While everybody else is stuck in 1080p — aka “full HD” — Apple is thinking and developing on a bigger canvas than that — starting with the new iPad‘s 2048 x 1536 screen. They are always looking to move standard usage forward by large steps (where they change the whole market and win big in the process), and you can bet they’re doing that again with display. The iPad display won’t be the last Apple one to break out of the 1080p mold.

For a snapshot of where we are now, go shop for a computer monitor . Most of what you’ll find is 1920 x 1080: the dimensions of HDTV, and the continued embodiment of ATSC standards for TV that were adopted in the early 1990s in anticipation of the fully digital age. That age is now here, and in the process TV is getting slowly absorbed into the Internet. So, at this point in history, your computer monitor can be your TV, and vice versa. Digital movie production is also now standardized on 1080p24 (24 frames per second) standard. So it looks like everything is settled, right? Well, I am sure Steve Jobs and friends looked at that situation several years ago and saw “stuck” instead of “settled.” The new iPad is the first clear clue that this was the case.

In the long roster of display resolutions, the iPad’s dimensions are QXGA, which is among the breed of 3×4 resolutions. 1080p is 16×9. What matters here, however, isn’t the standard being used, or the dimensions, but breaking out of a currently defaulted (or stuck) mode.

The main question for me is whether or not Apple will succeed in building a walled garden for everything new that breaks out of the old 1080p mold. I doubt they’ll succeed, but I’ll bet they’ll try.

(Oh, and in case you doubt my prophetic powers regarding Apple, check out what I wrote to Dave Winer in 1997.)

Some clothing we need. That’s the kind that keeps us warm, or shielded from sunlight, or from getting our feet burned or cut up. Some clothing we wear because we like the way it makes us look, or how it gives us a way to conform with social conventions, or to flaut the same.

But basically, clothing keeps us covered up. It hides what we call our “privates.” Also our love handles, pot bellies, surgery scars, cellulite, man-boobs, and tattoos we’d rather not show. Clothing can also enlarge or showcase our best features, or make our less-than-best look better.

In all cases other than the naked one, clothing gives us a means for doing what techies call selective disclosure — while just as selectively keeping some things undisclosed. Or, therefore, private.

What I’m saying here is that maybe, as we debate what privacy is, what it means, and how to deal with it through technology, business and policy, that the things that can teach us the most about privacy are the ones in our closets and drawers.

For fun, dig the best ad for clothing, ever: Barney’s Men of Destiny.

Bonus link.

According to this…

… the Aurora is on.

The Kp Index has hit 5, and a geomagnetic storm is on.

Here’s today’s SpaceWeather on the matter. Follow the links there.

Bear in mind that the aurora are curtains of light up to a thousand miles high. So if the auroral oval is pushed down over southern Canada (which these storms tend to do), it should still be visible far south across the United States. Current links:

• Northern Lights over the UK  metofficenews.wordpress.com)
• An Easy Guide To Observing Aurora  mbcalyn.wordpress.com)
• Epic Geomagnetic Storm Erupts : Discovery News  mbcalyn.com)
• Will you see the lights tonight?  blogs.discovermagazine.com)
• NOAA: Largest Solar Radiation Storm Since 2005 Now in Progress  geologyfreak.wordpress.com)
• Northern Lights Dance Over Northern England  usnews.com)
• Solar Storm January 2012 – How is it Changing You and the World?  moonlightenedshelves.wordpress.com)
• MASSIVE SOLAR STORM: Delta Reroutes Flights amid Biggest Storm Since 2005  blippitt.com)
• Geomagnetic storm expected to hit Earth on Tuesday  100gf.wordpress.com)

I was near the end of my career as a PR guy when I wrote the essay below for the January 1992 issue of Upside. Since then Upside has been erased. Some bits of it still persist on the Internet Archive, but nothing before 1996. But I did save my own draft of the piece, and put it up here, back in the mid-90s, where it has remained all but invisible. So I thought it would be fun to surface it now on the blog, on the 20th anniversary of its original publication. Here goes:

THE PROBLEM WITH PR

Toward a world beyond press releases and bogus news

By Doc Searls

There is no Pulitzer Prize for public relations. No Peabody. No Heismann. No Oscar, Emmy or Eddy. Not even a Most Valuable Flacker award. Sure, like many misunderstood professions, public relations has its official bodies, and even its degrees, awards and titles. Do you know what they are? Neither do most people who practice the profession.

The call of the flack is not a grateful one. Almost all casual references to public relations are negative. Between the last sentence and this one, I sought to confirm this by looking through a Time magazine. It took me about seven seconds to find an example: a Lance Morrow essay in which he says Serbia has “the biggest public relations problem since Pol Pot went into politics.” Since genocide is the problem in question, the public relations solution can only range from lying to cosmetics. Morrow’s remark suggests this is the full range of PR’s work. Few, I suspect, would disagree.

So PR has the biggest PR problem of all: people use it as a synonym for BS. It seems only fair to defend the profession, but there is no point to it. Common usage is impossible to correct. And frankly, there is a much smaller market for telling the truth than for shading it.

For proof, check your trash for a computer industry press release. Chances are you will read an “announcement” that was not made, for a product that was not available, with quotes by people who did not speak them, for distribution to a list of reporters who considered it junk mail. The dishonesty here is a matter of form more than content. Every press release is crafted as a news story, complete with headline, dateline, quotes and so forth. The idea is to make the story easy for editors to “insert” with little or no modification.

Yet most editors would rather insert a spider in their nose than a press release in their publication. First, no self-respecting editor would let anybody else — least of all a biased source — write a story. Second, press releases are not conceived as stories, but rather as “messages.”

It is amazing how much time, energy and money companies spend to come up with “the right message.” At this moment, thousands of staffers, consultants and agency people sit in meetings or bend over keyboards, straining to come up with perfect messages for their products and companies. All are oblivious to a fact that would be plain if they paid more attention to their market than their product.

There is no demand for messages.

There is, however, a demand for facts. To editors, messages are just clothing and make-up for emperors that are best seen naked. Editors like their subjects naked because facts are raw material for stories. Which brings up another clue that public relations tends to ignore.

Stories are about conflict.

What makes a story hot is the friction in its core. When that friction ceases, the story ends. Take the story of Apple vs. IBM. As enemies, they made great copy. As collaborators, they are boring as dirt.

The whole notion of “positive” stories is oxymoronic. Stories never begin with “happily ever after.” Happy endings may resolve problems, but they only work at the end, not the beginning. Good PR recognizes that problems are the hearts of stories, and takes advantage of that fact.

Unfortunately, bad PR not only ignores the properties of stories, but imagines that “positive” stories can be “created” by staging press conferences and other “announcement events” that are just as bogus as press releases — and just as hated by their audiences.

Columnist John Dvorak, a kind of fool killer to the PR profession, says, “So why would you want to sit in a large room full of reporters and publicly ask a question that can then be quoted by every guy in the place? It’s not the kind of material a columnist wants — something everybody is reporting. I’m always amazed when PR types are disappointed when I tell them I won’t be attending a press conference.”

So why does PR persist in practices its consumers hold in contempt?

Because PR’s consumers are not its customers. PR’s customers are companies who want to look good, and pay PR for the equivalent of clothing and cosmetics. If PR’s consumers — the press — were also its customers, you can bet the PR business would serve a much different purpose: to reveal rather than conceal, clarify rather than mystify, inform rather than mislead.

But it won’t happen. Even if PR were perfectly useful to the press, there is still the matter of “positioning” — one of PR’s favorite words. I have read just about every definition of this word since Trout & Ries coined it in 1969, and I am convinced that a “position” is nothing other than an identity. It is who you are, where you come from, and what you do for a living. Not a message about your ambitions.

That means PR does not have a very good position. It’s identity is a euphemism, or at least sounds like one. While it may “come from” good intentions, what it does for a living is not a noble thing. Just ask its consumers.

Maybe it is time to do with PR what we do with technology: make something new — something that works as an agent for understanding rather than illusion. Something that satisfies both the emperors and their subjects. God knows we’ve got the material. Our most important facts don’t need packaging, embellishment or artificial elevation. They only need to be made plain. This may not win prizes, but it will win respect.

Are we in that “world beyond” yet? If so, how far?

At the time I wrote that essay, my company was morphing from a PR agency to a marketing consultancy, mostly because I had become tired of being hired to do BS, even if the stated ambitions were more high-minded than that. Then, as the Nineties unfurled, I became tired of doing the BS that was expected of  marketing as well, especially since the Net and the Web had come along and changed the communications environment for nearly everything and everybody.

Yet both PR and marketing continued to be funded by corporate demand for better BS — even when BS could be exposed and disproven far more easily and by many more people. Persistent oblivity to the obvious was one big reason why Chris Locke, David Weinberger, Rick Levine and I co-wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto, and why much of the essay above was leveraged in the Markets are Conversations chapter of the book.

Now another decade has passed, and questions still stand. For example, Is PR still a synonym for BS? And, if not, how?

On the definition (or re-definition) front, the PRSA has floated three new definitions for PR, with the hashtag #PRDefined:

Definition No. 1:

Public relations is the management function of researching, engaging, communicating, and collaborating with stakeholders in an ethical manner to build mutually beneficial relationships and achieve results.

(Read the annotated version here.)

Definition No. 2:

Public relations is a strategic communication process that develops and maintains mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their key publics.

(Read the annotated version here.)

Definition No. 3:

Public relations is the engagement between organizations and individuals to achieve mutual understanding and realize strategic goals.

(Read the annotated version here.)

This is a serious effort, with much involvement by Phillip Sheldrake, whom I respect very much.

The main challenge, both for PR and for companies in general, is that individuals — both within companies and out in the marketplace — are going to be taking more and more of the lead in relations with the market’s supply side. Reduction in demand for BS by company brass will help that progress happen. But engagement will be the main thing. That’s why I vote for Definition No. 3, without the “realize strategic goals” clause (which is straight out of BuzzPhraser).

PR for most of its history has been less about relations with publics (a term only PR folk use, far as I know) than about relations between companies and mediators: the press, TV, radio and (more recently) “influencers” on the Web. The best people in PR and marketing have for decades been trying to move business relations in the personal direction. That is, toward the public itself, directly.

But will PR will still be PR when that happens? In other words, if somebody’s job is to help companies relate personally to customers, and to welcome customer input and leadership, what should we call that somebody’s job?

Bonus links:

• Why startups shouldn’t hire PR firms (Mark Cuban at blogmaverick.com)
• Communication shouldn’t be this tough for professionals  howtoughcanitbe.wordpress.com)
• What is PR?  helenwilsonpr.wordpress.com)
• Pondering Three Candidate Definitions for PR  nextcommunications.blogspot.com)
• What is PR?  rachelbarkley.wordpress.com)
• Top 10 Myths about Publicity and Public Relations  redpenofdoom.com)
• Public Relations Versus Marketing Communications: Can One Write For The Other?  deliberateink.com)
• Never Hire a Bad Billionaire PR Client  theprcoach.com)
• Let Us All Come Together to Improve the PR Industry Through Ridicule [PR Dummies]  gawker.com)
• What is PR?  maymedallada.com)

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. 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:

• Pastos Grandes Ignimbrite, Pastos Grandes Caldera—2.9 million years ago (>820 km³)^[27]
• Heise volcanic field, Walcott Tuff, Idaho, United States, Yellowstone hotspot—6.4 million years ago (750 km³).^[10]
• Aso, Kyūshū, Japan—four large explosive eruptions between 300,000 to 80,000 years ago (last one >600 km³)
• Long Valley Caldera, Bishop Tuff, California, United States—~760,000 years ago (600 km³)
•  Tambora, Sumbawa Island, West Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia—1815 (160 km³), the following year, 1816, became known as the “Year Without a Summer.”
• Baekdu Mountain, China/North Korea—~969 CE (96±19 km³)
• Lake Taupo, Taupo Volcanic Zone, North Island, New Zealand—Hatepe eruption ~181 CE(120 km³)^[16]
• Kikai Caldera, Nansei Islands, Japan—~6,300 years ago (~4,300 BCE) (150 km³)
• Macauley Island, Kermadec Islands, New Zealand—~6,300 years ago (~4,300 BCE) (100 km³)^[18][19]
• Aira Caldera, Kyūshū, Japan—~22,000 years ago (~110 km³)
• Rotoiti Ignimbrite, Taupo Volcanic Zone, North Island, New Zealand—~50,000 years ago (~240 km³)^[20]
• Campi Flegrei, Naples, Italy—39,280 ± 110 years ago (500 km³)
• Reporoa Caldera, Taupo Volcanic Zone, North Island, New Zealand—230,000 years ago (~100 km³)^[21]
• Mamaku Ignimbrite, Rotorua Caldera, Taupo Volcanic Zone, North Island, New Zealand—240,000 years ago (>280 km³)^[22]
• Matahina Ignimbrite, Haroharo Caldera, Taupo Volcanic Zone, North Island, New Zealand—280,000 years ago (~120 km³)^[23]
• Valles Caldera, New Mexico, United States—~1.15 million years ago (~600 km³)^[24]
• Mangakino, Taupo Volcanic Zone, North Island, New Zealand—three eruptions from 0.97 to 1.23 million years ago (each > 300 km³)^[25]
• Henry’s Fork Caldera, Mesa Falls Tuff, Idaho, United States, Yellowstone hotspot—1.3 million years ago (280 km³)^[8]
• Karymshina, Kamchatka, Russia—1.78±0.02 million years ago^[26]
• Bruneau-Jarbidge, Idaho, United States, Yellowstone hotspot—~10–12 million years ago (>250 km³) (responsible for the Ashfall Fossil Beds~1,600 km to the east^[28])

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:

• Supervolcanoes Won’t Destroy Earth in 2012  livescience.com)
• U.S. seismic hazard zones awaken: Long Valley super-volcano earthquake swarm notice  theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com)
• Is a super-volcano just 390 miles from London about to erupt?  theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com)
• Increased seismic activity seen at dangerous Santorini caldera  theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com)
• Long Valley Observatory  http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/lvo/)
• Volcanic Caldera Lake  gaijinmd.wordpress.com)
• Something tio watch out for – Large Icelandic volcanic eruption  amanwithaphd.wordpress.com)
• A Canarian comparison  geologygeek.wordpress.com)
• Signs of unrest at the famous Tambora Caldera in Indonesia  bigthink.com)
• What was kilaueas most violent eruption  wiki.answers.com)
• Volcanic Caldera Lake  gaijinmd.wordpress.com)
• Something tio watch out for – Large Icelandic volcanic eruption  amanwithaphd.wordpress.com)
• A Canarian comparison  geologygeek.wordpress.com)
• Signs of unrest at the famous Tambora Caldera in Indonesia  bigthink.com)
• What was kilaueas most violent eruption  wiki.answers.com)
• What was the most devastating eruption in new zealand  wiki.answers.com)
• Where are volcanoes in eastern US  wiki.answers.com)

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.

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:

• Android’s Cheap, Low Quality Apps Make It Feel Like A Technological Ghetto (APPL, GOOG)  businessinsider.com)
• Android and Samsung steal the show in comScore October report  slashgear.com)
• Android bumps up smartphone lead over Apple’s iOS  news.cnet.com)
• Android bumps up smartphone lead over Apple’s iOS  news.cnet.com)
• Android and iOS claim 83% of U.S. app downloads  intomobile.com)
• Google Android, Still Top Smartphone Platform in the US  ewriting.pamil-visions.com)
• The iPhone Has The Edge: iOS Just Works Better (APPL)  businessinsider.com)
• Android overtakes iOS in top European markets, says ComScore  digitaltrends.com)
• Android commands half of the U.S. smartphone platform market  venturebeat.com)
• Why The iPhone’s Market Share War With Android Actually Matters (AAPL, GOOG)  businessinsider.com)
• Android gains ground from BlackBerry in latest US mobile comScore figures  thenextweb.com)
• comScore: One In Ten Mobile Subscribers Now Using An iPhone  techcrunch.com)
• Blackberry rules Canada, but Android closing gap  business.financialpost.com)
• Keeping Pace with Market Demand Firebox Training Now Offers both Android Training Classes and Advanced Android Training Courses  prweb.com)
• Canada ‘still a BlackBerry nation’  theglobeandmail.com)
• comScore: Android still way ahead, but Apple now grabs 10% US market share  slashgear.com)

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:

• Fall colors on the Minuteman Bikeway, October 26-29, 2009
• Fall colors on Otter Lake, New Hampshire, October 11-13, 2008
• Maine trip, October 20-21, 2007

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.

I’ve been listening to the repeat broadcast of the Howard Stern Show, recorded live in New York as the 9/11 events unfolded. It’s been a transporting experience. The anger, bewilderment, confusion and fear are all there.

I was at our house in Montecito, California when it happened. My sister Jan called right after the first tower was hit, and we watched the rest on TV. Then I switched to the radio and blogged a number of posts through the day. Here they are (in reverse chronological order):

Stars. Just stars. 

Walking back from a meeting at school this evening, the kid and I looked up at the sky, as always. But it was … different. What was that behind the high branches of an Oak tree? A star or an — no, it couldn’t be an airplane. There were no airplanes in the sky tonight. Only stars: a condition we haven’t seen in nearly a century.

“Why aren’t the planes flying, Papa?” he asked. I explained. He asked again. I explained again. I stopped the questioning when the count got to four.

But it won’t stop.

What’s down? 

I get a steady flow of email, up to hundreds per day. But after 5:13 tonight, nothing. Is it just that everybody’s watching CNN now? No idea. Seems creepy.

More perspective 

Here’s Morgan Stanley, which had 3500 people working in the World Trade Center:

Because of the enormous emotional and physical toll that these events have taken and will take among many of our employees and their families…

Close to home 

We just lost power for a few minutes. No idea why.

One answer 

Here’s Eric S. Raymond on our “First Lessons” about terrorism.

Ironytrack 

Dean points out that today the United Nations opens in New York on the International Day of Peace.

Blogtracks 

Here are Blogger sites mentioning “World Trade” or “terrorist.”

How? 

BBC says the pilots would surely have been killed first, since they would never follow orders to fly into a building. I notice that all four planes involved were 757s and 767s, which have roughly identical cockpits.

Odd how we mull details like these to get a small grip on an immense tragedy. Right now I don’t even want food. Just details.

Now it gets personal 

Our West Coast family members check in fine. One is in Ohio, and will probably drive home to L.A. So far we’re lucky. East Coast, not so sure. I have a cousin who works in the Pentagon. My sister is a retired Navy officer, recently moved from Arlington to North Carolina. “I lost friends today,” she tells me. But who? So far we also don’t know very much about who lived, who died, who’s lost, trapped or worse.

Dave points to a press release reporting the death of Danny Lewin. He was on the American flight from New York to Los Angeles that crashed into the World Trade Center. I didn’t know Danny, but I’ve met him. He was a good guy. According to his bio, he was also a member of the Israeli Defense Forces. I imagine he would have done his best, as a passenger, to stop this thing.

And there were so many others lost today. So many families waiting, right now, for loved ones to call, to show up at the door.

The deepest human substance 

Now is the time to give blood, not take it. Wherever you are, please give some. For New York, call 1 800 933-blood or visit http://nybloodcenter.org/.

Declaration of Peace 

One of the surprising things to me about blogging is how much I don’t say. I tend to be a very disclosing guy, but if anything I tend to disclose less personal stuff than I ever thought I would have when I started this thing in 1999.

But today I’ll tell you where I come from on the matter of war.

I am a pacifist. I applied for contientious objector status during the Vietnam War, and I would have served in that capacity if I hadn’t received a medical deferment.

I went to a Quaker college, and have always felt most at home, philosophically and morally, with the Society of Friends. Although I currently attend a Catholic Church, my beliefs are the same.

What happened today brings out the pacifist in me, and the linguist as well. Just about everything we believe, and say, is framed up by conceptual metaphors. In the words of George Lakoff, written at the height of the Gulf War, metaphors can kill.

We have a choice about the ones we use. For the sake of those still with us, and the souls of those we’ve lost, choose your conceptual frameworks carefully.

Perspective 

We hear that 50,000 people worked in the World Trade Center alone. Consider these numbers:

4,435 U.S. soldiers died in the Revolutionary War, and another 2,260 in the War of 1812. Including civilians, 373,458 died in the Civil War. 53,513 combat deaths in World War I, plus 63,195 “other.” 292,131 combat deaths in Word War II, plus 115,185 “other.” 33,651 combat deaths in the Korean War (no “other” listed) 47,369 combat deaths in the Vietnam War, and 10,799 “other.” And for the Gulf war, the respective numbers were 148 and 145.

Here’s another summary.

Loverolling 

Zeldman. Dean. Adam. Dave. Cam, Eric, Akamai. Richard. Brent. Susan. Grant.East/West. Ultrasparky. Queso. Kottke. Meg. Metafilter. Ev. Glenn. Scoble.

I need to pick up the kid from school soon. This morning he wanted to know why his parents were crying. We couldn’t begin to explain.

Open choices 

What happened today may have been an act of war, but it was also an act of insanity.

Many people we know are dead. Many more are dying. This is a time to open our hearts, our homes, our wallets and our minds.

There is only one sane choice open to us all: What can we do to help?

If there is anything you think I can do, let me know. I just added AIM instant messaging to my suite of contacts. My handle, no longer a joke, is “Celeprosy.”

A time for love and mourning 

Pray, find your loved ones. Give help.

And God help us all.

Maybe because I have it 

Wanted to test out the latest AOL Instant Messenger today, so I downloaded it. But first I had to come up with a name. Searls, Dsearls, Dsearls1 and Zdilmidgi were all taken, by me, in the past. But AOL wouldn’t make them available to me because they had to clear it with the now-dead email address I used when I registered those identities. So I gave up on those and tried all kinds of names, finally going with “Celeprosy.” It took. Haven’t installed it yet, though.

What’s the commercial model for your toilet? Your light socket? Your floors? 

I was asked today what the ‘commercial model’ was for a blog hosted on a home computer. It amazes me that the Net is still being asked to justify itself commercially.

But as long as it is, we need Larry Lessig to rant about it. (Thanks to Tom for that link.)

And while we’re on the blog subject, check out the Lockergnome interview with Evan Williams. I ran into Chris Pirillo at TechTV when I was up there recently. Great guy. And he really does look like that Lockergnome dude in the illo.

Well, obviously 

Says here I’m infatuated with Google search results. Actually, amazed is a bit more like it.

Curious: what real competition does Google have these days? Looking here, it’s as if nobody has even bothered reviewing the matter in almost a year. At this point Google rivals the browser itself as a Web interface. It’s a portal that doesn’t act the part.

Is it making money yet? I have no idea.

Because smart people don’t always do that 

Eric Raymond: How to ask questions the smart way.

Blogging was young then. There was no Twitter, no Facebook. Yet blogging felt, and was, far more social — at least for me — than anything else we’ve seen since.

Some thoughts, ten years later:

• Yes, everything changed that day.
• We did go to war, as I expected we would, given the president we had and the mood of the country after being attacked. But the war, billed as one against “terrorism,” has been one of “regime change” in two countries. Since then other regimes have changed that needed changing, without our intervention, and at approximately zero $ cost to the U.S.
• The cost of going to war has been many $trillions, and has nearly (or perhaps actually) bankrupted the country. There was a rope-a-dope strategy behind the attack, and we took the bait.
• The U.S. hasn’t been attacked in the same way again, and for that I am grateful.
• The results of the War on Terrorism are debatable, although they are not much debated.
• The motivations for the attacks on the U.S., besides “they hate us and our way of life” and similar staples of talk radio, have not been visited at much depth, at least by sources the American people pay much attention to. That anybody might have a legitimate gripe against the U.S. is a question no politician wants to ask. And not many ordinary citizens, either.
• Many young men and women in my extended family have served in these wars. I am proud of them. I also wish they hadn’t needed to go.
• The peace movement, in which I played a small part during the Vietnam War, is now dormant. Almost nobody questions the need for war now.
• The hate we felt for Al Qaeda, the self-appointed enemy that attacked on 9/11, has since shifted to each other. I’ve been alive for a long time, and I can’t remember any period, including the Vietnam War, when it has been harder for political opponents to listen to each other, much less understand what the other is saying. Ad hominem arguments rule.
• One reason for our uncompromising political posturing and rhetoric is the loss of the moderate center that was held in place by the mainstream media, and especially by the evening network news. Even as late as 2001, we turned en mass to network TV and newspapers for reporting and analysis that at least tried to be unbiased, accountable and responsible to the whole country and not just to partisan factions. Now even CNN looks like an informercial to me.

I can’t shake the feeling that, in ways we don’t want to admit, the terrorists have won something. 9/11 gave us fear, and the will to attack. It changed our hearts and minds.

When I look back on human history, starting with our diaspora out of Africa only a few dozen millennia ago, I see persisting through it all a will to kill and dominate that is hardly diminished by civilization. We have hated and killed The Other for the duration. For all its many virtues, our species remains a violent and homicidal one. We’ve killed others who looked or spoke differently than we do. We’ve killed for land and religion and resources, which included each other, whom we often kidnapped and made into slaves. Even in our own country we killed each other by the dozens of thousands, over differing notions of freedom. (The Civil War is only two generations back on my father’s side. One great aunt, whom I remember well, was twelve years old when Lincoln was shot, and told stories about it. She was born when slavery was still more than legal in the U.S.)

How many people have died because of 9/11, since that day? Have their deaths been worthwhile? Have they bought peace, really? Will anything, ever? I have my doubts, and those started ten years ago today.

[Later…] Deaths in the War on Terror, according to Wikipedia, as of today:

• Iraq: 62,570 to 1,124,000
• Afghanistan: between 10,960 and 49,600
• Pakistan: between 1467 and 2334
• Somalia: 7,000+

And then,

Total American casualties from the War on Terror
(this includes fighting throughout the world):

US Military killed	5,921[109]
US Military wounded	42,673[109]
US Civilians killed (includes 9/11 and after)	3,000 +
US Civilians wounded/injured	6,000 +
Total Americans killed (military and civilian)	8,800 +
Total Americans wounded/injured	46,000 +
Total American casualties	54,800 +

Draw, or re-draw, your own conclusions. I still don’t have any. Or many. The older I get, the less certain I am of my own opinions, especially about War, the reasoning methods for which which seem to be hard-coded into human nature. In my heart I’m still a pacifist, but in my mind I’m not so sure.

Here’s what I wrote in Deliberate Explosive Devices last year:

I think there lurks in human nature a death wish — for others, even more than for ourselves. We rationalize nothing better, or with more effect, than killing each other. Especially the other. Fill in the blank. The other tribe, the other country, the other culture, the other religion, whatever.  “I’ve seen the future,”Leonard Cohen sings. “It is murder.” (You can read the lyrics here, but I like thevideo version.)

Yet we also don’t. The answer to Matt’s question — How did we keep from blowing ourselves up for all those years? —is lieutenant colonel Stanislav Petrov, and others like him, unnamed. Petrov had the brains and the balls to say “No” to doing the crazy thing that only looked sane because a big institution was doing it.

We’re still crazy. You and I may not be, but we are.

War is a force that gives us meaning, Chris Hedges says. You can read his book by that title, (required reading from a highly decorated and deeply insightful former war correspondent). You can also watch the lecture he gave on the topic at UCSB in 2004. The mystery will be diminished by his answer, but not solved.

Still, every dose of sanity helps.

Still true.

Bonus link from Euan Semple.