Doc Searls Weblog · problems

Bye ‘Bai

February 17, 2009 in Future, News, Past, Places, problems, Travel | 7 comments

I’ve been wondering, What happens to Dubai in a worldwide depresion? Smashing Telly says goodbye. Fun writing. A sample:

Dubai is a place for the shallow and fickle. Tabloid celebrities and worn out sports stars are sponsored by swollen faced, botox injected, perma-tanned European property developers to encourage the type of people who are impressed by fame itself, rather than what originated it, to inhabit pastiche Mediterranean villas on fake islands. Its a grotesquely leveraged version of time-share where people are sold a life in the same way as being peddled a set of steak knives. Funny shaped towers smatter empty neighborhoods, based on designs with unsubtle, eye-catching envelopes but bland floor plans and churned out by the dozen by anonymous minions in brand name architects offices and signed by the boss, unseen, as they fly through the door. This architecture, a three dimensional solidified version of a synthesized musical jingle, consists of ever more preposterous gimmickry – an underwater, revolving, white leather fuck pad or a marina skyscraper with a product placement name that would normally only appeal to teenage boys, such as the preposterous Michael Schumacher World Champion Tower.

Canada’s Smart Immigrant Pevention Plan Draft

February 14, 2009 in News, Places, problems | 3 comments

Ars: Canadian judge: No warrant needed to see ISP logs? Specifically, “The judge said that there’s ‘no reasonable expectation of privacy’ when it comes to logs kept by ISPs. Canadians, watch out, because everything you do online could soon be turned into legal fodder, even without a warrant.”

Well, it certainly is, with a warrant. No shortage of those. But still, it’s one more click in the ratchet by which freedom gets squeezed and chilled.

Stimulus Bill Qs

February 12, 2009 in News, problems | 18 comments

I am confused beyond endurance by whatever-the-hell is going on (or went on) with the “final Stimulus Bill”. So maybe some of ya’ll can provide some A’s to the following Qs:

— Where can one see a copy of the final bill? How about in .html, rather than .pdf form? Earth to Newspapers (and hell, bloggers): Give us some links to some goddam hard facts on this thing. Even the @#$% New York Times story on the Plan’s passage offers no links at all to the bill. Or whatever got passed.

— What the hell is the NTIA, really, and how is it different from the FCC? I ask because I see it all over the place, and hardly heard about it before this. I’ve read what it says at that last link, and I get the feeling I’m missing a lot. Especially politically.

— Are there “open network provisions” in there, like Public Knowledge said yesterday? Where? What?

— Is “open” defined in the bill?

— How about “broadband”? Here’s a search for “broadband” at ReadTheStimulus.org; but I’m not even sure if it’s for the “final” plan. Or wtf it says, really. Take this, for example. Okay, I just found this. Not sure what to think about it, though.

— Is the Internet treated as infrastructure in any serious way by this thing? I look up “Internet” at ReadTheStimulus.org and find eleven results. Over half say something like “The secretary shall post on the Internet…”

I like this Washington Post graphic, even though it looks like a map of a boondoggle to me.

My big concern, of course, is with the Internet, which desperately needs to be liberated from the telecom Regulatorium. This “package” isn’t the right place to do that, I’m sure. But liberation needs to be done. Far more economic prosperity will arise form Internet build-out that’s free from regulatory encumberances that date back to the railroad age.

Which brings me to another question.

— How would you deregulate the Internet? I know lots of folks (myself included, in some ways) who would like to see the Net’s virtues (openness, neutrality, whatever) protected one way or another. My question here is about what we’d get rid of. And not just at the federal level. I mean at the state, county and municipal level as well. What I’d like to see is a wide open field where anybody can get into building out the Net’s physical and wireless infrastructure in any way that does not make our varioius commons tragic.

My short answer to that one is to get rid of the whole concept of “telecom services” and “information services” — and even of “services”, in the laws that govern how we connect.

Which brings me to Freedom to Connect next month in Washington. I’ve been to most of them, and I wouldn’t miss it. The theme this year is “The Emerging Internet Economy”. I submit that more will emerge with less regulation than with more of it — especially if “more” is done inside the old telecom regime.

Bonus link. Comments included.

Sony Hit With a Clue-By-Four

February 11, 2009 in problems | 4 comments

This Onion Video may be the best thing that ever happened to Sony.

Toward understanding the MIddle East

February 5, 2009 in Places, problems | 2 comments

I don’t write much about war, mostly because I’d rather write about stuff I can do something about. As a young man I opposed the Vietnam war, wrote about it, protested against it. If I hadn’t lucked into a medical deferment, I would have been a conscientious objector, like some of my good friends.

Stephen Lewis was a fellow student at the same Quaker college, a good friend and a fellow protestor. We met when we crashed the same Ku Klux Klan rally, near the ironically named Liberty, NC. I believe we even joined the same picket lines outside one of Ed Cone’s family’s textile plants. (I’m not sure if Ed was even born back then. We’re talking about the ’60s here.)

With A Gingerly Step Middle-East-Wards, Steve treads lightly on territory I’ve been reluctant to write about — but about which I’ve been glad to learn more. At that Steve helps a lot. The post is short, sobering, and linkful.

There are no easy answers. But we can improve on the questions. This post does that.

The advertising bubble

February 2, 2009 in problems | 6 comments

continues to pop. The money ‘graphs:

Market research company eMarketer recently cut its estimate of advertising spending on the social networking sites, including Facebook, MySpace and Bebo, this year by $455 million to $1.3 billion. It said US advertising spending on Facebook will fall by 20 percent to $602 million.

IDC said advertisers are turning their backs on social networking sites because they have a lower “click-through rate” than traditional online ads. Only 57 percent of social network site users clicked on an advertisement and made a purchase last year, compared to 79 percent on the internet at large.

Experts at Deloitte said Facebook is suffering from the double-whammy of collapsing advertising revenue and the soaring cost of electronic data storage. Deloitte estimates that the cost of storing photos and videos on sites like Facebook has increased by more than $100 million a year.

“The book value of some social networks may be written down and some companies may fail altogether if funding dries up,” said Paul Lee, Deloitte director of research for technology and telecommunications. “Average revenue per user for some of the largest new media sites is measured in just cents per month.”

I gave thumbs down to every ad I saw on Facebook until it quit showing me ads. Meanwhile, I’d be glad to track my use of facebook and pay something for the value I get from it.

The perils of publicity

January 26, 2009 in Blogging, Future, Ideas, Life, problems, VRM | Permalink

I’m pretty good at getting buzz when I want it. The irony of running ProjectVRM, however, is that I don’t want much of that. Not yet, anyway. About a year ago I did promote it a bit, got a lot of great response, and also spent a lot of time debugging bad understandings of what VRM is and what’s going on with it.

Since then I’ve kept a pretty low profile with it, and encouraged others to do the same. That way we get fewer people showing up, but a better chance that they’re the right people.

But still, the buzz is out there. And, since it’s a new and as yet unproven idea, it attracts detractors as well. Here’s one that lays out “four fallacies” of VRM, all based on wrong understandings of what it is, and what its roles will be. So, I just tried to debug those understandings with this post here.

As I said there, I urge folks to hold off on their judgement until we’ve got working code and actual stuff that does what VRM is supposed to do. Trust me, it’ll come.

Tags: VRM

Killing spamlike comments

January 25, 2009 in Blogging, problems | 8 comments

This blog’s dashboard has a line that says this: Akismet has protected your site from 128,720 spam comments already, and there are 4,868 comments in your spam queue right now. I rarely look at the spam queue. The only time I’ve found false positives there are when some of my own comments have gone into the spam queue, because the system flags as spam anything with more than two links in it. Now I know where to look for linky comments that go missing.

Some spams get through, though. They’re easy to spot. Most of them respond to an old post about a topic of interest to the spammer. Let’s say I mentioned fly fishing sometime last year. I’ll get a post by zxzzyks452 at Hotmail or Gmail, and a blog address like flyfishingflyfishing.blogph0rm.com. The entire response will be “I agree. Keep it up!” or something equally innocuous and positive.

The top spams in the queue right now say, “Hehe! Good work!”, “I want to say – thank you for this!”, “Great site. Good info”, “Thank you!”, “Great site. Keep doing.” “Realy, realy nice work! I was impressed! My own are… (bunch of spammy links)”, “Excellent site. It was pleasant to me.”, “Incredible site!”, “Perfect work!”… and so on.

That last one came from a user calling himself or herself “GetXanax” at http://openlibrary.org/, which may not know it’s been hijacked by a spam system.

Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying that I delete nearly every comment that responds to an old post with language that looks like the examples two paragraphs up. I don’t think I’ve killed any good ones yet, but every once in awhile I wonder. Wish it were otherwise, but it ain’t. Life in the vast lane, I guess.

Pressing for respect

January 23, 2009 in Blogging, Ideas, Journalism, News, problems | 7 comments

The Columbia Journalism Review whines,

WhiteHouse.gov presents itself as a kind of social networking portal in which citizens can essentially “friend” the government–and it frames the ensuing dialogue as one that takes place directly between the people and the government. The press, it suggests by way of omission, need not be part of the exchange. One hopes–hey, one even dares to assume–that the conspicuous absence of the press from Obama’s transparency agenda is due to his conclusion that the democratic vitality of the Fourth Estate is so obvious as to render explanation or elucidation of that fact unnecessary.

Chris Anderson (he of Wired?) replies,

I don’t understand: why should “the press” get any special mention on the Obama website? And by “the press” you mean who: Talking Points Memo, the New York Times, Wonkette? The DC Independent Media Center? Or what?

And really, I’m sorry, this is just dumb: “created the impression that its members were, to him, a buzzing nuisance. Instead of the voice of the people.” When has “the press” ever been the “voice of the people,” and by what institutional arrogance does it CONTINUE to give this role to itself? Perhaps the press would be better off it started seeing itself as a particular category of content producers (a noble, unique and important one to be sure) and drop all this voice of the people foolishness. You might make a better argument about why Obama should mention you on his website.

Jay Rosen begins his comments with Please stop beating up on the techno-utopian strawman. It’s not that useful... and then pulls some of the particulars apart, concluding,

The “calm down digital utopians, let CJR sort the rhetoric from reality” tone is very familiar and we don’t really expect you to quit it, even though it would do you a world of good. What I found new and intriguing about this article is the “direct democracy” thing. I think I have this right: just as the United States is not a direct democracy but a republic, where the principle of self-government is modified by the rule of representatives who distill popular sentiment into wise decisions, so it is in the information sphere: “direct” access to information about the executive branch may appeal to a few digital utopians out there (don’t you wish they would calm down?) but it is not what the United States is about; rather, we need representative access, via the skeptical, curious, unhysterical and professional press, which sorts through the information and asks the wise questions. Do I have that right?

Good luck with that concept. May we see it elaborated, please?

I also like Dave Winer’s construcive critique of WhiteHouse.gov.

Bonus link. Another. And another. (Could Blackberry have better product placement anywhere? Ever? Yow.)