to hate. Yes, 3Com was hardware to Novell’s software, which is why NetWare prevailed. But NetWare also succeeded because Judith was so good at positioning Novell, establishing software as the issue in the market and forcing 3Com (and later Microsoft and IBM) to fight on Novell’s terms.

    There were, of course, a very large number of people responsible for making Novell what it was. It’s also nice to be on the right side of the issue, and there’s no question that Novell and NetWare were in the right place at the right time. But the attitude, the positioning, and the messaging that was Novell’s essence during that amazing run in the 80s and early 90s, that was all Judith. Novell wouldn’t have been the same company without her efforts. That win over DEC, for example, wouldn’t have happened without the months and years of relentless and effective marketing that preceded it. And I don’t think the correlation between Judith’s personality and Novell’s was any coincidence. Novell had the audacity to act like it belonged because Judith did.

    Years later, at Burton Group, whenever I heard people say they thought we were bigger than we actually were, I never failed to think of Judith. We carried that same attitude, a willingness to believe and act like we belonged. I learned a great deal from Judith, but it’s that lesson that had the biggest impact. She and Craig took a chance on a journalism major that had never written a line of code, and for that I will be forever grateful. She inspired and drove those around her to be better, to be what they aspired to be. I think I can speak for all of the people who knew and worked with her when I say she’ll be missed, and that we appreciate what she did for us, and for the industry she played such a large part in creating.

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  • Leveraging Hal

    Hal Crowther remains my favorite essayist, regardless of whether or not I agree with him. (And on some things I don’t.) Like Hunter S. Thompson, Hal’s writing is beyond enviable and his characterizations often over the top. Here’s some of his latest, addressed to the #Occupy movement:

    “Go get a bath right after you get a job,” snarls Newt Gingrich, an influence-peddler who’s had no legitimate job for 15 years and exists only to give the word “hypocrisy” a human face.

    My sympathies are obvious. What you in the tents can accomplish remains to be seen. But what I think I see, through the media fog of polarized America, is the return of the full-fledged idealists (as opposed to single-issue idealists) who seemed to go underground around 1980, possibly because the mass media abandoned them during the mudslide of self-celebration that began with Reaganism and culminated in Facebook.

    I say God bless them, and God will if he still has any investment in the United States of America. The Goliath they challenge has crushed a thousand Davids. The good news is that “the kids” are right on target. Their diagnosis is bull’s-eye correct, and the patient is critical. For this country to survive, it must find saner ways to pursue and multiply wealth, and find them quickly. The cannibal capitalism that produced a Goldman Sachs and a Bernie Madoff is subhuman and obscene. There’s no form of government more inherently offensive than plutocracy—only theocracy comes close. When a citizen comes of age in a plutocracy, he has no moral choice but to slay Pluto or die trying.

    The history of American plutocracy is shockingly simple. The Industrial Revolution fueled the metamorphosis of capitalism into a ravenous monster that devoured resources, landscapes and human beings on a scale no wars or natural disasters had ever approached. The wealth generated by this devastation created colossal corporations and financial operations far more powerful than elected governments; long ago the individuals who controlled these giants learned that it was cost-effective to buy up the politicians and turn governments into virtual subsidiaries. Along with the unprecedented wealth of the new ruling class came two protective myths, transparently false but widely accepted: one, that the feeble, compliant federal government was somehow the enemy of free enterprise; two, the outrageous trickle-down theory, which urged us to choke the rich with riches in the hope that they would disgorge a few crumbs for the peasants.

    Investment banks and hedge funds were designed as perfect engines for multiplying the assets of the affluent. The Wall Street elite of the 20th century—Masters of the Universe, Tom Wolfe called them—flew so far above the laws of the land that they began to imagine themselves exempt from all laws, including economics, physics and averages. This magical thinking came to a head with a wave of death-defying speculation in mortgage-backed securities, and quite suddenly, in 2008, the walls came tumbling down, exposing a phantom economy based on nothing but arrogance and sleight of hand.

    … In a recent German study that established a “social justice” index (poverty levels, education, health care, income equality) for countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States ranked 27th among 31 nations, outstripping only Greece, Turkey, Chile and Mexico. Meanwhile, also, Wall Street banks on taxpayer life support continued to pay out billions in bonuses, monstrously inflated CEO salaries showed no signs of shrinking and the Republican Party campaigned for more of the bloody same, and a stronger dose of it: no taxes, no regulations, no unions.

    This is beyond unacceptable, much closer to unspeakable, like an economic survey comparing the French court at Versailles to the sans-culottes.

    …a slate of demands from Occupy Chicago struck me as savvy and dead-on: repeal tax cuts and close loopholes for the rich, prosecute the Wall Street felons of 2008, separate commercial lending from investment banking, rein in lobbyists, eliminate corporate personhood and overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision of 2010.

    This last demand is perhaps the most critical. The decision that defined campaign contributions as free speech, delivered by the court’s 5-4 Republican majority, removed the last legal obstacles to a wallet-based political system that leaves the 1 percent, or one-hundredth of 1 percent, in unchallenged control of our fortunes and our public lives. It opened the floodgates for a multibillion-dollar campaign to defeat President Obama, and any candidates who might resist corporate feudalism, in 2012.

    In the words of the late Molly Ivins, “We either get the money out of politics or we lose the democracy.”

    Molly’s gone, but Hal lives. I just wish he wrote more often. Here’s the archive.

    Bonus links:

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  • A Mammoth Perspective

    Long Valley from Mammoth

    For the last three days I’ve been skiing at Mammoth Mountain, an 11,059-foot volcano built to its current shape between 110,000 and 57,000 years ago. It is still active. The mountain’s last eruption of rock and lava was about 1200 years ago, essentially in the geologic present. Lethal gasses burp out of fissures, and hot springs push steam through snow. Up to 150 tons of carbon dioxide seep out of the mountain — enough to produce a necklace of “tree kills” around its base. In 2006, three members of the Mammoth Mountain ski patrol were killed by gasses from a volcanic vent.

    Mammoth overlooks the Long Valley Caldera on the east side, which is where most of the ski runs are. That’s it in the photo above, which I shot yesterday from the summit. About 760,000 years ago, a short tick before the geologic present, a supervolcano stood where Long Valley is now.Long Valley Caldera It was obliterated in one of the largest explosions in the known history of the Earth. Over 150 cubic miles of material were blown out, so violently and completely that what remained was a wide deep crater. Lava flows spread for dozens of miles, while ash and debris spread from the Pacific to Kansas. The image on the right (via Wikipedia and courtesy of Roy A. Bailey, USGS Volcanologist with the USGS in Menlo Park) is a cross section of the view above.

    To put this in perspective, Krakatoa blew 5 cubic miles into the sky. Mount St. Helens blew out less than one cubic mile. Long Valley was a VEI7 event. Only VEI8 events are bigger. Perhaps the biggest risk of a similar event is the Yellowstone caldera, which sits over a hot spot that has already produced four cataclysms exceeding the Long Valley one. Only two other events have been larger than any of those, and the largest was in Colorado. All were VEI8 events. Here’s a list of those, from Wikipedia, in decreasing order of material displaced:

    1. La Garita Caldera, Colorado, United States—Source of the enormous eruption of the Fish Canyon Tuff ~27.8 million years ago (~5,000 km³) This was in
    2. Lake Toba, Sumatra, Indonesia—~74,000 years ago (~2,800 km³). The Lake Toba eruption plunged the Earth into a volcanic winter, eradicating an estimated 60%[11][12][13][14] of the human population (although humans managed to survive even in the vicinity of the volcano[15]).
    3. Island Park Caldera, Huckleberry Ridge Tuff, Idaho/Wyoming, United States, Yellowstone hotspot—2.1 million years ago (2,500 km³)[8]
    4. Atana Ignimbrite, Pacana Caldera, northern Chile—4 million years ago (2,500 km³)[9]
    5. Whakamaru, Taupo Volcanic Zone, North Island, New Zealand—Whakamaru Ignimbrite/Mount Curl Tephra ~254,000 years ago (1,200–2,000 km³)[7]
    6. Heise volcanic field, Kilgore Tuff, Idaho, United States, Yellowstone hotspot—4.5 million years ago (1,800 km³).[10]
    7. Heise volcanic field, Blacktail Tuff, Idaho, United States, Yellowstone hotspot—6.6 million years ago (1,500 km³).[10]
    8. Lake Taupo, Taupo Volcanic Zone, North Island, New Zealand—Oruanui eruption ~26,500 years ago (~1,170 km³)
    9. Cerro Galan, Catamarca Province, Argentina—2.5 million years ago (1,050 km³)
    10. Yellowstone Caldera, Lava Creek Tuff, Wyoming, United States, Yellowstone hotspot—640,000 years ago (1,000 km³)[8]

    Following that is a list of  VEI7 events, including Long Valley:

    Over the last 3/4 million years, the Long Valley Caldera has been decorated by many smaller volcanic eruptions and formations (including Mammoth), as well as by glacial advances and retreats and gradual erosion. The result looks as innocent as any other valley filled with cones and old tuff — though less innocent than Yellowstone, whose charms are mostly those of hot water.

    Still, knowing the provenance of Long Valley and Mammoth gives the observer reason to pause and wonder — not only at the hugeness of Earth’s formative events, but of our species’ oblivity to them.

    Bonus links:

  • Holes in The Cloud

    So our family of three is sharing a hotel room while doing some holiday stuff. The hotel charges about $20/day per device to use its wi-fi. We have seven devices that are Net-enabled, but so far have only one (my laptop) paying the fare — and the quality of the connection gets a D+ from Speedtest.net. Our two phones (my wife’s and mine) with cellular data plans are left to the mercies of AT&T, which barely provides phone service. (Among the few calls that came through yesterday were several in which the other person could hear nothing that we said.) Cellular data works only in the wee hours, when demands on AT&T’s system are at low ebb. Without a Net connection, my wife, whose new laptop is tethered to Apple’s iCloud, is SOL for email and calendar updates.

    There are dozens of wi-fi hot spots showing up on our lists, but all of them are closed. If this were eight years ago, at least half of them would be open, but the popular default in the world is now for closed hot spots, so those are also not options.

    I’m sure in the long run The Market will fix this, but meanwhile “The Cloud’s” promise and reality are way out of sync. Since most of The Market outside our homes is comprised of pay services over wi-fi and cellular data systems are sure to suffer traffic jams as more of our lives require tethering to data banks and services in clouds, I’m not holding my breath for ease in the short run.

    Remember “the information superhighway”? Would be nice to have that now.

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  • Comments vs. Likes, Tweets, Shares and +1s

    At the bottom of How Luther went viral: Five centuries before Facebook and the Arab spring, social media helped bring about the Reformation, an excellent essay in the latest Economist, I found this…

    … and decided to leave the first comment. You can read it here.

  • If you hate Big Government, fight SOPA.

    Nobody who opposes Big Government and favors degregulation should favor the Stop Online Piracy Act, better known as SOPA, or H.R. 3261. It’s a big new can of worms that will cripple use of the Net, slow innovation on it, clog the courts with lawsuits, employ litigators in perpetuity and deliver copyright maximalists in the “content” business a hollow victory for the ages.

    A few years back, a former government official confidentially issued a warning to a small group I was part of, which favored some kind of lawmaking around technology. While this isn’t a verbatim quote, it’s pretty close, because it has been burned in my mind ever since: “In the course of my work I have met with nearly every member of Congress. And I can tell you that, with only a handful of exceptions, there are two things none of them understand. One is economics and the other is technology. Now proceed.”

    Know-nothing lawmakers are doing exactly that with SOPA. As Joshua Kopstein says, Dear Congress, It’s No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works.

    SOPA is a test for principle for members of Congress. If you wish to save the Internet, vote against it. If you wish to fight Big Government, vote against it. If you wish to protect friends in the “content” production and distribution business at extreme cost to every other business in the world, vote for it. If you care more about a few businesses you can name and nothing about all the rest of them — which will be whiplashed by the unintended consequences of a bill that limits what can be done on the Internet while not comprehending the Internet at all, vote for it.

    Rivers of ink and oceans of pixels have been spilled by others on this subject, so I’ll confine my case to a single section of the bill:

    SEC. 103. MARKET-BASED SYSTEM TO PROTECT U.S. CUS- TOMERS AND PREVENT U.S. FUNDING OF SITES DEDICATED TO THEFT OF U.S. PROPERTY.

    (I tried copying and pasting the whole section here, but it’s a @#$%^& .pdf, a proprietary format that has been Web-hostile from the start, but beloved of the “content” folks, as well as Congress and lawyers in general. If somebody can find us a .html or a .txt version, please let me know.)

    There is nothing “market-based” about this section of the bill. “Market-based” is a paint job on more regulation, more restriction, more bureaucracy, more federal meddling, more litigation. Weighing in at nearly 17,000 words, is not only clueless about the nature of the Net and the Web, mischaracterizing both from front to back, but features the word “plaintiff” 100 or more times (I lost count). Oh, and lots of new work for this bureaucrat:

    INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ENFORCEMENT COORDINATOR.—The term ‘‘Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator’’ means the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator appointed under section 301 of the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2008 (154 U.S.C. 8111)

    Yes, it exists.

    We don’t need SOPA. What we do need is for Congress — along with lawmakers and regulators everywhere, right down to public utilities commissions and town councils — to at least begin to understand what the Internet is, and what it does for everybody, before it starts making laws protecting one business at the expense of all the rest.

    If you want to see who is behind SOPA, just follow the money.

    A couple days ago, David Weinberger told me Jimmy Wales was mulling the wisdom of shutting off Wikipedia for a day.  David blogged about it. So did Cory Doctorow. Later Torrent Freak spilled the beans as well. For some perspective on this, consider these two facts: 1) Jimbo is an economic Libertarian—about as pro-business and pro-“market-based” as you can get; and 2) Wikipedia remains the only search result for anything that consistently rises above the tide of gimmickry that has corrupted the commercial Web and buried more and more “organic” (non-commercial) results under an avalanche of promotional jive.

    Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute presents a solid Libertarian case against SOPA on YouTube. If it passes, he says, “the only difference between the U.S. and China is what’s on the blacklist.”

    Sure, “piracy” is a problem. So are a zillion other afflictions you can name. New laws — especially ones that are written by regulatory captives and feared by real businesses in the marketplace — are not a solution. They compound the problem they purport to solve and cause untold new problems as unintended but certain consequences. Any conservative worthy of the label should be dead-set against SOPA.

    Futhter reading, compiled mostly by Zemanta:

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  • Broadband vs. Internet

    By design, the Internet supports everything you can do with it. As deployed, it is no more capable than the infrastructures that carry it. Here in the U.S. most of the infrastructures that carry the Internet are owned by telephone and cable companies. Those companies are not only in a position to limit use of the Internet for purposes other than those they favor, but to reduce the Net itself to something less, called “broadband.” In fact, they’ve been working hard on both.

    We’ll talk about broadband shortly. But first let’s look at the clobbering the Internet took last week when Verizon, the only large provider of fiber optic Internet connections to homes in the U.S., put an end to expansion of FiOS, their fiber-to-the-home telephone, Internet and cable TV system.

    This matters hugely, because the connections with the greatest data-carrying capacities are fiber optic ones. In terms of raw capacity, cable TV and copper telephone lines can’t compete. But then, they don’t need to compete if fiber is off the table as a competitor. That’s what Verizon just did.

    In speedtestVerizon ends satellite deal, FiOS expansion as it partners with cable, Cecelia Kang reports in the Washington Post that the telco giant “will stop its buildout of FiOS television and Internet services in the next couple years.”

    When a company says they plan to stop growing a business, they mean they have given up on it. (Hey, what business, especially a big one, doesn’t want to grow?) It’s also often a sign that the business is for sale, in this case probably to competitors in the cable business. Clues in that direction come from Cecelia’s following sentence: “The moves come as Verizon Wireless forges a new partnership with cable giants to cross-market phone, video, Internet and cellular services.” In that piece, she says “Verizon will pay $3.6 billion to Comcast, Time Warner and Bright House Networks to use a swath of cellphone airwaves that the cable giants own but do not use.”

    At the business +/vs. business level, here’s how it sorts out (to me, at least):

    1. Verizon was never a cable TV company, and didn’t do a good-enough job at that with FiOS. Straight-up, it should have beaten the crap out of all its cable competitors, just based on superior video and a much higher channel count, thanks to fiber’s much higher data capacity. But Comcast and the others — even Dish Network and DirectTV — were better at the cable game. But Verizon is king of the hill in cellular wireless, with the best coverage and service in most cities. (See the latest Consumer Reports for details.) A lot of what used to be TV is moving to wireless, both over cellular connections and wi-fi. In cellular, Verizon holds aces.
    2. Cable has no cellular wireless business, and its auction winnings for spectrum haven’t yet yet paid off. But the spectrum is worth money to rent out, in ways that get cable into the cellular wireless business, so they can now sell “quadruple play” — cable TV, landline phone, Internet (increasingly called “broadband”… more about that below) and cellular.
    3. Verizon (along with cable, satellite, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and everybody else) wants to be in the “content distribution” game, which is the future of television, publishing and every other business the Internet has both threatened and transformed.
    4. For the most popular technically demanding “content” — video — 100Mbps downstream is enough. You don’t need fiber for that. Cable can do the job well enough. For DVD-quality video (such as Netflix and TV from Google and Apple) it already is.
    5. TV is body-snatching personal computing, and it’s good to get in on progress there. Take a look at all the cheap screens you can buy now at Cosco and Staples. Their default dimensions are 1920 x 1080: the native resolution of HDTV.
    6. As an informal quid pro quo with the cable companies, Verizon agreed to halt FiOS expansion. Don’t be surprised to see Verizon’s whole FiOS business leased or sold off to a cable competitor in the next few months or years. We’ll all be better off if it gets sold to Google or Apple, but that’s unlikely to happen.

    The deal sucks for everything and everybody outside the content distro business, including the rest of the Internet. The sum of the lost or prevented business (and social benefits as well) is incalculable. But nobody seems to be counting. We’re just boiling frogs here.

    As of today, your chance of getting fiber to your home is zero, unless you are lucky enough to live in Lafayette, Chatanooga, Pulaski, or one of too-few other places where public and private interests align long enough for fiber service to get built out before brutal opposition by phone and cable companies prevents it — mostly by lobbying up state regulations making build-out difficult or impossible for entities other than phone and cable companies that aren’t going to bother building what they’ve already prevented anyway.

    The appetite for fiber is there. We chose to rent our part-time apartment here near Boston because the street is served by FiOS. (Also RCN, a weaker fiber competitor.) Many businesses see places like the towns listed above as port cities on the Internet’s sea of bits.  The speedtest above is typical of what we get from FiOS, which offers speeds up to 150Mbps down and 50Mbps up. Fiber’s native capacity is actually much higher, which is why Chatanooga offers up to 1Gbps, as will Google’s new project in Kansas City. If you live in one of fourteen Utah cities fibered up by Utopia, you have a choice of providers of 100Mbps symmetrical service that will cost you less than what I pay ($70/mo) for my 25Mbps from Verizon.

    Last I heard, the fastest cable offering in the upstream direction was 12Mbps. Cox, our cable provider in Santa Barbara, gives us about 25Mbps down, but only 4Mbps up. Last time I talked to them (in June 2009), their plan was to deliver up to 100Mbps down eventually, but still only about 5Mbps up. That’s competitive as long as all you want is “content delivery.” But what about when you want to live “in the cloud,” and all your data is elsewhere? In the long run you’ll need a lot more upstream as well as downstream capacity for that. Internet service optimized for media delivery (where TV especially wants to go) won’t cut it. But then, most people aren’t looking at that. They’re looking at TV on their iPads over broadband, and thinking that’s way cool enough.

    So here we are, smack up against what John Perry Barlow warned us about in Death From Above, way back in early 1995. There he wrote, “The cable companies and Baby Bells have a model for developing the next phase of telecom infrastructure which, were it applied to the design of physical superhighways, would have us building them with about five thousand lanes in one direction and one lane in the other.”

    Internet speeds over cable aren’t that lopsided, but they are that biased. And the name for that bias is broadband. So let’s look at the difference between the Internet and broadband, because that difference matters.

    While the Internet is often called a “network of networks,” what defines the “network of” is a suite of protocols and standards that transcend individual networks and give the whole a single and coherent way of working. Broadband is an old telecommunications term which, as Wikipedia puts it, “became popularized through the 1990s as a vague marketing term for Internet access.”

    The Internet’s protocols are NEA:

    • Nobody owns them.*
    • Everybody can use them, and
    • Anybody can improve them.

    Like the periodic table, the Net’s protocols occur in nature — in this case a human one — which is why the Net’s founding capacities can be limitless in size and scope.

    For business this means the Net and the Web (which is an application on the Net) are building materials with leverage as boundless as those of hydrogen, copper, oxygen, iron and other real-world elements, but without the scarcity. This is why the Net’s open protocols and standards support $trillions in business without making a dime for themselves, and without promoting the wealth-inducing facts of the matter.

    We call these kinds of leverage “because effects“: you make money because of them, rather than with them.

    But, since the Internet is not out to make money for itself, it is easily dismissed either as passé, or as having little or no business value. This is what George Colony of Forrester Research did in his recent speech at LeWeb, where he spoke about “the death of the Web,” and why I followed up with Be careful what you call dead. Although I’m sure he didn’t mean it that way, George’s speech was a win for the forces out to subordinate the Internet and the Web to their own parochial businesses and business models.

    Right now most of us are unaware that this is going on, and fail to see the risk it presents for everybody who depends on a capacious Internet for future growth and prosperity.

    The phone and cable operators are not working alone to limit the Net’s because effects. At this point their allies include lawmakers, regulators, and professional organizations like the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

    A subtle and pernicious part of that campaign has been an effort to shift the nobody-owns-it Internet conversation to one about “broadband,” which is something the operators own and rent out. Governments are enlisted in this campaign, and now so are the rest of us. (I’ve used the term “broadband” plenty myself, for example, here.) I began to get hip to this trick in the Summer of 2010, at a conference where a spokesman for the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) gave a talk about the goodness of broadband without once uttering the word “Internet.” Recently the ITU has been further sanitizing this rhetorical body-snatch by talking up broadband as a “basic human right”.

    Bob Frankston (co-father of spreadsheet software and much more) has been on this case at least since 2009, when he wrote The Broadband Internet? One sample: “Today we are used to the ‘broadband’ Internet in which we achieve connectivity despite the services and twisting passages our connections travel.” Bob’s preference is that we look to maximize connectivity, rather than to increase our dependency on carriers with more interest in maintaining telephony and cable TV service and billing models than in maximizing all the other businesses and business models the Net’s founding protocols were built to support.

    The division is between what communications wonks crudely characterize as “net-heads” and “bell-heads.” Think of conflict as one betwee any and only. Net-heads want the Net to support anything. Bell-heads want communications systems optimized only for the businesses they prefer — namely, their own — and to avoid even talking about the Internet. (Bell-heads have never been comfortable with the Net, because it was not made to bill. TV and telephony are easy to bill, and so is “content” in general. Thanks to Apple’s and Google’s pioneering work —mostly in league with the operators — so now are apps.)

    To see how sharp this distinction is, read The New Digital Divide, by Susan Crawford, an alpha net-head, in The New York Times. Nowhere in the piece does she use the word “broadband.” She does, however, use the word “Internet” twenty-six times. In his letter to the editor responding to Susan’s piece, Verizon CEO and alpha bell-head Ivan B. Seidenberg uses the term “broadband” six times and  “Internet” just once, and only because he can’t say “The 2011 World Economic Forum global survey ranks the United States first in Internet competition” without it. (One wonders if the U.S. will continue to rank first, now that Verizon has given up on FiOS build-out.)

    At this point the only entities still trying to bring fiber to your home are Google in Kansas City, brave small operators such as Vermont’s ECFiber.net and some scattered municipalities. Helping where fiber can’t make it (and, in many cases, where broadband can’t either) are Wireless Internet Service Providers, or WISPs. Here’s hoping that these net-headed entities can prove that a wide open and supportive infrastructure for the Internet will do more for business and society than “broadband” alone can provide.

    Here are Zemanta‘s related links:

    * Technically, nobody restricts use based on ownership. The Ethernet protocol, for example, succeeded where IBM’s Token Ring and other purely proprietary alternaties failed, because Intel, Digital and Xerox, which owned Ethernet’s patents, chose to to make Ethernet open. There were no restrictions on how hardware manufacturers (who deployed Ethernet) could implement it.

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  • Be careful about what you call dead

    In The Web is on life support: Forrester Research, Marketwatch reports on a speech titled “Three Social Thunderstorms,” by Forrester CEO George Colony at LeWeb. Sourcing both the Marketwatch report and George’s slides, this appears to be what he said*…

    Thunderstorm One is “The Death of the Web.” Marketwatch:

    Colony said that several models of thinking about the Web/Internet space are dead or outmoded.

    Colony distinguished between the Web, which he said is a software architecture, and the Internet, which is a larger organizing framework.

    He said technology is migrating away from the PC/Desktop model, as well as what he called the Web cloud.

    Thunderstorm Two is “Social Saturation.” George’s slide:

    • Yes, we are in a bubble…for social startups
    • We are moving to a post social (POSO) world
    • POSO startups will dominate

    Marketwatch again:

    Colony asked LeWeb attendees to consider “what we will hold in our hands 5 years from now.”

    Forrester Research thinks the answer to that question is the so-called App Internet, which offers a “faster, simpler and better Internet experience.”

    The App Internet market is worth $2.2 billion, according to Forrester Research.

    And decision makers at 41% of companies are now moving away from Web-based software toward the App Internet, Colony said…

    He also said that adoption of social media in urban areas was now extremely high and “running out of hours and people.”

    Declaring, in effect, that we are socially saturated.

    That means “we are in a bubble,” he said, adding that a post-social world was on its way that would “sweep away some of the nonsense like Foursquare.

    Thunderstorm Three is “Enterprise.” George’s summary slides:

    What enterprise means

    • Beyond Sharepoint…lies the next wave of social opportunity
    • A rich and growing professional service market emerges
    • A major test of marketing and BT collaboration

    When the skies clear…

    • A new social platform – App Internet
    • New social players – POSO
    • New social opportunities – Enterprise
    • Social will thrive, but in an evolved form

    Declaring things dead is always an attention-grabber, and George grabbed a lot with this one, as you can see from the links below. Forrester’s market (and George’s primary audience), however, is the enterprise. For that audience George is right to call for thinking beyond today’s Web and social strategies, and to develop app-based ones. But calling the Web dead along the way has the effect of a red herring, diverting attention away from real risks both to the Net and to the Web — risks that extend to enterprises as well, and that all of us (including Forrester) should also be caring about. More about those in my next post.

    Meanwhile, here are Zemanta‘s related articles:

    * Fred Wilson has since put up Sunday Debate: Is Social Peaking?, which includes George’s full speech. Watch it and compare with what I was able to glean above from the Marketwatch report and George’s slides, which were all I had to go by at the time. That alone is a lesson in the insufficiencies of all sources other than one’s own direct witness.

    Now let’s look at what George says abut the “death of the Web,” and about the larger topic of “the network.”

    Starting at 3:10 George says “Yes, the network is improving in power, but not at the same speed as processing and storage.” And, “If you had to build an architecture based only around the network — move all your bits to the network — you would be wasting over time all this extraordinary processing power and storage.” As an example of how the network is moving slowly, he cites the slow uptake of 4G mobile data in Europe. Other nuggets:

    • The periphery of the network is becoming ever more intelligent.” (that is, “what we hold in our hands” e.g. the iPad.)
    • (I’ll add more when I have time. Other stuff has jumped in the way.)

    What matters here is the reason why the network is growing slower than either processing or storage: because it’s trapped inside what Bob Frankston calls The Regulatorium, which is the collusive space co-occupied by the phone and cable operators and their regulatory captives. While we might be impressed that our downstream speeds from Comcast have gone from 3Mbps to 50Mbps, that progress masks the limits that all the carriers put on forward Internet growth, and connectivity in general. For more on that, go to my next post, Broadband vs. Internet.

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  • What’s popular vs. What’s used

    In terms of sales, Android is tops in smarphones. According to this ComScore press release, Google had a 46.3% market share of U.S. smartphone platform sales (with Android) in October, up 4.4% from July. At 28.1%, Apple’s iOS share was up 1%. Apple’s share of total subscribers was 10.8%, up 1% from July.

    Yet when you take a look at this graphic from Flickr…

    … usage seems to be another matter.

    Far as I know, there is nothing about Flickr that discriminates against non-iOS smartphones. But that graphic squares with something I’ve heard from develpers: that the same apps on Android and iOS tend to get used more on iOS.

    I don’t say that to advocate Apple. In fact, I’d much rather advocate Android — or any open platform. Just saying it’s interesting.

    From Zemanta, here’s a list of related articles:

  • Remembering Ray

    Ray SimoneRay Simone, my good friend and long-time business partner, died this morning. He was 63 years old. He is survived by his wife Gillian, his daughter Christina, and many good friends for whom he remains an inspiration and a delight.

    Ray was one of the most creative people I have ever known. Though we originally shared the Creative Director title at our agency, Hodskins Simone & Searls, Ray was the Main Man. While I was a good copywriter, Ray could do it all: come up with killer campaigns, clever headlines, great design and art, tight scripts, whatever. His knowledge of art, of typography, of technologies and sciences — actually, pretty much everything — was encyclopedic. He worked his ass off, and he was great to work with as well.

    We met in the mid-’70s in Durham, North Carolina, when I was still “Doctor Dave,” an occasional comic radio character for WDBS and columnist for the station’s magazine (see the visual below), and Ray was an artist whose own comic work appeared in the same publication. We both circulated in the same low-rent Hippie creative-art-music-dance-weekend-party crowd surrounding Duke University. Ray was working with Hodskins Simone and Searls 1978David Hodskins and some other folks at small “multiple media” shop (decades ahead of its time) that had somehow spun out of the Duke Media Center. One day, when I called up Ray to talk about collaborating on an ad for an audio shop I was working for part-time, Ray put me on hold and told David that Doctor Dave was on the line. David told Ray to arrange a lunch. A team was born over that lunch, and in 1978 we became an advertising agency: Hodskins Simone & Searls. The photo on the right dates from that time.

    By 1980 we were specializing in high tech clients up and down the East Coast, and after several years decided to open a satellite office in Silicon Valley.

    After winning some major West Coast

    Hillbilly Jazzaccounts we moved the whole agency to Palo Alto, and by the early 90s HS&S was one of the top shops there. (Huge props to David Hodskins for his leadership through all that. David was the agency President and another truly brilliant dude.)

    Twenty years after its founding,  HS&S was acquired. By then I had moved on to other work, and after awhile so had David and Ray. While I went back to journalism, Ray went back to art, teaching at Ocean Shore School in Pacifica, as well as at Brighton Preschool, which he and Gillian, his wife and soulmate, ran in the same town. He was Sting Ray to the kids there. Says Gillian, “He made story time come alive.”

    He also went back to painting. But his full portfolio of accomplishments includes much, much more. For example, Ray designed covers for dozens of major country and bluegrass albums, mostly for Sugar Hill Records. Two samples, one for Vassar Clements and the other for the Red Clay Ramblers, are on the left and right. Here is a partial discography (drawn from here and other places), in alphabetical order:

    Ray was a musician as well. When he was a student at what is now Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, he played keyboards in a band that traveled to gigs in a used hearse. Some of the stories he told about those days were beyond wild and very funny.

    Ray also designed countless t-shirts and posters, most of which were worthy of collection. Panel from Ray Simone Hassle House poster(Wish I still had some, but alas.) Old friends from Durham will fondly remember the Forklift Festival at the late Plantation (an run-down mansion on North Roxboro that should have been preserved). Forklift was a play on the Folklife Festival (now Festival for the Eno) that took place across the road. Ray also helped the Good Time Boogie, an annual gathering in Eastern North Carolina for which there was huge attendance, pass-the-hat funding and no publicity beyond Ray’s brilliant t-shirt art.

    Ray’s cartoon poster for a place called Hassle House, done in the style of MAD’s Will Elder by way of Vaughn Bodé, was the first thing that turned me on to Ray. It was funny as hell, and I can still remember every panel of it. (Rob Gringle provides more background in a comment below, and also reminds us that Ray did many covers for The Guide, the monthly published by WDBS. I still have a stack of Guides somewhere.)

    [Later…] Big thanks to Jay Cunningham for providing scans to the poster. That’s one panel, there on the right.

    Ray was a born athlete, though he never exploited his talents beyond casually (but never maliciously) humiliating anybody who took him on at ping-pong, darts, softball or whatever. I remember one softball game where he grabbed a hard grounder bare-handed at third base, and — while falling down — threw out the runner at first base. All in one move. Like it was no big deal. It was awesome.

    He took up fencing when we were still in North Carolina, and quickly won trophies.

    A student of fun history, he was active for years in the Society for Creative Anachronism. In that capacity he once served “stargazy pie” at Monkeytop, the rambling Victorian urban commune where he, David Hodskins and many others lived at various times on Swift Street. (It’s now the restored E.K. Powe House.)

    When Ray and Gillian (also an artist) were married at a California ranch in 1991, everybody was costumed as cowboys and cowgirls. That was huge fun too.

    A devoted reader of science fiction and watcher of movies, Ray could expound with insight and authority on either subject, plus too many others to list.

    Yet what matters most is that Ray was a loving guy and a first-rate friend. Back at the turn of the ’90s, when I had sworn off dating after a series of failed relationships, Ray pulled me out of my shell. As a direct result I’ve now been happily married for more than twenty years, with a wonderful teenage son. I know Ray had similar influences on others as well.

    I could add much more (such as a backstory on my nickname, which Ray illustrated with the character on the right),docdave but I want to post this today. I’m sure other old friends will weigh in as well. Additions and corrections of course are welcome. Here are a few I failed to string among the pearls above:

        • His full name: Raymond George Simone. Most of his album credits are for Raymond Simone.
        • Simone is pronounced with three syllables and a long e:—Simonē: the correct Italian way, Ray said.
        • He was born in Potsdam, New York, and grew up in High Point, North Carolina.
        • He had one brother, Jim, who died of throat cancer many years ago. Ray’s malady was lung cancer, no doubt an effect, as with Jim, of smoking. Ray quit many years ago, but it still caught up with him.
        • His mother, born and raised in Oklahoma, was (as I recall) half Cherokee. Both his parents passed in recent years.
        • He sometimes called himself The Weasel (others shortened that to “The Weez”), and drew himself in cartoons as a weasel with a mustache. For most of the early years we worked together, Ray’s signature look was long hair and a mustache, sometimes waxed at the tips.
        • He learned and worked in deep-sea diving out of San Clemente, California.
        • He was into cars and motorcycles, in various ways at various times. Among other feats he once rode alone across Canada on the biggest ride Honda made.
        • Here is Ray’s Facebook page, with a self-portrait from when he was more full-bodied, a couple years back.

    The photo at the top of this post is cropped from this one, shot by Gillian last Friday when David and I came to visit Ray at their home. Ray knew he didn’t have much time left, but was still in good humor. That was the day after Thanksgiving. So I’m thankful that I was in town and that these three old partners could get together one last time.

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  • The Continuing End of TV

    Tossed TVsI’m sitting in a medical office (routine stuff) where a number of people, myself included, are doing our best to ignore the flat TV screen on the wall. Most of us are reading magazines, using our phones or tablets, or (in one case — mine) working on a laptop.

    When I arrived around 8am, I found the flat screen interesting, because it was showing a radio show I like: Dennis & Callahan, of WEEI. While most sports talk shows sound like human beer cans yelling at each other, D&C is always thoughtful and informative, even (or especially) when it veers off the sports groove, as it often does. I’d never seen John Dennis or Gerry Callahan before, so it was interesting to see them at work. I also like their long 8am conversation with Boomer Esiason every Monday during the NFL season. So digging all that was cool. Then, at 9am, when the show ended, the first of a series of half-hour-long ads began to run. Says here on the NESN schedule page that “paid programming” will continue until noon. Nobody in the room is watching. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that most of them find the non-stop pitches annoying.

    NESN is the New England Sports Network. I’d never seen it before, except maybe in a bar or another place like this one. Nothing I’ve seen so far this morning would make me want to see it again. (I’m still in the Waiting Room, waiting.) While it was nice seeing D&C, I don’t need a TV for that. And, while “paid programming” fills the time between D&C and sports news later in the day, it’s otherwise one big value-subtract for everybody but the station and the advertiser (and, I suppose the people who buy the crap being advertised — currently some kind of electronic “Amish fireplace.”). But then, so might be pretty much everything else on TV that isn’t news or sports you can’t get anywhere else.

    That’s being unfair, of course. There is plenty of worthwhile stuff on TV. Talent shows. Sit-coms. Dramas and comedies. Even some reality shows. (I know people who love “Dancing With the Stars.”) My point is that none of it needs to be on TV, because today TV = Cable, and only Cable needs Cable. What we call “channels” and “networks” are just sources of programs, most of which are just files or streams that can be stored as files. We have the Net for that now.

    Programs should be made available to pay for and watch on an a la carte basis, or as part of subscription packages that make sense to viewers. Apple does some of that, but most of the programs are too expensive at this point.

    Sure, NBC, ABC, TNT, AMC and the rest of them have “brands” as sources of programs. But why should they be stuffed inside so much packing material, like D&C gets stuffed between “paid programming” nobody watches? Why not buy what’s worth more than $zero at prices that also exceed $zero, without also buying all the pure crap that serves as filler?

    Mostly because the flywheels of Business As Usual in TV are enormous, and are sustained by FCC regulations for over-the-air, Cable and Satellite (a variety of Cable) that remain anchored in the nearly-vanished Antenna Age. (Speaking of which, there is an excellent exhibition called TV in the Antenna Age, in Terminal 3 at SFO. Check it out if you’re flying United in or out of there.)

    Conveniently, all Cable companies offer Internet service as well. TV on the Net they call “over the top.” But in the long run, “over the top” will be the whole thing. The writing is already on the wall. Progress toward the inevitable is slow, but we can see how it ends. What used to be TV will just be files and streams, some of which we’ll pay for, and some of which will be free. Meanwhile, more of the usual crap will just be ignored.

    [Later…] Brett (below) makes a good point about the high efficiency of broadcast (cable) for streaming. I should add that cable broadcast as a way of delivering video will make sense for a long time. But the business and technical model as it stands is obsolete and out of alignment with the marketplace. “TV” will become as obsolete as telegraphy. Video will never be.

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  • Happy birthday, Grandma

    Among friends and relatives there is an unusual concentration of birthdays in November. For example, the 12th, 13th and 14th are birthdays of my wife, my daughter (plus Chris Locke and JP Rangaswami) and my grandmother, respectively.

    That’s Grandma Searls, on the left. Born in 1882, she would have been 129 years old today. She died in 1990, just short of 108. Her daughter Grace Apgar, my aunt, will be 100 next June.

    I like this picture of Grandma, because that’s how I remember her best. The shot was taken in Ju;y, 1953. Grandma was 70 at the time.

    It’s a close-up from this group shot, at her little summer place back in the woods of South Jersey. Our little summer place was at the other end of a winding path through the blueberries. The third point of our summer home triangle was Aunt Florence and Uncle Jack Dwyer‘s place. Paths led from both of the other houses to that one. Aunt Florence was Grandma’s younger sister. Uncle Jack took the picture with one of those large-format bellows cameras. I’m the curly-headed kid in the front row with the beer. I turned six at the end of July, the month this was shot.

    Grandma was the third of the four Englert Sisters, all of whom were also in fine health then (and lived many more years as well). Here they are as kids, with their dad, Henry Roman Englert, then head of the Steel & Copperplate Engravers Union in New York. Here they are again, that same summer of ’53, at the beach.

    Grandma grew up at 732 E. 142nd Street in The Bronx, which looked like this in 1885 and is today a parking lot. The house where Grandma raised three kids in Fort Lee, New Jersey, at 2063 Hoyt Avenue, is also gone. In fact, the whole street is wiped out. Too close to the George Washington Bridge, which my father helped build, as a cable rigger. All three of our summer places are gone too, replaced by a bank and a shopping center.

    But what lives is the love. Grandma was one of the most loving people I’ve ever known. Pop told me she was a tough mom when he was growing up, but for us grandkids she was a saint. She loved kids totally, always welcomed and fed us, loved to read us stories (in her warm Bronx accent) and tuck us into bed when we spent the night (which was always a treat). She never had a critical word to say, and was always full of encouragement and support.

    This is all strong in my mind right now as my own two grandkids sleep upstairs in their house here in Baltimore, where I’ve been visiting.

    Grandparenting is different than parenting. Even these many years later, Grandma is still teaching me that.

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  • What could be more social than a real marketplace?

    When we say “social” these days, we mostly mean the sites and services of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare and other commercial entities. Not talking on the phone or in person. Not meeting at a café. Not blogging, or emailing or even texting. Those things are all retro and passé. Worse, they’re not what marketers get high off of these days. Meaning they’re outside the Big Data ecosystem, most of which is devoted to improving the vast business of guesswork we call advertising, flowing outward increasingly through digital media.

    The marketplace where all the Big Bux are being spent these day is not the public one where culture is made and goods are bought and sold. It’s the marketing marketplace.

    Go to SelectOut.org. See who and what is tracking you right now. Chances are it’s more than a few of the hundreds of companies listed here. The market they’re in is putting better crosshairs on your back and your wallet. Not the one where you live and you shop.

    Their market is in selling your ass to advertisers. So is Twitter’s, for that matter. It’s not serving you as a customer. You are a consumer. Your job is to consume “content,” and hopefully every once in awhile also click on stuff you might buy. That’s it. Yes, it’s a trade-off, but it’s not a very conscious one, and it’s not very “social,” either. Not when you don’t really know the company, or have a relationship with human beings there. Ever tried to call customer service at Facebook? Or hell, at Google? They don’t do that. They don’t want to get personal with you, even if they give you free personal services. Again, you’re not the customer. You’re inventory.

    What’s missing here is real innovation in the real marketplace. (Besides what’s going on in VRM, of course.)

    This became clear to me yesterday when John Wilbanks mentioned an amazing idea he had posted recently, titled Consumption Offsets and Sustainable Loyalty Cards. Here are the key paragraphs:

    I had two ideas today. One is that if we can trade emissions at a corporate level, we should be able to trade consumption. So if we can track consumption of goods, and the sustainability of those goods, we have the rudiments of a market for consumption. So why not offer (wealthy, western, northern) people the chance to pay extra for an offset for their iPad like they do with their plane ticket?

    My other idea was based on the ever present loyalty cards for grocery stores, pharmacies, and even cupcake shops in the US. You give away your personal data in return for lower prices (although I often use the algorithm of [local area code of store] + 867-5309). Why not something similar for sustainable goods? Either you pay the full price, or you pony up your data to save the world. Also you get a sticker to put on your computer to show how much better you are than other people – and that’s big, because being proud of being a sustainable consumer is currently, and unfortunately, densely tied to being one.

    Both here and in conversation, John posed an interesting question: If personal data really is an “asset class,” as the World Economic Forum says it is, shouldn’t we be able to sell it? Or to make it fungible in some other way?

    John’s second idea raises two interesting questions:

    • Who would buy your personal data?
    • What would they use it for?

    Especially when, right now, lots of companies you don’t know (and a few you do) are getting that data for free. Would they pay more than nothing for it? If not, is it possible that it really is worth nothing?

    When I ask questions like the two above, the answer I usually get is marketers and marketing. Some of the data you shed in the course of surfing and shopping helps sellers remember and serve you. Amazon always comes up as a canonical example. But even there Amazon is often suggesting books I’ve already bought or would hardly be interested in. Grocery stores, meanwhile, mostly use my shopping data to push coupons for stuff I bought once and might never buy again. The whole loyalty card game is one reason we do most of our grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s, which doesn’t bother with any gimmicks, and gives great service as well.

    Here’s where I’m going with this: The marketplace that matters is the primary one where we live and work and shop. Not the secondary one where people we don’t know are sniffing our digital butts to see what we’ve consumed and might want to consume instead (or again).

    I’m about to lead a session at the Social Business Jam, on Seamless Integration of Social. In the spirit of Dave Winer’s bailing from Facebook today, I’d like to suggest that we look at how social works in real markets, and why we keep mistaking closed private markets on the Web for real ones.

    For evidence of how far off base we are, here’s Zemanta‘s list of articles related to what I’ve been writing about here:

    Related articles

    And, as a small counterweight to that dollarfall of investment and buzz, A Sense of Bewronging.

    See ya at the jam.

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  • Fall for trees

    Harvard Yard thinks it’s October. The Red, Sugar and Norway maples, the Scarlet and Pin oaks, the dogwoods and hawthorns, have all been at peak Fall color around Boston the last few days. The weather has been glorious too, hovering around 70° in the afternoons. Lots of people walking around in shorts, the sidewalk cafés packed with customers eating sandwiches and drinking coffee. If it weren’t for the freak snowstorm and a mild frost a couple weeks back, the predominant foliage might still be green. It’s been a warm Fall.

    After attending a great talk by John Wilbanks at lunch yesterday (and my latest $25 ticket for going several minutes over the 2 hour limit on my parking meter), I moved the car, poured another $2 into another meter, and walked around Cambridge, just enjoying the warmth and the scenery. I took a bunch of pictures with my phone as well, which joined this batch here, which includes shots taken with a real camera, plus some with a scanner.

    My interests in Science as a kid were organized as a series of obsessions. Their order went something like this:

    1. Trees
    2. Oceans and sea life
    3. Weather
    4. Astronomy
    5. Paleontology
    6. Radio

    The first four were primarily informed by Golden Guide books my parents bought for my sister and me. The titles were Trees, Fishes, Weather and Stars. Amazingly, I still have Trees, “@1956, 1952, by Western Publishing Company, Inc.” (That last link goes to the current version, on Amazon.) I turned nine years old in the Summer of 1956. I remember being so obsessed with trees that I would spend hours at the end of our street, identifying the sycamores, elms, beeches, hickories, oaks and maples of Borg’s Woods, then still decades away from becoming Hackensack‘s pride of a nature preserve. Thanks to fellow obsessives and the Web, anyone in the world can see those trees too.

    My old Trees book was helpful in identifying some of the leaves in those shots I’ve taken the last few days. So has Ryan Lynch’s Crimson Canopy, with it’s excellent Harvard Yard Trees. I only discovered the site late yesterday after I got home. If I had the time, I’d walk around again with the iPad and Ryan’s maps to check again on which trees were which.

    Perhaps readers inclinded to horticulture, plant taxonomy and dendrology can help puzzle out and correct identification of leaves such as this one here, which on Map 6 of Crimson Canopy is identified as a Red maple, but looks to me more like a Silver maple. (There’s a lot of variation among the Reds, though, I’ve noticed.) I should point out that it’s a big leaf.

    So today it’s supposed to rain, and I’m busy, so that’ll be it for this year’s walks among Fall colors. Tomorrow starts several weeks of travel.

    Bonus links:

  • Back to Blogging

    Today is the first day in months when my first question wasn’t, “What can I do to finish (or improve) the book today?” That’s because I turned in the (hopefully) final draft yesterday morning.

    Details: The book is The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge and the publisher is Harvard Business Review Press. You can pre-order it on Amazon.

    There are still hurdles to cross (copy editing, a few quote approvals), but all balls are in courts other than mine at the moment. So I can get back to all the stuff I’ve neglected in the meantime, including this: blogging.

    I think it was twelve years ago today that I put up the first post on this blog. Here it is. Funny, it mentions that this new Cluetrain book is going to come out, and is available for pre-order on Amazon. I didn’t remember that until just now.

    Note that the image of me in the title bar at the top of this page is taken from the photo in that first post. The other three guys still look like they did back then, but I’ve moved on. Meanwhile that old picture has become my “brand” now, I guess. Kind of like Colonel Sanders, Uncle Ben, Betty Crocker and Aunt Jemimah. With the goatee I’ve grown since then, it’s now Colonel Sanders I most resemble. Except I’m still alive and stopped wearing glasses full-time not long after that shot was taken. (Nothing medical was involved. I just quit wearing them and my eyes got better.)

    From 1999 until I found Tweeting easier, I generally posted several times a day, almost every day. Posting was easier on that old platform: Dave Winer‘s Manila. And I mostly wrote in one of Dave’s outliners — or sometimes in HTML with a simple text editor. Writing in WordPress is more complicated, but my favorite blogging tool is still OPML.

    Once tweeting came along, a lot of the stuff I once blogged about I began tweeting about instead. I still tweet, but blogging is more substantive, and the results are more like real publishing and less like snow on pavement. (I was going to say “snow on the water,” but that’s what radio is.) For example, you can still find everything I’ve ever blogged. Can’t say the same about everything I’ve ever tweeted. At least not easily. (If there is an easy way to search back through your own tweets, even to ones you wrote several years ago, let me know.)

    After I started bearing down on the book, in the Summer of last year, I found that blogging no longer worked as a steam valve on the side of whatever else I was doing. At least not in respect to the book. Writing a book, at least for me, required a level of focus and concentration I had never put into anything, ever. Self-discipline has never been my strong suit, and still isn’t; but I had to become much more self-disciplined to write this thing. Alas, one diversion that became essential to deny was blogging. Even though I could blurt out a blog post in a few minutes, returning to the Task At Hand wasn’t easy.

    It was also hard to write what I knew wouldn’t appear in print for many months. Blogging was live and engaging. Writing a book required being engaged with The Work Itself, which was new to me. It wasn’t until the book started to look and feel like a book — and not a series of long blog posts — that I could get down and groove with it. Once that started to happen, early this year, the book became something I enjoyed doing and got energy from as I did it. By the end of the project I found myself wanting to go straight on to the next book. Turns out I liked running marathons and not just sprinting. As a writer, that is.

    But I also became much more of a desk potato than I already was. Not good.

    So now here I am, ready both to sprint again in print and to go back outside, ride a bike, play basketball, take walks… anything to get my butt back into something close to “shape.” Got a ways to go with that.

    Anyway, bear with me as I work my way back into my old grooves, and try to find a balance between all the too many things I’ve always done, to which I’ve now added book writing. Gonna be an interesting challenge.

  • Need help with a Word bug

    I need help debugging this.

    word bugThe image on the left is a screenshot of Word 2011 bug effects that are standing in the path of a book am finishing. If you click on it you’ll go to a larger image with mouse-over notes explaining the problem, which I’ll detail here in slightly greater length.

    While the Print view looks fine, and clicking on any text shows the correct style in the Styles toolbox, the Outline view has big problems. Lines of normal text, regardless of formatting, show up in the Outline view as Level 1. They also show up as Level 1 or 2 in the Document Map Pane sidebar, which is the pane on the left.

    “The Comity of the Commons” is Heading 2. So is “Agency,” though it shows up as something between Level 2 and 3. The other items flush-left are all normal text that Word has elevated to Heading 1, even though they are not.

    I use this pane to navigate around the book, which is close to 300 pages and over 80,000 words. Having so many illegitimate Heading 1’s and Heading 2’s makes navigating nearly impossible using the Document Map Pane sidebar.

    I can very temporarily fix the problem by clicking on the line of text incorrectly seen by word as Heading 1 or 2, clearing the formatting, and re-formatting it if necessary. But that takes me about an hour each time this happens, and it’s a huge PITA. And then it goes back to this state anyway.

    Word’s AutoRecovery works rarely, and when it does, the AutoRecovered file has the same problem. FWIW, I don’t use any fancy formatting, instead relying on Word’s own default Headings and other styles.

    Bonus problem: If I view and save in Outline view, ALL TEXT gets turned into Level 1, and the document is hosed. I just have to go back to the last good copy.

    I have wasted my time on the phone already with Microsoft support, which was useless.

    I have invested some time with Craig Burton on the phone. He opened one of my screwed-up book drafts in his Windows version of Word 2011, and the doc was screwed up in exactly the same way.

    So the docs (.docx) are being screwed up, somehow. It’s not a display issue. It’s embedded in the file itself. And unscrewing the problem doesn’t help, because the file screws up again anyway. The document doesn’t appear to be screwed in Print view; but in Outline view, and in the Document View Pane sidebar, it is screwed. So, as it’s going now, I’ll be turning in a document that can only be used in Print view.

    Any clues or help you can provide would be greatly appreciated. And please don’t tell me not to use Word. I wish I didn’t have to; but it’s a requirement if I want to get this book finished and in.

    Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

    [Later…] Autoflowering, below, gave me an answer I tried before — saving the file as a .doc instead of a .docx — and seeing if that worked. It didn’t the first time, but it did this time, and has been working for more than a day now. I’m not convinced that the file isn’t still corrupted in some way, but it seems to work fine. So, thanks to everybody for your help.

  • Circular quoting

    So I’m writing about financialization. Kevin Phillips‘ prophetic book on the subject, Bad Money, is open on my desk. (He published it in early 2007, in advance of The Crash.) But it doesn’t contain the definitional quote that I need. So I turn to Wikipedia. There, in the Financialization entry, we are treated to this quote:

    Financialization may be defined as: “the increasing dominance of the finance industry in the sum total of economic activity, of financial controllers in the management of corporations, of financial assets among total assets, of marketised securities and particularly equities among financial assets, of the stock market as a market for corporate control in determining corporate strategies, and of fluctuations in the stock market as a determinant of business cycles” (Dore 2002)

    Nice, but there is no citation for Dore; just some “further reading”:

    Dore, R (2000). Stock Market Capitalism: Welfare Capitalism: Japan and Germany vs. the Anglo-Saxons. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-924061-2.

    So I go look that up, find it on Amazon, and look inside. I choose to search for “determinant,” a fairly rare word, and get five results. None are what’s quoted in Wikipedia. But, since Ronald Dore is a scholar, I figure he must have written that definition somewhere. But when I go to look, the results are a cascade of Wikipedia citations. Not the original Dore.

    This drives me just as nuts as I get when I go to look up, say, a geographical feature and get pages of commercial businesses associated with the feature, but not the feature itself. Google Maps is one offender here. Look up “Comb Ridge”, and you get this: http://g.co/maps/syspr. (Here are my own many shots of Comb Ridge.) The difference in this case is that I can still find Comb Ridge, while the provenance of the original Dore quote remains a mystery to me.

    And, since I want to finish my book today, I’m not going to fool around any more with it. I’ll find some other definition. Still, I need to gripe a bit. Sloppy citing is a curse that keeps on cursing. Or causing it, anyway.

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