Doc Searls Weblog

Just trying to make stuff happen

  • We Need Deep News

    First in the News Commons series.
    An exhibit at the Monroe County History Center, in Bloomington, Indiana

    Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.
    — Thomas Jefferson

    News is the first rough draft of history. — Countless journalists

    “Breaking the News” is the title of an exhibit at the Monroe County History Center here in Bloomington, Indiana.* It traces the history of local news from the mid-18oos, when several competing newspapers served a population of a thousand people or less, to our current time, when the golden age of newspapers is long past, and its survivors and successors struggle to fill the empty shoes of local papers while finding new ways to get around and get along.

    Most of the exhibits are provided by what’s left of the city’s final major newspaper, the Herald-Times, which thankfully still persists. Archives of the paper are also online, going back to 1988. I am told that there are microfilm archives going back farther, available at the Monroe County Public Library. Meanwhile, bound volumes of the paper, from the 1950s through 2013, are up for auction. (More here, including word that older bound volumes are apparently lost.)

    Meanwhile, in our other hometown, the Santa Barbara News-Press is gone after serving the city for more than 150 years. The Wikipedia article for the paper now speaks of it in the past tense: was. Its owner, Ampersand Publishing (for which I can find nothing online), filed for bankruptcy late last month. You can read reports about it in KSBY, the LA Times, the Independent, Noozhawk, Edhat, and a raft of other local and regional news organizations.

    From what I’ve read so far (and I’d love to be wrong) none of those news reports touch on the subject of the News-Press‘ archives, which conceivably reach back across the century and a half it was published. There can’t be a better first draft of history for Santa Barbara than that one. If it’s gone, the loss is incalculable.

    Back here in Bloomington, Dave Askins of the B Square Bulletin, which reports on what public offices and officials are up to, has issued a public RFQ for a digital file repository that will be a first step in the direction of what I suggest we call deep news. Namely, the kind that depends on archives. It begins,

    Introduction:
    The B Square is seeking proposals from qualified web developers to create a digital file repository. The purpose of this repository is to provide a platform where residents of the Bloomington area can contribute and access digital files of civic or historical interest. This repository will allow users to upload files, add metadata, perform searches, and receive notifications about new additions. We invite interested parties to submit their proposals, outlining their approach, capabilities, and cost estimates for the development and implementation of this project. For an example of a similar project, see: https://a2docs.org/ For the source code of that project, see: https://github.com/a2civictech/docstore.

    The links go to a project in Ann Arbor (where Dave used to live and work) that was clearly ahead of its time, which is now.

    We also need wide news, which is what you get from lots of organizations and people doing more than filling the void left by shrunken or departed newspapers. (Also local radio, most of which is now just music and talk programs piped in from elsewhere.)

    News reporting is a process more than a product, and the Internet opens that process to countless new participants and approaches. Many of us have been writing, talking, and working toward Internet-enabled journalism since the last millennium. Jim Fallows (see below), Dan Gillmor, Dave Winer, JD Lasica, Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis, Emily Bell & crew at the Tow Center, and Joshua Benton and the crew at NiemanLab, are among those who come to mind. (I’ll be adding more.) Me too (for example, here).

    Wide news, when it happens, is a commons: an informal cooperative. (The Ostrom Workshop, where my wife and I are visiting scholars, studies them.) I think we are getting there in Santa Barbara. But, as the LA Times story on the News-Press suggests in its closing paragraphs, there are gaps:

    Santa Barbarans have turned to other sources as the newspaper’s staff withered to just a handful of journalists. Along with the Independent and Noozhawk, some locals said they turn to KEYT television and to Edhat, a website that relies heavily on “citizen journalists” to report on local events.

    Melinda Burns, one of many reporters who left the paper after feuding with management, now provides freelance stories to many of the alternative news organizations. Burns, who has spent decades in the news business, including a stint at the Los Angeles Times, said she has seen gaps in coverage in recent years, particularly in the areas of water policy and the changes wrought by legalized cannabis. She continues to report on those topics and said she gives away her in-depth stories free to reach as many people as possible.

    “It keeps me engaged with the community and, God, do we need the coverage,” she said. “The local news outlets are valiant but overworked. It’s just a constant scramble for them to try to keep up.”

    Maybe it helps to know that a landmark local news institution is gone, and the community needs to create a journalistic commons, together: one without a single canonical source, or a scoop-driven culture.

    I think the combination of deep and wide news is a new thing we don’t have yet. I’ll call it whole news. We’ll know it’s whole by what’s not missing. Is hard news covered? City hall? Sports? Music? Fashion? Culture? Events? Is there a collected calendar where anyone can see everything that’s going on? With whole news, there is a checkmark beside each of those and more.

    Toward one of those checkmarks (in addition to the one for city hall), Dave Askins has put together a collective calendar for Bloomington. Wherever you are, you can make one of your own, filled by RSS feeds and .ics files.

    At the close of all his news reports, Scoop Nisker (who just died, dammit) said, “If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own.”

    So let’s do it.

    *Breaking the News is also James Fallows‘ newsletter on Substack. I recommend it highly.

    , ,

  • All home now

    header images for three blogs

    From 2007 until about a month ago, I wrote on three blogs that lived at blogs.harvard.edu. There was my personal blog (this one here, which I started after retiring my original blog), ProjectVRM‘s blog (also its home page), and Trunkline, a blog about infrastructure that was started by Christian Sandvig when he and I were both fellows at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society (and which I kept alive with very occasional posts since then). The image above is from those blogs’ header images.

    All three are now re-homed. This one is at doc.searls.com (a URL that had redirected to blogs/harvard.edu/doc for many years), ProjectVRM’s is at ProjectVRM.org (a URL that had redirected to blogs.harvard.edu/vrm address) and Trunkline’s (which had been at blogs.harvard.edu/trunk) is now at trunkli.org.

    Their hosting service is Pressable.com, a WordPress subsidiary that worked with the Berkman Klein Center to make sure that every link on the Web pointing to pages at those three Harvard-hosted blogs now goes to those pages’ new locations, without anything being 404’d. Which is just. freaking. awesome.

    My thanks and gratitude to all the people who helped, both within those organizations and in my own network of friends. Together they demonstrate that the Web is a living archive and not just a whiteboard.

    , , , , , ,

  • Microsoft Bing Chat 0, Perplexity.ai 1.

    So I thought I’d give Bing a try at using ChatGPT to answer a question for which I knew the answer.

    The question was, “What group sings the theme song to the podcast ‘A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs’?”

    Bing search took me to a page of search results about the podcast itself, which didn’t help; but I saw a chat menu under its search bar. Clicking on that brought up a huge popover headlined, “Chat mode is only available when you have access to the new Bing.” For that I need to “unlock conversational search on Microsoft Edge.”

    So I fired up Edge and clicked on the Chat link. Next, it wanted me to log into Microsoft itself. This required two-factor authentication for my password manager (Dashlane) and for Microsoft, all of which was annoying, but we live in an annoying time.

    Afer all that I finally got to ask Bing Chat the same question. It replied, The theme music for the podcast “A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs” is called “I Can’t Stop Loving You” by Ray Charles1. I hope that helps!

    It didn’t help. In fact, it could hardly be farther off.

    So I said, “No, it’s a female group, and the song was recorded in the 1930s.” It replied, I’m sorry but I couldn’t find any information on the female group that sings the theme music for “A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs” that was recorded in the 1930s. Would you like me to help you with anything else?

    Nope.

    Then I tried ChatGPT, and got this answer:

    The theme song for the podcast “A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs” is performed by a group called “The Men That Will Not Be Blamed for Nothing.” The band is known for their unique blend of punk rock and Victorian music hall influences, and they have a dedicated following within the alternative music scene. Their song “Margate Fhtagn,” which is used as the theme song for the podcast, captures the spirit of the show’s exploration of rock music history.

    Wholly shit. Talk about hallucinating.

    Next I went to perplexity.ai, which gave a correct answer, complete with sources: The theme song for the podcast “A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs” is called “Rock and Roll” [1]. It is a song from 1934 and is believed to be the very first song to use the phrase “rock and roll” in those words.

    The “1” is a footnote going to the source of the answer. which is a post for the “500 Songs” podcast itself. Again, the song is called “Rock and Roll,” and it’s by the Boswell Sisters.

    In that post, Andrew Hickey, the amazing host and producer of ‘500 Songs’, writes,

    The song is called “Rock and Roll”, and it’s from 1934. It is, I believe, the very first song to use the phrase “rock and roll” in those words — there was an earlier song called “rocking and rolling”, but I think it’s the first one to use the phrase “rock and roll”.

    It’s performed by the Boswell Sisters, a jazz vocal trio from the thirties whose lead singer, Connee Boswell, influenced Ella Fitzgerald among others, and it was written by Richard Whiting and Sidney Clare.

    They actually wrote it for Shirley Temple — they’re the people who wrote “On the Good Ship Lollipop” — but it was turned down for use in one of her films so the Boswells did it instead.

    The version I’m using is actually the version the Boswells sang in a film, Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round, rather than the proper studio recording. That’s just because the film version was easier for me to obtain.

    So there you have it.

    I don’t know who does perplexity.ai, but it is by far the most useful AI chatbot I’ve found so far. (Though I’ve been briefed on another one in the works. Stay tuned for that.)

    [Later…] I just asked Google’s Bard the same question, and got this answer:

    The theme song to the podcast “A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs” is “Rock and Roll” by the Boswell Sisters. The song was released in 1934 and is considered to be the first song to use the phrase “rock and roll” in its lyrics. The Boswell Sisters were a jazz vocal trio from the 1930s who were known for their harmonies and their innovative arrangements. Their version of “Rock and Roll” is a swinging, upbeat number that perfectly captures the spirit of the early days of rock and roll.

    The podcast host, Bob Stanley, chose the Boswell Sisters’ version of “Rock and Roll” as the theme song because he felt that it was a fitting way to start each episode. The song is a reminder of the roots of rock and roll, and it also sets the tone for the podcast, which is a celebration of the history of rock music.

    Right about the Boswell sisters, wrong about the host of the podcast. Again, it’s Andrew Hickey, not Bob Stanley.

    So Perplexity.ai still wins.

    [Later (27 July)…] Retesting before pointing to this post again.

    Bing: The theme song for the podcast ‘A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs’ is called “500 Songs” and it is performed by the band The Heat Death[1]. (The [1] footnote just goes to https://500songs.com/. Not very specific, that.)

    ChatGPT: As of my last update in September 2021, the theme song for the podcast “A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs” is performed by the host of the podcast, Andrew Hickey. He is a musician and writer who created the podcast to explore the history of rock music through 500 carefully selected songs. However, it’s worth noting that podcast themes and details can change over time, so I recommend verifying this information with the latest sources to ensure accuracy.

    Bard: I’m a language model and don’t have the capacity to help with that.

    Perplexity.ai: After conducting a search, I could not find any information about a female group that recorded the theme song for the podcast “A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs”. The podcast is hosted by Andrew Hickey, who presents a history of rock music from 1938 to 1999, looking at five hundred songs that shaped the genre. (Six footnotes are appended.)

    So this time all of them failed.

    I only followed up with Perplexity.ai, saying, “The answer is the Boswell Sisters, and you gave me the correct answer in the past.” It replied, I apologize for the confusion. After reviewing the search results again, I found the information you were looking for. The Boswell Sisters, a female vocal group, recorded the theme song used by Andrew Hickey for his podcast “A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs”1. Thank you for bringing this to my attention, and I apologize for any inconvenience caused. The footnote, irrelevantly, goes here.

    [Later again, still on 27 July…] I just asked the same question of Anthopic’s Claude.io. Here is the dialog:

    DS: What group sings the theme song to the podcast ‘A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs’?

    Unfortunately I do not have enough context to determine what the theme song is for the podcast “A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs.” Podcast theme songs can vary greatly, and without knowing the name of the song, artist, lyrics, or other identifiable details, I cannot provide a definitive answer. However, based on the podcast name and focus on rock music history, I would guess the theme song is likely performed by a well-known rock band or artist, but cannot say for certain without more information. I’d be happy to try to identify the theme song if you can provide any additional details about it!
    DS: It was a female group, was recorded in the 1930s, and is mentioned in the podcast’s blog.
    Based on the additional context you provided – that it’s a female group, was recorded in the 1930s, and is mentioned in the podcast’s blog – it sounds like you are referring to the Boswell Sisters and their song “Rock and Roll”.

    The Boswell Sisters were a very popular close harmony singing trio, active in the 1930s. They were known for their jazz, blues, and pop vocal styles.

    In the blog for the podcast “A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs”, the host Andrew Hickey mentions that he uses a 1932 recording of “Rock and Roll” by the Boswell Sisters as the podcast’s theme song. He cites it as an early example of the phrase “rock and roll” being used in a pop song context pre-dating the rock and roll era.

    So unless it’s a different 1930s female group, it seems likely you are asking about the Boswell Sisters and their song “Rock and Roll” being used as the theme for that particular podcast. Let me know if this helps identify the artist you were asking about!

    DS: That is correct. Thank you.

    You’re very welcome! I’m glad I was able to provide the right answer for the theme song to “A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs” after you gave me some helpful additional context. Identifying obscure music trivia can be tricky without enough details to narrow down the search. Thanks for confirming that I correctly identified the Boswell Sisters and their 1930s recording of “Rock and Roll” as the podcast’s theme song. Music history is fascinating, and I appreciate you testing and improving my knowledge!

    So I’ll give Claude half a point for that answer.

    , ,

  • An exercise in perspective

    I wrote this today for a list that’s mostly populated by folks in overlapping music, broadcasting, legal, tech, and other businesses who share a common interest in what’s happening to the arts and artists they care about in a world now turning almost completely digital.—Doc

    Here is a question I hope can get us out of our heads, our histories in the businesses (music, broadcasting, entertainment, publishing, law, pick-your-art), and up past the 30,000-foot level, out into space, so its possible, at least conceptually, to see the digital world that now coexists with the physical one, but with completely new blessings and curses that may have little to do with the physical world models that operate with and under it.

    With that in mind, let’s try putting our minds outside the supply side of the marketplace, with all its incumbent mechanisms and rules, and where all of us have operated for the duration. We’re in space now, looking down on the digital and physical worlds, free to see what might be possible in these co-worlds.

    Now try visiting this question: As a consumer or customer (not all the same) of artistic goods, what would you be willing to pay for them if payment was easy and on your terms and not just those of incumbent industries and their regulatory frameworks?

    For example, Would you pay the recording artists, performers, producers, and composers the tiny amounts most of them get from a play on Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, Apple Music, Pandora, SiriusXM, a radio station or indirectly through the movies or TV shows that feature those goods?

    Try not to be mindful of standing copyright regimes, deals made between all the parties in distribution chains, and subscription systems as they stand. In fact, try to put subscription out of your minds and think instead of what you would want to pay, value-for-value, in a completely open marketplace where you can pay what you like for whatever you like, on an á la carte basis. Don’t think how. Think how much. Imagine no coercion on the providers’ side. You’re the customer. You value what you use and enjoy, and are willing to pay for it on a value-for-value basis.

    To help with this, imagine you have your own personal AI: one that logs all the music you hear, all the programs you watch, all the podcasts you listen to, all the radio you play in your car, and can tell you exactly how much time you spent with each. Perhaps it can tell you what composers, writers, producers, labels, and performers were involved, and help you know which you valued more and which you valued less. (Again, this is your AI, not Microsoft’s, Google’s, Facebook’s, or Apple’s. It works only for you, in your own private life.)

    Then look at whatever you’re spending now, for all the subscription services you employ, for all the one-offs (concerts, movies in theaters, bands night clubs) you also pay for. Would it be more? Less? How much?

    The idea here is to zero-base the ways we understand and build new and more open markets in the digital world, which is decades old at most and will be with us for many decades, centuries, or millennia to come. It should help to look at possibilities in this new non-place without the burden of leveraging models built in a world that is physical alone.

    I submit that in this new world, free customers will be more valuable—to themselves and to the marketplace—than captive ones. And that sellers working toward customer capture through coercive subscription systems and favorable regulations will find less advantage than by following (respecting Adam Smith) the hand-signals of independent customers.

    We don’t know yet if that will be the case. But we can at least imagine it, and see where that goes.

    , , , , ,

  • A look at broadcast history happening

    When I was a kid in the 1950s and early 1960s, AM was the ruling form of radio, and its transmitters were beyond obvious, taking the form of towers hundreds of feet high, sometimes in collections arranged to produce signals favoring some directions over others. These were landmarks out on the edges of town, or standing oddly on salt bogs or farmland.

    From my bedroom in New Jersey, not far across the Hudson from New York City, I could see the red lights on the tops of towers standing in the “Meadowlands” (we called them swamps then) with Manhattan’s skyline beyond.

    The towers in the photo above are three of those, tasked with beaming WMCA/570 and WNYC/820 toward New York’s boroughs from a pond of impounded water beside the Hackensack River and the east spur of the New Jersey Turnpike. Built in 1940, these three towers have by now become the most-seen AM radio signal source on Earth. For a while, they were also the most heard. That’s because, in its prime, which ran from 1958 to 1966, WMCA was also the leading top 40 music station in the world’s leading radio market. (WABC, with a signal ten times as strong, ruled the suburbs, with a night signal heard across half the country.)

    While these days WNYC is the AM side of New York’s public radio empire (which brings in more money, largely from listeners, than any of the commercial stations in town), it is most famous for Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s “Talk to the People” show, which ran in the first half of the 1940s. (Back then WNYC had its own towers standing on what’s now WNYC Transmitter Park, alongside the East River in Brooklyn.)

    Prior to the Internet, major media comprised a fewness of sources, in both print and broadcast. That fewness is over now, and the writing of over-the-air broadcasting’s end is being written on the Internet’s walls, perhaps most purposefully by yours truly. Because I’ve shot and shared thousands of photos of transmitters and antennas, knowing that the land under the most vulnerable ones—those on the AM band—tends to be worth more than the signals themselves. Many of these sites have already been sold off, with signals moving to shared towers on other stations’ sites, or just going dark.

    Radio itself is also slowly being eaten alive: on the talk side by podcasts and on the music side by streaming services and webcasters. So I publish those photos as historical evidence of what in a few years (decades at most) will be no more. (Sorry, but no amount of lawmaking or regulation will save AM radio. Much as many of us—me included—still love it, neither the tech nor the economics can compete with the Internet, smartphones, the cellular system, and computers.)

    So I recently ran a test of a theory: that it is good to have a conversation about all these developments, at least among professionals both active and retired in the broadcast engineering world. What follows is a post I put up for a private group that includes more than a dozen thousand of those.

    Some hopefully fun detective work.

    First, an ad in the November 14, 1949 issue of Broadcasting, the Youngstown-based company that built (or supplied steel) for countless AM stations in that band’s golden age. The image is of the array of six 400-foot tall self-supporting towers putting out the directional night signal for WFMJ, now WNIO/1390. HT for scanning and publishing that page goes to David Gleason, who gives us the amazing and valuable [https://worldradiohistory.com/](https://worldradiohistory.com/)

    Second is a Google StreetView of what I think is the current view of the same site, with the transmitter shack and the six towers replaced. One of those is also a tower in WKBN’s own directional nighttime array. (Also, in the distance is another tower that appears not to participate in either station’s system.)

    Third is a Bing Birds Eye (a fixed-wing aircraft) view of the whole site:

    And a fourth is the Google view from space of the same.

    Of possible relevance is that WNIO and WKBN are non-directional by day, the former from a tower at another site in town. Also that WNIO was a 5kw DA-N from the site for most of its life and is now 9.5kw from the day site and 4.8kw from the night site we see in these images—and that its six towers have six different electrical lengths, ranging from 105.8° to 215.1°, apparently in slightly different positions on the ground. Also that WKBN has been 5kw day and night since the late 1940s.

    We can also see from the Truscon ad that the original address of WFMJ was on Poland-Broadmans Road, which I think is now just Broad. (The current shack for WNIO is on East Western Reserve Road, while WKBN’s is at the end of a long driveway off that same road.) One can also see from above something of the entrance off broad and possibly something of the original footprint of the original tower layout.

    So, some questions are:

    1) Is the first photo from the entrance to the site in the Truscon ad?
    2) When did WKBN show up, or was it already at this site?
    3) Are the different lengths of towers in the current WNIO array the result of more efficient towers in it, and also why the 4.8kw signal roughly matches the old 5kw footprint on the ground?
    4) In 1949, were six towers about the limit of what one could do with a directional array using long math, trig tables, and graph paper, and perhaps a record number for its time?
    5) Was Truscon the outfit that pioneered narrow rather than fat towers, and ones with three sides rather than four?

    There are other variables, of course. But I just enjoy this kind of detective work, and I’m kinda chumming the waters to bait others who like to do the same. Thanks in advance.

    We’ll see who rises to the bait and with what.

    [Later…] Old pal Scott Fybush pointed to one of his transmitter visit reports and added this:  “Summary: the current WNIO night site is not the original 1949 six-tower site. That was on what’s now Boardman-Poland Road (US 224) at what’s now the Shops at Boardman Park strip mall. It succumbed to development in the early 1990s, at which point 1390 moved to what’s now its current day tower. The current six-tower night array on Western Reserve Rd. was built in 2003, next to the 1977-vintage WKBN array. WKBN’s original DA was at the WKBN studios at 3930 Sunset, which is still the WKBN-TV facility.”

    Given that radio’s content (as we now call it) is gone at the speed of short-term memory (unless it’s recorded, which mostly it isn’t), this kind of reporting may be the only history it has. So, if history matters, this kind of inquiry also matters.

    The top photo is one of many I’ve shot on en route to EWR (Newark Liberty International Airport). By the way, these towers were built when one could walk on the land there. One needed boots and a scythe, but it was possible. The water was impounded in the 1990s, I think. Here are some shots from a visit to the site nine years ago.

    , , , ,

  • Toward customer boats fishing on a sea of goods and services

    I’ll be talking shortly to some readers of The Intention Economy who are looking for ways to connect that economy with advertising. (Or so I gather. I’ll know more soon.) What follows is the gist of what I wrote to them in prep for the call.

    First,  take a look at People vs. Adtech, and/or Separating Advertising’s Wheat and Chaff.

    Both are still valid (IMHO), but don’t yet cover what A.I. will inevitably do to advertising. There are two possible ways that can go.

    One is toward hyper-personalized advertising based on even more pernicious uninvited tracking than we already have, with A.I.s rather than lawyers and hired intermediaries finding loopholes in privacy law that will automate specious forms of “consent” far more efficiently than possible without it.

    The other is toward finding the best vectors for targeting the right audiences rather than the most-tracked individuals—and to find those amidst the millions of podcasts, newsletters, blogs, mainstream media, and other online outlets into the ever-widening world of thought, opinion, news, scholarship, journalism, sports, and the rest of it.

    The former will make tracking and personalized targeting far worse, and the latter will make advertising targeted at audiences far better. It will also do a much better job of supporting journalism in the process because more money can get through to publishers and reporters who won’t be fed by an evil hand they avoid biting.

    Those two directions are the chaff-vs-wheat choices for A.I.’s future in advertising. For now, there is surely far more action happening with the former than with the latter, given the sizes of today’s spinning adtech flywheels. But this also means there will be bigger opportunities with the latter: a blue ocean away from the red one.

    What makes the intention economy ocean blue is that it will exist almost entirely outside both those advertising systems—and inside horizons that are far more expansive than can be seen through the lens of advertising and marketing as we’ve known them.

    Here the opportunities will be in creating better signaling from demand to supply, and better intermediation between them: forms that will safeguard the privacy needs of individuals and the legitimate needs of businesses. In some cases there will be no intermediation at all—just forms of agency on both sides that are friendly to each other and can interact directly. And, where intermediations are required, they will find a wide-open space for what we’ve long called fourth parties.

    To visualize the opportunities here, think of every customer as a boat afloat on a sea of goods and services, and friendly to the ecosystems where demand encourages supply at least as well as supply satisfies demand.

    If you’re looking for market opportunities in this vast new ocean, here are thirteen of them.

    , , , ,

  • Truckin’ forward

    Open road

    Welcome to my new old blog.

    My old-old (but not oldest) blog—the one I’ve written since 2007—is still there, in complete archival form, at blogs.harvard.edu/doc, where it has always been. It is now also here with a different URL: doc.searls.com, which had pointed at blogs.harvard.edu/doc for many years. Now it points here, to its native location. No more redirecting.

    Put another way, doc.searls.com was a Harvard blog until yesterday (and again, everything until that day remains so: that’s its legacy). From now on, it’s mine alone. It has crossed from one state to another. I’m not sure yet how it will change, if at all. But I feel energized about what I might do with it.

    So, before I hit the gas here, I want to thank Dave Winer for getting me going as a blogger in the first place with my original blog (archived at weblog.searls.com) in 1999, again with this one in 2007, and now in this new location on the Web.

    I also thank old and new friends who helped me make all the transitions involved—especially the Berkman Klein Center. It is as good a friend and colleague as an institution can be.

    And yes, I know this blog needs a fresh new theme. Recommendations are invited.

    ,
    , ,

  • Moving on

    dead truck

    I started this blog in August 2007 after the host for my original blog went away. (That blog has been preserved, however. Find it at http://weblog.searls.com.)

    At the time I was told something like “Hey, Harvard has been around since 1636, so your blog will last a long time here.” Well, the duration will be a bit less than sixteen years: Harvard is shutting the server down on Friday. [Later: it didn’t.]

    I just got this news here, in an announcement posted in March. I missed it until Rogers Cadenhead (@rcade) told me about it on Twitter. [Later: the announcement was put in an obvious place: in the blog’s dashboard header. I still missed it. Disclosure: sometimes the obvious is not apparent to me.]

    So I am scrambling now, with the help of friends, to move the contents of this blog to a new place. Hopefully, that will be blog.searls.com or searls.com/blog or both. We’ll see. [Later: it landed here at doc.searls.com, which had been a redirect URL aimed for many years at blogs.harvard.edu/doc.]

    Two other blogs I run—ProjectVRM and Trunkline—also need to be moved. ProjectVRM is the one that matters more. If all goes according to plan, projectvrm.org will map to the same blog in its own new place. Trunkline will go to trunkli.org. [Later: both of these are (as of early July 2023) in the midst of both staying where they are and moving elsewhere. ProjectVRM should appear at some point at projectvrm.org.]

    Here are my final Harvard-hosted posts on ProjectVRM and Trunkline:

    My thanks to the Berkman Klein Center for hosting these blogs for so many years, and for the amazing community it serves— and in which I remain a devoted member.

    The image above is of a truck I borrowed being towed away after the engine blew up in King City, California, back in 2005. It’s not a good illustration of what’s going on, but the best I could do in a hurry. I’ll find a better one later.

    , , ,

  • The Long View

    This blog has been looking like my personal obituary section, and I suppose it is. While I promise to change that, for this post I’ll stick with the theme, and surface some correspondence with an old friend who recommended that I read The Five People You’ll Meet in Heaven, by Mitch Albom. In the correspondence that followed, I shared some of my own views across life’s horizons. Thinking those perhaps blogworthy, here’s what I said:

    Just ordered the book.

    Odd that I’m a lifelong Christian (technically, Catholic) who (thanks to my wife, who is observant) attends mass every Sunday. Yet I believe the most useful teachings of all the major religions at their best are about kindness and mercy toward other people and the world, and that our sum purpose as conscious and responsible beings is to leave the place better than we found it. In this sense, eternal life is gravy, not meat and potatoes.

    So I will be surprised and pleased if there really is an afterlife of some kind. And I would dearly love to hang again with those five people, plus my parents and other loved ones who are, as we say in this world of time and space, departed.

    However, absent proof here in time/space world, the way to bet is pure absence: an afterlife like the beforelife.

    Did you know I was working for the Psychical Research Foundation, which studied the possibility of life after death, at (but not of) Duke University when I met David Hodskins and Ray Simone? This was an occasion without which I would likely never have met Gil Templeton, Kim Cameron, Craig Burton and others I’ve memorialized online. It see now for the first time that the poetry in that, with those guys—all younger than me—while I’m still here. Wherever this is.

    Our favorite priest, Father Sean Olaoire, calls people “spirits in space suits.” This is consistent with Bill Hicks‘ take: “It’s just a ride.” Sean and Bill’s case: we are timeless beings who catch a ride in time and get off when it’s over. We need Wise Ones like Jesus to tell us that our world view is insufficient, and the real myth is mortality.

    So, we’ll find out. Or not. Either way, it’s best to clean up first. I’m at that stage now, even though I still have work to do. Back to it.

    So I’m back. See you soon.

    , , , , ,

  • Remembering Heather Armstrong

    My email archive contains dozens of postings in which Heather Armstrong* and I are among those writing, receiving, mentioning, mentioned, cc’d or otherwise included. Most postings are from the ’00s and between bloggers in the brief age before media got social and blogging was still hot shit. Heather, with her Dooce blog, was the alpha among us, but never snotty about it.

    Heather wore her heart, her head, her life, on the Web page. At humorous, opinionated, and wince-worthy self-disclosure, Heather even out-raged Chris Locke, aka RageBoy. Heather, Chris and I might have met for a panel at the 2006 SXSW, had Chris made the trip. Wrote Chris, “I was nearly as bummed as Doc said he was that I wasn’t there in Austin today on the ‘Cluetrain: Seven Years Later’ panel. What can I say? If God had wanted people to fly, he would have given them upgrades.” Best I recall, that panel was the only time I met Heather in person. She was fun.

    Her final post was on April 6. It is mostly about, and for, her daughter Leta Louise. The closing line is “Here at 18 months sober, I salute my 18-year-old frog baby, she who taught me how to love.” According to news reports, Heather had fallen off the wagon. Whatever the reason, she fell all the way, and we will be forever lessened by her loss.

    *On her Instagram, Facebook and Twitter accounts, all branded Dooce, she identified as Heather B. Hamilton, her birth name.

  • A Santa Barbara itinerary from ChatGPT

    I asked ChatGPT for a three-day itinerary to give visitors to Santa Barbara. Here ya go:

    Day 1:

    • Start the day with breakfast at the Shoreline Beach Cafe, which has a beautiful view of the ocean.
    • After breakfast, head to Knapp’s Castle for a scenic hike and exploration of the ruins of a 20th century mansion. The hike offers stunning views of the Santa Ynez Valley.
    • For lunch, grab some sandwiches or salads from the nearby Panino’s, a local favorite with fresh, high-quality ingredients.
    • Spend the afternoon exploring downtown Santa Barbara, with its charming shops and cafes. Don’t miss a visit to the Santa Barbara County Courthouse, a stunning Spanish Colonial Revival building with a beautiful clock tower that offers a panoramic view of the city.
    • For dinner, head to Tee-Off, a local institution that has been serving up classic American fare since 1949.

    Day 2:

    • Start the day with a hike up La Cumbre Peak, which offers stunning views of Santa Barbara and the Channel Islands.
    • For lunch, grab some tacos from La Super-Rica Taqueria, a casual spot that was a favorite of Julia Child.
    • Spend the afternoon exploring the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, which showcases native plants and offers a peaceful escape from the city.
    • For dinner, head to the Stagecoach Inn, a historic restaurant that serves up classic American fare in a cozy setting.

    Day 3:

    • Start the day with breakfast at Jeannine’s Bakery, a local favorite known for its delicious baked goods and breakfast items.
    • Spend the morning at Hendry’s Beach, a local favorite with beautiful views and great walking trails.
    • For lunch, grab some sandwiches or salads from South Coast Deli, a local favorite with fresh ingredients and creative flavor combinations.
    • Spend the afternoon exploring the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, which features a diverse collection of artwork from around the world.
    • For dinner, head back to downtown Santa Barbara and choose from one of the many restaurants in the area, depending on your preference. Some options include Olio e Limone Ristorante, Los Agaves, and The Lark.

    I wouldn’t disagree with any of it, except maybe to note that Hendry’s Beach at sunset (where and when I shot the photo above) is mighty fine.

    Of course, the answer will vary with every regeneration, but what the hell. It’s very early in our co-evolution with whatever the hell we and AI are together becoming.

    , , ,

  • Unstill life

    Her name is Mary Johnson. Born in 1917, the year the U.S. entered WWI, two years before women in the same country got the right to vote, she died in 1944, not long before the end of WWII. She was buried, unembalmed, in the cemetery of a Chicago church that was later abandoned. Her grave was unmarked. To make room for new commercial development in 2023, the church was razed and occupants of the cemetery were quietly disinterred and moved to a working cemetery elsewhere in town. In the midst, efforts were made by the coroner’s office to discover the identities of the bodies from unmarked graves before they were to be reburied. Mary’s was among them.

    The difference with Mary was that her body appeared to be unchanged: a bit dusty under bits of casket lining, with light flecks on her dark skin. Except for that, she looked like she had died yesterday. When they removed her body from the casket in the hospital morgue where she was taken for DNA sampling, she was still flexible. I asked the pathologist what would account for her perfect state of preservation. The pathologist said she had no idea. Even the best embalming jobs age in the ground.

    When the pathologist was out of the room, I reached to lift one of Mary’s eyelids. Before my fingers touched, both lids opened, slightly. I called out, “Come here! Come here!” Nobody came. Then both eyes opened. Her body shook as she tried to breathe.

    “Code Blue! I yelled.

    She was alive. Somehow, alive. After what, eighty years? At the time we didn’t know.

    I was ready to do CPR, but she started breathing and tried to sit up. “Hang on,” I said. Let me help.” As I did, she was becoming warm. She stood up and looked around.

    I looked at my watch. It was 5:15 AM. The dream was too interesting for me to completely awaken, so I dropped back in. As a half-conscious dreamer, I often do that. For the next hour, I followed several different story threads. Each visited what happened in the eighty years of Mary’s suspended life. The Cold War. Israel. Civil rights. Rock & Roll. Space travel. Disco. Hip hop. Rap. Digital everything. One of her questions: “What’s television?”

    I thought about the backstory of her own short life: a child in the twenties, a teen during the Depression, a young adult during The War. What interesting stuff happened in those years? Was she in love, maybe with a guy who went off to fight? What work did she do?

    I thought about the science questions. How was it possible for someone to lay undead for so long? Who else in that cemetery, or any cemetery, might still be alive? Was she a one-of-one, a one-of-some, or a one-of-many? Though not a horror story, it did recall Poe’s The Premeture Burial, in which the protagonist’s undead state was “catalepsy.” I imagined in this thread that the story might be one Michael Chrichton would like to write, were he still alive.

    Dreams have no more detail than one gives them. Being a white guy from New Jersey, born after Mary went cataleptic, I didn’t have much to furnish any storyline about Mary’s life, past or present. But I could still think of questions to address. What perspective and wisdom could Mary bring to our time? How would she cope with finding nearly all the people and things she knew were now dead and gone? What would she marvel at, and what would appall her? What would she be, or mean, to the rest of us?

    No surprise that I would dream of a resurrection on Easter morning, even though that wasn’t in my head at the time. So, might Mary (not hard to guess from what corner of my unconscious that name came from) be a Jesus for our time? Hmm.

    At 6:15, I finally had to get up and do my business, and the dream ended there. Still, “This has to be a book,” I told myself. But I have other books to write, ones that have sat half-written for years. And writing fiction isn’t my thing. So I decided I’d blog it instead. And here we are.

    She is alive now, on this page, and in your mind. All she needs is for someone to finish her story.

    The image above is courtesy of DALL-E, the artificially creative image generator. Took four tries to get this one. Since DALL-E seems to know only how to make grotesque faces, I made sure the woman here is looking away.

    ,

  • From sea to rhyming sea

    states and capitals

    While discussing ChatGPT with my teenage grandkids, I put it to a number of tests. In one I asked it to write a poem that includes all the capital cities in the U.S. Here is its reply:

    From sea to shining sea, Across this land so grand, The capitals of every state, Await us to take a stand.

    In Montgomery, Alabama, We begin our noble quest, To climb each statehouse staircase, And put our wills to the test.

    Through Juneau, Alaska, To Phoenix, Arizona’s heat, The halls of power beckon us, With challenges we must meet.

    Little Rock, Arkansas, And Sacramento, too, We march to their state capitals, To learn what they can do.

    From Denver, Colorado’s heights, To Connecticut’s Hartford town, We cross this land of liberty, To see our nation’s crown.

    Dover, Delaware, And Tallahassee, Florida’s heat, We journey forth to find our place, In every statehouse seat.

    Atlanta’s Georgia peach, And Honolulu’s island breeze, We’ll walk the halls of power, To achieve our lofty dreams.

    Through Boise, Idaho’s hills, And Springfield’s Illinois pride, We’ll take the steps of governance, With courage as our guide.

    Indianapolis, Indiana, And Iowa’s Des Moines, We’ll stand in every capital, To honor each state’s joins.

    From Topeka’s Kansas plains, To Kentucky’s Frankfort pride, We’ll learn from every leader, In whom we can confide.

    Baton Rouge, Louisiana, And Augusta, Maine’s coast, We’ll listen to the wisdom, That each statehouse host.

    In Annapolis, Maryland, And Massachusetts’ Boston town, We’ll seek to find our purpose, And rise to wear the crown.

    Lansing, Michigan, And St. Paul’s Minnesota pride, We’ll climb each capital’s staircase, And never be denied.

    Mississippi’s Jackson town, And Jefferson City’s Missouri call, We’ll cross this land with honor, And never falter or fall.

    Helena, Montana’s heights, And Lincoln’s Nebraska plains, We’ll march through every capital, And honor each state’s gains.

    Carson City, Nevada, And Concord’s New Hampshire pride, We’ll stand in every statehouse, And let our voices be our guide.

    Trenton’s New Jersey call, And Santa Fe’s New Mexico sun, We’ll climb the stairs of governance, And learn from everyone.

    Albany’s New York pride, And Raleigh’s North Carolina charm, We’ll honor every state’s glory, And never let it harm.

    Bismarck’s North Dakota plains, And Columbus’ Ohio pride, We’ll journey forth to every capital, With honor as our guide.

    Oklahoma’s Oklahoma City, And Salem’s Oregon call, We’ll stand in every statehouse, And never let our spirits fall.

    Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, And Rhode Island’s Providence town, We’ll climb each capital’s staircase, And never let ourselves drown.

    South Carolina’s Columbia pride, And South Dakota’s Pierre call, We’ll cross this land with dignity, And never let ourselves stall.

    Nashville’s Tennessee music, And Austin’s Texas pride, We’ll stand in every statehouse, And let our voices rise.

    Salt Lake City’s Utah heights, And Montpelier’s Vermont pride, We’ll march through every capital, And let our dreams be our guide.

    Richmond’s Virginia charm, And Olympia’s Washington crown, We’ll honor every state’s valor, And never let ourselves down.

    Charleston’s West Virginia hills, And Madison’s Wisconsin pride, We’ll journey forth to every capital, And never be denied.

    Cheyenne’s Wyoming pride, And Washington, D.C.’s White House, We’ll cross this land with honor, And never let ourselves douse.

    From sea to shining sea, We’ve walked each statehouse hall, And learned the lessons of governance, That make our nation stand tall.

    Redraw your own conclusions.

  • A workflow challenge

    I shoot a lot of pictures. Most are from altitude (such as the above). But lots are of people and places; for example, here are a few I shot at DWebCamp last summer with my new Sony A7 IV camera (to which I migrated last year after many years shooting Canon):

    Importing and curating photos is the only organized thing I do in life. Let me explain.

    Under each of those photos is the name of the file. These are the actual file names, not ones stored in the library of some app and remembered at the meta-level. None are called DSCN0401.JPG, IMG_4523.JPG, or IMG_1874.PNG. I’ve give all of them meaningful names, all by the same convention: YYYY_MM_DD_name-of-event. Every file in every folder has the same name as the folder, with a number appended to it. The numbers are chronological. Each event’s folder goes into a month folder, each of those goes into a year folder, and all years go into a folder called pix-by-year. That folder has years going back to 1869. (The earliest are scans, such as this one.) This way I can search in the Finder for, say, dweb-camp, or 2022_08_24, and find the files and/or their folder easily.

    I organize and name all my photos with a piece of software originally called iView Media Pro, then Expression Media 2 (after Microsoft bought it), and finally Phase One Media Pro (after Microsoft abandoned it). I like the second version best, so that’s what I use. (One reason is that Phase One changed the file type, with a new suffix, which confused things, and then itself abandoned the software.)

    Here is a short and partial list of all the things Expression Media 2 can do:

    1. Rename files in the Finder, very selectively, alone, or in batches (much more smoothly and easily than can be done with Adobe Bridge or Apple’s Shortcuts or Automator).
    2. Search for any variable, or combination of variables
    3. Sort by up to 24 variables (file name, size, date created, date modified…)
    4. Resize selectively
    5. Open any files with any other app
    6. Bring multiple photos (files) from multiple directories into a single catalog, to organize any way one wants. Also to export, rename, or whatever, including—
    7. Run a slide show, with many choices of presentation (much more than with Apple’s Photos and Preview apps), and save shows as movies
    8. Open any file or collection of files in any other app (for me that’s usually Photoshop 2021)
    9. Basic image edits
    10. Rotate, flip, zoom in and out
    11. See and edit EXIF data for every shot, and add new comments in blank fields
    12. Find missing and duplicate items
    13. Show or hide any file or combinations of files
    14. Move files in the Finder
    15. Operate in lieu of the finder when dragging or dropping into a Web page or another app, for example into an WYSIWYG HTML editor such as Adobe’s DreamWeaver
    16. Arrange or tile photos by hand or by sort
    17. Log and show actions
    18. Place images on a map
    19. Make a .pdf of any image or collection of them
    20. Turn galleries into pages in .html
    21. Import and export to and from .xml

    I don’t do all that stuff, but I list it because I want to remember what I know I will lose when I move from this 2017 MacBook Pro running Mojave to my new 16″ 2023 M2 Max MacBook Pro. That will happen later today after I upgrade both machines to the latest version of Ventura. When that happens, Expressions Media 2, a 32-bit program last updated in 2013, will be kaput. And I will need to find another workflow.

    Or maybe one of ya’ll has a better way to manage workflow than I’m using now. I’m open.

    Meanwhile, here goes…

    [Later (May 10, 2023)…] I am now working with my new M2 Macbook Pro, and I feel like I am missing limbs. The only prostheses I have are the limited choices that come with Apple’s Finder and Adobe Bridge. So again, help is welcome. Thanks.

    Addendum: If you’re wondering why I’m not running my life on Linux and free and/or open-source software, the main reasons are Photoshop and Lightroom. I’ve tried Gimp and it doesn’t cut it. Photoshop knows the camera and lenses I’m using, and its tools, such as dehaze, are extremely useful. See the photos here? Thank dehaze for making the detail pop out. (Yes, Gimp de-hazes, but not easily.) I hate being trapped in Apple’s castle as much as the next serf, but shooting as much as I do requires tools I can use quickly and easily.

    , , , ,

  • Is Mastodon a commons?

    Groups of people under bubbles at sunset on the grounds of Versailles

    Glenn Fleishman has a lucid and helpful introduction to Mastodon in TidBITS that opens with this:

    Cast your mind back to the first time you experienced joy and wonder on the Internet. Do you worry you’ll never be able to capture that sense again? If so, it’s worth wading gently into the world of Mastodon microblogging to see if it offers something fresh and delightful. It might remind you—as it does me, at least for now—of the days when you didn’t view online interactions with some level of dread.

    Mastodon isn’t a service but a network of consensually affiliated, independently operated servers running the Mastodon software. It’s the best-known example of the so-called Fediverse…

    Then, a few paragraphs later, he provides the best metaphor I’ve yet seen for what Mastodon is and how it works:

    You can think of Mastodon as a flotilla of boats of vastly different sizes, whereas Twitter is like being on a cruise ship the size of a continent. Some Mastodon boats might be cruise liners with as many as 50,000 passengers; others are just dinghies with a single occupant! The admin of each instance—the captain of your particular boat—might make arbitrary decisions you disagree with as heartily as with any commercial operator’s tacks and turns. But you’re not stuck on your boat, with abandoning ship as the only alternative. Instead, you can hop from one boat to another without losing your place in the flotilla community. Parts of a flotilla can also splinter off and form their own disconnected groups, but no boat, however large, is in charge of the community.

    Since my day job is working as a visiting scholar in the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University, and Customer Commons has been imagined from its start as a potential commons for customers (or as many commons, flotilla style), I find myself wondering if each of Mastodon’s boats is a commons. Or if some of them could be, or already are. Or if Mastodon itself is one.

    My first experience with Mastodon came early on, in a boat that I abandoned before it sank. But now that Mastodon is hot again, I’ve jumped with two crowds onto two boats: twit.social (here) and journa.host (here). TWiT.social’s occupants are the community of hosts, co-hosts, and participants in the TWiT network. Journa.host’s occupants are a collection of journalists. The two communities are different, though not entirely: journalists abound in both of them.

    The question for me here is if any of these boats qualify as a commons. Or if Mastodon itself is one.

    To qualify as a commons, a canonical list to check off is provided by Elinor Ostrom. In Governing the Commons (Cambridge, 1990), she outlined eight “design principles” for stable local common pool resource (CPR) management. I’ll make notes following each in italics:

    1. Clearly defining the group boundaries (and effective exclusion of external un-entitled parties) and the contents of the common pool resource. Mastodon is designed to support that.
    2. The appropriation and provision of common resources that are adapted to local conditions. If we’re talking about code, yes. Maybe more. Gotta think about that.
    3. Collective-choice arrangements that allow most resource appropriators to participate in the decision-making process. Depends on the instance, I suppose. 
    4. Effective monitoring by monitors who are part of or accountable to the appropriators. Not sure about that one. 
    5. A scale of graduated sanctions for resource appropriators who violate community rules. Up to the person or people running each boat.
    6. Mechanisms of conflict resolution that are cheap and of easy access. I think these range from informal to formal, and draw from rules developed for mailing lists and other fora. But, not sure.
    7. Self-determination of the community recognized by higher-level authorities. At the top level, it’s othe Mastodon dev community. At the boat (instance) level, it’s the captain(s) of each.
    8. In the case of larger common-pool resources, organization in the form of multiple layers of nested enterprises, with small local CPRs (common pool resources) at the base level. A thought: the common pool resource is the authors of posts (aka toots) and the posts themselves.

    Ostrom and others have also gone deeper and wider than that, for example by examining socio-ecological systems (SESes), defined here in 2004. I’ll leave digging into that up to scholars more schooled than I (or to a later post, after I finish schooling myself). Meanwhile, I think it’s important, given the sudden growth of Mastodon and other federated systems with flotilla-ish qualities, to examine how deep research and writing on commons apply.

    This work does matter: Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for it, and it may matter more now than ever.

    And help is welcome.

    About the photo up top: Lacking a royalty-free visual for a flotilla of boats, I settled on the collections of people you see through bubbles in the photo above, which I shot on the grounds of Versailles. Kinda works, methinks.

    , ,

  • Does Sirius XM sound far worse than listening to music on YouTube?

    That’s a question asked on Quora and deleted (for reasons unknown) before I posted my answer. So I’m posting my answer here.

    This is like asking if a car radio sounds better than a TV. Because it’s a matter of where, how, when, and what, more than a matter of sound.

    There is some overlap in the sense that both SiriusXM and YouTube are fully useful on mobile apps. But you don’t watch your radio in your car or listen to your radio on your TV, even though it’s possible to do both through apps that are native to both the road (through Android Auto and Apple Carplay) and the living room (through Roku, Amazon, Apple, and other TV app platforms).

    As for the sound itself, YouTube lets you select audio quality bitrates up to 256kbps AAC & OPUS. SiriusXM’s default bitrate is also 256kpbs, but over the satellite link bitrates are typically lower—sometimes much lower. But, since SiriusXM does not (to my knowledge, so far) publish its bitrates in a place that’s easy to find, its bitrates are subject to debate. Here is one of those on Reddit.

    But, again, it’s a matter of where. when, and what, more than how. If you want to see and hear a piece of music, YouTube provides enormous optionality, with its boundless collection of videos. If you want radio-like music programming, SiriusXM offers more—plus talk, news, sports (including play-by-play for all the major ones), and more.

    Yet the Internet has more than both put together. That’s why the image above is of Radio Paradise, which is one of the oldest and best Internet music stations. It’s live on the Net and the Web, and it has Best Of collections on YouTube as well.

    Bonus link (and a lot of fun): radio.garden. There’s an app for that too.

  • FM Stations Down on Gibraltar Peak

    [Update: 11:20 AM Wednesday 18 January] Well, I woke this morning to hear all the signals from Gibraltar Peak back on the air. I don’t know if the site is on generator power, or if electric power has been restored. This pop-out from a map symbol on Southern California Edison’s Power Outage Awareness Map suggests the latter:

    However, I am listening right now to KZSB/1290 AM’s FM signal on 96.9 from Gibraltar Peak, where the show hosts are detailing many road closures, noting that sections of Gibraltar road are “down the hill,” meaning not there anymore, and unlikely to be fixed soon. I think I also heard them say their FM transmitter is on generator power. Far as I know, they are the only station covering local road closures, buildings damaged, farms and orchards damaged, and related topics, in great detail. It’s old-fashioned local radio at its best. Hats off.

    Looking at the power requirements up there, only two stations are high-power ones: KDB/93.7’s transmitter pumps 4.9kW into a stack of five antenna bays that yield an ERP (effective radiated power) of 12.5kW, and KDRW(KCRW)/88.7 uses about 5.9kW to produce 12kW ERP through a stack of four antenna bays. Those are on the poles at the right and left ends of this photo, which I shot after the Jesusita Fire in 2009:

    All the other stations’ transmitters require less wattage than a microwave oven. Three only put out ten watts. So, given typical modern transmitter efficiencies, I’m guessing the site probably has a 20kW generator, give or take, requiring about 2.5 gallons of propane per hour. So a 500-gallon propane tank (a typical size) will last about 200 hours. Of course, none of that will matter until the next outage, provided electrical service is actually restored now, or soon.

    [Update: 3:34 PM Monday 16 January] Two news stories:

    1. Edhat: Gibraltar Road Damage., by Edhat staff, Januraly 11, 2023 12:30 PM. It’s a collection of revealing Gibraltar Road photos that I wish I had seen earlier. Apologies for that. This is the text of the whole story: “A resident of Gibraltar Road shared the below photos from the recent storm damage. A section of the road appears to be washed out with a Tesla trapped under some debris. The Tesla slide is located approximately a quarter mile past the Rattlesnake Canyon trailhead and the washed road is about a mile past the radio tower before reaching the west fork trailhead.” If “mile past” means going uphill toward East Camino Cielo on the ridge, that means travel was (and is) impeded (at the very least) in both directions from the transmitter sites. The photos are dramatic. Please check them out.
    2. Noozhawk: Several Radio Stations Still Off the Air After Storm Knocks Out Power to Gibraltar Transmitter Site by Giana Magnoli, by Managing Editor Giana Magnoli, January 16, 2023 | 1:47 pm

    From the Noozhawk story:

    • “… they’ve helicoptered up a new battery and 600 gallons of diesel fuel to the site’s backup generator, but they haven’t been able to get it to work.” I believe this is for lack of the expected banjo valve. (See below.)
    • “Southern California Edison, which supplies power to the transmission towers site, first reported an outage for the Gibraltar Road area at 2:34 a.m. Jan. 9, the day of the big storm.” That was Monday. At least some stations would have switched over to generator power then.
    • “Repair crews haven’t been sent to the site yet, according to the SCE Outage Map, but Franklin said he heard there could be new poles installed this week.” That’s John Franklin, who runs the whole Gibraltar Peak site.
    • “KCLU (102.3 FM) went off the air on Wednesday and was still off as of Monday.KCLU (102.3 FM) went off the air on Wednesday and was still off as of Monday. KJEE (92.9 FM) went down for several days but came back on the air on Thursday.” Note: it’s not on now—at least not on the radios I’m using.
    • “Santa Barbara County spokeswoman Kelsey Gerckens Buttitta said there are cell and radio station towers off Gibraltar Road that requires fuel to operate, and Gibraltar Road and East Camino Cielo Road are closed because of slides, debris and slipouts.” Fixing those roads will be very difficult and time-consuming.

    The story also lists signals I reported off as of last night. One correction to that: K250BS/97.9, which relays KTMS/990, is on the air. This I presume is because it’s at the KTMS/KTYD site. All the signals from that site (which is up the road from Gibraltar Peak) are still up. I assume that’s either because they are fed electric power separately from Gibraltar Peak, or because they are running on generator power.

    [Update: 11:40 AM Monday 16 January] In a private group discussion with broadcast engineers, I am gathering that a stretch of Gibraltar Road close to the Gibraltar Peak site has collapsed. The location is 34°28’05.2″N 119°40’21″W, not far from the road into the transmitter site. This is not the section marked closed by Santa Barbara County on its map here. It is also not an easy fix, because it appears from one photograph I’ve seen (shared on a private group) that the land under the road slid away. It is also not the section where power lines to the site were knocked out. So we’re looking at three separate challenges here:

    1. Restoring electrical service to Gibraltar Peak, and other places served by the same now-broken lines
    2. Repairing Gibraltar Road in at least two places (the one marked on the county map and the one above)
    3. Getting generators fueled and fixed.

    On that last issue, I’m told that the site with most of the transmitters can be powered by a generator that awaits what is called a banjo valve. The KDB facility requires propane, and stayed up longer than the others on the peak while its own supply held up.

    Gibraltar Peak isn’t the highest landform overlooking Santa Barbara. At 2180 feet, it’s about halfway up the south flank of the Santa Ynez Mountains. But it does provide an excellent vantage for FM stations that want the least obstructed view of the market’s population. That’s why more local signals come from here than from any other site in the region.

    Except for now: a time that began with the storm last Tuesday. That’s when power lines feeding the peak were broken by falling rocks that also closed Gibraltar road. Here is a list of signals that have been knocked off the air (and are still off, as of the latest edit, on Sunday, January 15 at 11:15PM):

    • 88.7 KDRW, which has a studio in Santa Barbara, but mostly relays KCRW from Santa Monica
    • 89.5 KSBX, which relays KCBX from San Luis Obispo*
    • 89.9 K210AD, which relays KPCC from Pasadena by way of KJAI from Ojai
    • 90.3 KMRO-FM2, a booster for KMRO in Camarillo
    • 91.5 K218CP, which relays KAWZ from Twin Falls, Idaho
    • 93.7 KDB, which relays KUSC from Los Angeles (down after running on generator power for 5 days)
    • 96.9 K245DD, which relays KZSB/1290 AM in Santa Barbara
    • 97.9 K250BS, which relays KTMS/990 AM in Santa Barbara (and is on a KTMS tower, farther up the slope)
    • 98.7 K254AH, which relays KPFK from Los Angeles
    • 102.3 KK272DT, the FM side of KCLU/1340 in Santa Barbara and KCLU/88.3 in Thousand Oaks

    KTMS/990AM, KTYD/99.9FM, and K231CR/94.1, which relays KOSJ/1490AM, are still on the air as of Sunday night at 11:15pm. Those are are a short distance farther up Gibraltar Road. (In the other box in the photo above.)

    Here is a guide to substitute signals for some of the stations:

    • KCRW/KDRW can be heard on KCRU/89.1 from Oxnard (actually, Laguna Peak, in Pt. Magu State Park)
    • KDB can be heard on KDSC/91.1 from Thousand Oaks (actually off Sulphur Mountain Road, south of Ojai)
    • KCLU can be heard on 1340 AM from Santa Barbara and 88.3 FM from Thousand Oaks
    • KPCC can be heard on KJAI/89.5 from Ojai (also transmitting from Sulphur Mountai Road)
    • KSBX/KCBX can be heard on 90.9 from Solvang (actually Broadcast Peak)
    • KPFK can be heard on its home signal (biggest in the U.S.) from Mount Wilson in Los Angeles at 90.7
    • KZSB can be heard on 1290 AM from Santa Barbara
    • KMRO can still be heard on its Camarillo main transmitter on 90.3

    The two AM signals (marked green in the top list above) are strong in town and most of the FMs are weak but listenable here and there. And all of them can be heard through their live streams online.

    Published stories so far, other than this one:

    The Independent says the site is a “relay” one. That’s correct in the sense that most of the stations there are satellites of bigger stations elsewhere. But KCLU is local to Santa Barbara (its anchor AM station is here), and the ratings reflect it. I wrote about those ratings a few years ago, in Where Public Radio Rocks. In that post, I noted that public radio is bigger in Santa Barbara than anywhere else in the country.

    The most recent ratings (Spring of 2022), in % shares of total listening, are these:

    • KDB/93.9, classical music, relaying KUSC/91.1 from Los Angeles: 7.9%
    • KCLU/102.3 and 1340 in Santa Barbara (studios in Thousand Oaks), public broadcasting: 7.3%
    • KDRW/88.7 in Santa Barbara (main studio in Santa Monica, as KCRW/89.9): 4.6%
    • KPCC/89.9, relaying KJAI/89.5 and KPCC/89.3 in Pasadena: 1.3%
    • KSBX/89.5, relaying KCBX/90.1 from San Luis Obispo: 0.7%

    Total: 21.8%.

    That means more than a fifth of all radio listening in Santa Barbara is to noncommercial and public radio.

    And, of all those stations, only KDB/KUSC and KCLU-AM are on the air right now.

    By the way, when I check to see how public broadcasting is doing in other markets, nothing is close. Santa Barbara still kicks ass. I think that’s an interesting story, and I haven’t seen anyone report on it, other than here.

    *Turns out KSBX is off the air permanently, after losing a coverage battle with KPBS/89.5 in San Diego. On December 29, they published a story in print and sound titled Why is 89.5 KSBX off the air? The answer is in the atmosphere. They blame tropospheric ducting, which much of the time makes KPBS come in like a local signal. Also, even though KPBS’s transmitter on Soledad Mountain (really more of a hill) above the coast at La Jolla is more than 200 miles away, it does pump out 26,000 watts, while KCBX puts out only 50 watts—and less in some directions. Though the story doesn’t mention it, KJAI, the KPCC relay on 89.5 for Ojai, is audible in Santa Barbara if nothing else is there. So that also didn’t help. By the way, I’m almost certain that the antenna identified as KSBX’s in the story’s photo (which is also one of mine) is actually for KMRO-2. KSBX’s is the one on the left in this photo here.

    , , , , ,

  • Heavy Weather

    2005 Landslide at La Conchita

    Most of California has just two seasons: rain and fire. Rain is another name for Winter, and it peaks in January. In most years, January in California isn’t any more wet than, say, New York, Miami or Chicago. But every few years California gets monsoons. Big ones. This is one of those years.

    The eighteen gallon storage tub in our yard is sixteen inches deep and serves as a rain gauge:

    Yesterday morning it was less than half full. While it gathered rain, our devices blasted out alerts with instructions like this:

    So we stayed home and watched the Web tell us how the drought was ending:

    Wasn’t long ago that Lake Cachuna was at 7%.

    So that’s good news. The bad news is about floods, ruined piers and wharfs, downed trees, power outages, levee breaches. The usual.

    It should help to remember that the geology on both coasts is temporary and improvisational. The East Coast south of New England and Long Island (where coastal landforms were mostly dumped there or scraped bare by glaciers in the geologic yesterday) is a stretch of barrier islands that are essentially dunes shifted by storms. Same goes for the Gulf Coast. The West Coast looks more solid, with hills and mountains directly facing the sea. But Pacific storms in Winter routinely feature waves high as houses, pounding against the shores and sea cliffs.

    Looking up the coast from Tijuana, within a few hundred years Coronado and Point Loma in San Diego, La Jolla, all the clifftop towns up the coast to Dana Point and Laguna, Palos Verdes Peninsula, Malibu and Point Dume, Carpinteria, the Santa Barbara Mesa and Hope Ranch, all of Isla Vista and UCSB, Pismo and Avila Beaches, all of Big Sur and the Pacific Coast Highway there, Carmel and the Monterey Peninsula, Aptos, Capitola and Santa Cruz, Davenport, Half Moon Bay, Pacifica, the headlands of San Francisco, Muir and Stimson Beaches and Bolinas in Marin, Fort Bragg in Mendicino County, and Crescent City in Humbolt—all in California—will be eaten away partially or entirely by weather and waves. Earthquakes will also weigh in.

    The photo up top is of La Conchita, a stupidly located town on the South Coast, west of Ventura, four days after a landslide in 2005 took out 13 homes and killed 10 people. All the land above town is a pile of former and future landslides, sure to slide again when the ground is saturated with water. Such as now or soon.

    So that’s a long view. For one that spans the next week, visit windy.com and slide the elevation up to FL (flight level) 340 (34000 feet):

    That yellow river of wind is a jet stream hauling serious ass straight across the Pacific and into California. Jet streams are why the headwinds and tailwinds you see on seat-back displays showing flight progress on planes often say 100mph or more. Look at Windy before you fly coast to coast or overseas, and you can guess what the flight path will be. You can also see why it may take as little as five hours to get from Dulles to Heathrow, or more than seven hours to come back by a route that touches the Arctic Circle. Your plane is riding, fighting or circumventing high altitude winds that have huge influences on the weather below.

    To see how, drop Windy down to the surface:

    Those eddies alongside the jet stream are low pressure centers full of the moisture and wind we call storms. They spin along the sides of the jet stream the way dust devils twist up along the sides of highways full of passing trucks. Those two storm centers are spinning toward California and will bring more wind and rain.

    Beside the sure damage those will bring, there will be two benefits. One is that California will be as green as Ireland for a few months. The other is that wildflowers will bloom all over the place.

    The Death Valley folks are hedging their bet, but I’d put money on a nice bloom this Spring. Watch for it.

    Bonus link: There’s An Underground City Beneath Sacramento In Northern California That Most People Don’t Know About. Excerpt: “…Old Sacramento was built up during the time of the gold rush, but the frequent flooding of this area obliterated its first level time and time again, until finally, the city abandoned that level altogether. It’s both fascinating and creepy to tour the abandoned level…”

    , , ,
    , ,

  • How the species killing the planet can save it

    We live in the Anthropocene, a geological epoch defined by the influence of one species over everything else, including the planet itself. That species is ours, and we are a pestilential one, altering, consuming, and wasting everything we can.

    Specifically, our civilizations have advanced on the planet like a cancer, parasitically metabolizing materials we call “resources” (without their permission) as if their sums were not finite. Oil and coal will be gone in a few hundred years. Uranium, titanium, tungsten, helium, lithium and other members of the periodic table may be gone far sooner, thanks to our boundless appetites. And yes, we can raise crops of corn and other plants to make fuel for cars and jets, but only at the many costs of monoculture on the biodiversity required for sustaining every form of life.

    Vinay GuptaI bring all this up because we’ll be talking about it on Monday at this month’s Ostrom Workshop salon at Indiana University and live on the Web. Our speaker will be Vinay Gupta (@leashless), inventor of the Hexayurt refugee shelter, founder and CEO of Mattereum, a progenitor of Ethereum, and source of wisdom on all that and much else. The title of his talk is the headline above. His case is that we have to get our per-person environmental consumption down by about 10x. Or else.

    It helps that there are people and regions in the world providing living examples of how that is done. Vinay is deeply familiar with those and will share what he knows in ways that help us co-think and work to save the planet’s butt, along with our own.

    The salon is at 2 PM Eastern time. It is also free, but you need to register first, here.

    If this follows the pattern of our prior salons—all with the theme Beyond the Web—the presentation and discussion will be lively, informative, and productive. See you there.

  • When Clouds Crash

    Rackspace is in a crater right now, on fire.

    So are many of its customers. I’m one of them.

    What happened, Rackspace says, was “the result of a ransomware incident.” Damaged, lost or destroyed is its Hosted Exchange business. On that cloud platform, companies and individuals around the world run their email and much else.

    It’s quite a saga.

    The first report from Rackspace came at 11:49pm Pacific (where I am) on Thursday, posted on its Incidents page:

    We are investigating an issue that is affecting our Hosted Exchange environments. More details will be posted as they become available.

    Updates got more wordy as the outage continued. About a day later, a long posting said,

    We proactively powered down and disconnected the Hosted Exchange environment while we triaged to understand the extent and the severity of the impact. After further analysis, we have determined that this is a security incident.

    They also offered a lifeline of sorts:

    At no cost to you, we will be providing access to Microsoft Exchange Plan 1 licenses on Microsoft 365 until further notice. At no cost to you, we will be providing access to Microsoft Exchange Plan 1 licenses on Microsoft 365 until further notice. To activate, please use the below link for instructions on how to set up your account and users.

    For reasons not worth going into, this was useless to me. But I’m also just one guy, and almost all of Rackspace’s customers are businesses with more to lose.

    Getting help from Rackspace quickly became difficult or impossible, while details about the situation were minimal, until this morning (6 December), when they said it was a ransomware incident. Which countless tweets had been suggesting from the start.

    Here is what Rackspace said it was doing about it:

    Alongside our internal security team, we have engaged a leading cyber defense firm to investigate. Our investigation is still in its early stages, and it is too early to say what, if any, data was affected. If we determine sensitive information was affected, we will notify customers as appropriate.

    No FBI? CIA? NSA? DHS? Police? My guess is that at least two of those have been notified because it would make sense for them to be involved. But I’m sure abundant caution on Rackspace’s part is the reason we’re not hearing about any of that.

    As for notifying customers, good luck. In a posting two days ago, Rackspace said,

    For those who are finding the process challenging and are awaiting support, we ask for your patience as we increase staff to help every customer. Since our last update, we have mobilized roughly 1000 support Rackers to reduce wait times and address ticket queues. We will continue to accelerate and deploy even more resources to further help customers.

    Search for Rackspace+wait on Twitter to see how that’s going.

    Yesterday morning I chose the “we’ll call you back asap” option at the Rackspace support number, after calling them fruitlessly before that. Since then, crickets. Meanwhile, I’ve been working almost non-stop on moving my email hosting to Hover, which answers the phone quickly and is always helpful.

    Of course, I haven’t been able to export anything from Rackspace, and I have growing doubts that I ever will. If the failure is total, many details of my life in the digital world will be lost forever.

    One bit of good fortune is that my wife and sister, who both also have searls.com email addresses, were on Rackspace’s basic non-Exchange email service. Since that was still working today, we could export their mail archive from Rackspace as .mbox files, and start new accounts for them on Hover. (Ironically, I moved to Rackspace’s Exchange service because I punched through the basic service’s 25Gb limit on storage, and they sold me on the Exchange service’s better security.)

    Ramsomware is bad shit. If you’re Rackspace or one of its customers, there is plenty to fear.

    But the larger story here isn’t about Rackspace or its customers. It’s about the cloud business, which is beyond massive.

    I’ve been looking for examples of cloud failures that are bigger than this one. Here’s a list from five years ago. Here is one from July of this year. Here is one from August. Most list disruptions lasting hours. This one has been going on for five days with no end in sight.

    So let’s imagine that Rackspace and its customers are stuck in that crater, and it just keeps burning. For years. What are the lessons from that?

    [Later, on 10 December…] This report by Kevin Beaumont on the Rackspace catastrophe (which continues) is long on technical and administrative details that nobody else seems to be reporting, and is damning to Microsoft as well.

    ,