Still going after all these years.
Prayer, if you believe in it (and maybe even if you don’t), is in order: Seattle’s blogmom Anita Rowland has diabetes and ovarian cancer…and no health insurance.
Folks, this is really bad news. Anita, as she is wont to do, is putting a really brave face on it, but this is not a good situation at all. I wish there was something we could do for her.
Redmond’s own Irish-Cajun brewpub, the Celtic Bayou, just took home a silver medal at the Great American Beer Festival for their Barbarian’s Best Bitter (in the Extra Special Bitter category, naturally). No tasting notes because you can only get the beer at the pub. Maybe I should swing by again…
As rumored, the iTunes Music Store for Windows arrived today. Two significant parts of that announcement: the store is available to Windows users, and iTunes itself is available to Windows users.
I downloaded the software today, which includes QuickTime 6.4, and installed it. After a restart (probably necessary because I already had QuickTime installed), I started iTunes. It asked me whether I wanted to find MP3 and AAC files in my My Music folder, and whether I wanted to see the store right away. I said yes and no, respectively, and let it start finding music. About a minute later, it had populated 1473 MP3s into my library.
Note: It didn’t ask about WMA files. Not a problem unles you were already using Windows Media Player and ripping to WMA format. But support for the format is absent, unsurprisingly.
The music store looks slightly different from the Mac version, but the functionality is the same, including the two new features added today, Gift Certificates and Allowance (smart features for family and friends). One major problem: I couldn’t get purchased music that I had bought on my Mac to download to my Windows account. I’ll have to see if I can figure out how to do that… (Update: Looks like I’ll have to copy the files manually; see these Support Articles about moving music between authorized computers.)
Update 2: Holy crap, music sharing works too! Someone else in my building has downloaded the software, and his shared list just showed up in my library… I’ll have to wait until tonight to see how it works on our home network.
In my email this morning, a link to another blogging Jarrett: Patrick Jarrett of Georgia Tech, who blogs at RoninCyberpunk. Interesting writing about college life and programming.
I was planning to go to the Blog Meetup tonight but fate and work intervened. Hope it went well.
Can there be anything more civilized than reading the New York Times’ Dining section on Tuesday night, the night before it makes it into print, and finding the following:
Man. Who needs to eat? Just reading the articles is enough.
Arbitrage=the art of buying low and selling high with no risk. If one could sell online music at the same rates as the iTunes music store, there would be real arbitrage opportunities this week.
To wit: eMusic is shutting the doors on its unlimited downloads policy at the end of the month, but until then it’s all you can download (meaning, there are a ton of people including myself doing just that right now). Meanwhile, the iTunes Music Store seems to be adding a bunch of labels that were formerly found only on eMusic, including Matador (Cat Power, Pizzicato Five, Mark Eitzel, Pavement, Yo La Tengo) and Fantasy/Prestige/Riverside (John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Coleman Hawkins, Eric Dolphy, Freddie Hubbard, Bill Evans, Joe Henderson, and other brilliant 1950s jazz sessions), and Lakeshore (Granddaddy). Alas, no arbitrage. Otherwise I could download all the albums for free on eMusic, resell them on iTunes, and make a killing. I’ll have to settle for just downloading the albums for free.
In compensation for the lack of arbitrage, the iTunes Music Store has added a few artists and albums that never made it to eMusic, like the White Stripes and Pop Will Eat Itself’s 1989 album featuring the insanely brilliant “Can U Dig It?”. If music keeps getting added like this, I’ll forget all about my disappointment with eMusic. Eventually.
Local favorites Fantagraphics announced today that they will begin reprinting the complete Peanuts—all fifty years—with a collection from the first two years (1950 to 1952) to be published next April. The plan is to do 25 books, two a year. I’m most interested by the first book, which should shed some interesting light on the development of the characters in the strip—since Lucy, Schroeder, Linus, and even Snoopy started out as babies. There were fascinating hints of those early characters in the Art of Peanuts collection that was published a few years back.
No way to pre-order, though ISBN (1-56097-589-X), price ($28.95), and cover are given.
The Olympian: Many soldiers, same letter: Newspapers around US get identical missives from Iraq. The letter apparently was handed out by the platoon leader, who asked soldiers to sign it; speculation is that someone is trying really hard to put a positive face on the war. Some of the soldiers were unhappy that their signatures appeared on papers that weren’t their own thoughts:
2nd Battalion soldier [Sgt. Shawn Grueser] said he did not sign any letter.
Although Grueser said he agrees with the letter’s sentiments, he was uncomfortable that a letter with his signature did not contain his own words or spell out his own accomplishments.
“It makes it look like you cheated on a test, and everybody got the same grade,” Grueser said by phone from a base in Italy where he had just arrived from Iraq.
Infothought has a follow-up that shows how to search for all the astroturfed letters on Google. About fourteen hits from different papers.
Here’s Instapundit on the astroturfs: most of the letters seem to be sent out voluntarily, even if they were all the same.
Compare this with the GOP astroturf campaign a few months back. I know it’s common practice, but you know, it still smells. A few of the papers did features on the letters from the front, as though the boys that signed them had actually written the letters.
I’m only part way through Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver, despite having worked on it all the way back from Boston. So far, so good: fun, intelligent, and multilayered, with the science of Newton and Hooke present but taking a decided back seat to the intrigues of the royal court and the politics of the Royal Society.
One thing the book has done for me is to greatly increase my enjoyment of Samuel Pepys’s blog/diary. I almost laughed out loud reading the entry from October 7, 1660, in which Pepys relates the story of how the Duke of York initially refused to marry Anne Hyde, and concludes with the tongue in cheek proverb: “he that do get a wench with child and marry her afterwards is as if a man should sh*t in his hat and then clap it on his head.” Not exactly the cold dusty hand of history…
Update: I’m not the only one working through the book, it appears; Matthew Kirschenbaum points to this interview with Stephenson in which it is revealed that the whole book, all 900 pages, was written longhand with pen and paper. Kirschenbaum also rightly dings Stephenson for not pointing out that the preservation of paper documents from the 1600s has something to do with libraries.
Second post-mortem piece on BloggerCon, trying to dive into the hype and document why I think blogs are revolutionary.
Most of the discussion at BloggerCon, at least on Day One, focused on ways that blogging and the lowered threshold of entry to self-publication facilitated a more empowered, more aware population. I heard an emergent theory of blog empowerment that goes something like this: voice, connection, power. (For background on this piece, read my strawman definition of blogs from the conference.)
By providing a central place for the blogger’s work, the blog collects everything the blogger writes in one place, in a chronology. By reading the blogger’s past writing, we can discover that the blogger has held the same opinion over time, or has changed it; who the blogger likes, whom he or she distrusts; what subjects engage the blogger’s energy; and (by following links back to the blogger) who has opinions about the blogger’s work. By providing this ongoing trail of words, this rich back history, and links, the blogger creates an online voice with history, chronology, evolution, and context.
More importantly, the act of posting thoughts in a blog on the Internet (as opposed to in a private document) enables others to hear that voice. If the blogger’s words are heard, and others enter into dialog, the blogger has ceased to be a passive observer of the Internet and has instead become a creator of it. This enables people—whether 12-year-old confused adolescents, 24-year-old software programmers in cubicle farms, 30-year-old Iraqi translators in Baghdad reporting from inside a war, or sixty-year-old grandmothers with a passion for presidential politics—who might never have written anything before to be read around the world.
In education, blogs are being used as teaching aids to help students, from elementary school through graduate programs, to learn to express their thoughts, read and evaluate other sources, and to enter into dialog. Seminarians who blog learn to take responsibility for their daily thoughts and actions. Business students who blog learn how to cooperate with others in loosely distributed groups to have open and constructive discussions and defend their views. Students in impoverished nations who find gaps in curriculum for their native languages are encouraged to fill the gaps with their own writing.
A big conference theme was blogs as mediating transformative connections. By providing alternative outlets for publishing commentary on other materials on the web and for relating first-hand experience, blogs enable individuals to publish opinions and other material that might not otherwise be published—this is empowerment by publishing.
Blogs written by individuals inside institutions also, through their personal nature, offer the readers of those blogs a connection to the institution at an individual level that they would not experience otherwise. This empowers them through connecting them more closely to that institution and enabling them to better understand the institution. This is empowerment by access.
Finally, when the blogger outside the institution publishes a comment and a link to the work of the blogger inside the institution, and the institutional blogger reciprocates with a link, a relationship develops between the two, the outsider and the institution, that helps the outsider to understand, and in some cases affect, the institution. This is empowerment by relationship.
In journalism, the effect of this empowerment is to greatly expand the power of the non-institutional observer of events, formerly only a reader or consumer of journalism, to create and publish his own version of events, to enter into dialog with the institution that published the first version, and occasionally—as in the case of Trent Lott—to change the tone of the institutional coverage and affect the course of events.
This is an expanded version of Jim Moore’s thesis of the Second Superpower, because in this scenario blogs empower the people inside the institution as well. By providing voices to the powerless, and by giving a voice in the same sphere to individuals inside institutions, greater understanding between the two parties can be reached, opinions can be formed and shaped, and change can be effected.
At the conference, Chris Lydon, Doc Searls, and others observed that this is a process that has been going on for a long time, since the printing press became available to Tom Paine as a means of disseminating his thoughts on political theory. Dave Weinberger posited that blogs put the nail in the coffin of “objective voices” and help to expose the myriad of overlapping subjectivities by which individual thoughts become part of the public record, shape policy, and create history.
Me? I think there’s a lot of promise. I think a lot of conference attendees were right to point out that blogging is a limited empowerment that presupposes a level of access and literacy that are by themselves pretty empowering. But there is something about the way this particular method of communication has shaped up that gives me hope.
I’ve been sitting on a few short responses to BloggerCon since last Sunday. I’m not pleased with them yet, but if I sit on them any longer they’ll get even staler, so here goes.
BloggerCon started by taking an explicitly technology neutral view of blogs, one that discussed the implications of blogs rather than what they were. On Day One (the only day I attended), there was no discussion of the construction of blogs and fundamental operations of blogging. A brief definition, then:
Blogs are personally published documents on the web, with attribution and date, collected in a single place, generally published with a static structure to facilitate incoming links from other sources, and updated with some regularity and frequency from every few days to several times daily. Blogs are generally understood to be subjective, with no authority other than that lent by their author generally. Many blogs consist of links and commentary—comments about something or some entity with a web presence, links to enable the reader to discover the original object being commented on and explore it for themselves. Bloggers leave link trails, hyperlinks back to the subjects of their commentary, and the link trails enable others to go beyond the blogger’s subjective opinion and find the original source so that they can evaluate it and form their own opinions.
Blogging thus differs from general web pages in frequency, intent and practice. Rather than claiming authority, blogs assume subjectivity and let the reader make up his own mind. Rather than a collection of documents that define an object on the Internet—for instance, a company, a university, a person’s family tree—blogs are glosses on those objects, marginal annotations that unlike other forms of web comments such as the “sticky note” feature in IE have permanence of their own on the Web. Unlike a threaded discussion group (web board or Usenet), where there are generally no authoritative methods to find a prior message and no central record of a person’s contributions and opinions, blogs host the author’s comments in a single place, at a personal address, and in a chronology so that others can review the blogger’s thoughts and comments in one location. By keeping a permanent record of the blogger’s writings in a central place, a blog implies a certain amount of accountability for the author’s words and opinions; in other online communities, this accountability is generally left up to the community to enforce.
I wondered the other day how it was that eMusic, or its artists, made money on the $14.99 a month unlimited download plan. I generally, when I remember to do so, find about four or five albums that I want to listen to for that $14.99, and that happens about every two weeks.
So this morning’s email that eMusic was being acquired by “Dimensional Associates LLC,” and changing their pricing model to eliminate all-you-can-download, came as no real surprise. The two tiers in the new pricing scheme: 40 songs a month for $9.99, or 300 songs for $50 a month.
Neither tier is really tempting, but I suppose I’ll stick with the basic pricing scheme just in case I discover another band I should have been listening to all along—like Pavement, Yo La Tengo, Red House Painters, or Cat Power—through the service. And between now and October 30, when the new pricing scheme takes effect, I’ll be pretty busy, especially in the Prestige/Riverside jazz part of the eMusic store.
Of course, the fine What Do I Know beat me to this post this morning…
Moving on to pleasanter topics: Nancy Pearl, one of my three favorite librarians, has an interview in the New York Times: A Librarian Is Making a Big Noise. Great bit at the end:
Confronted with a wealth of books, Ms. Pearl has invented a now-famous tool to cope with the onslaught: the Rule of 50.
“Nobody should ever have to finish a book they’re not thoroughly enjoying, but you need to give the book a chance,” she explained. “It seems to me that a good amount of pages would be 50. At the end of 50 pages, you ask, ‘Am I really liking this book, or am I just gutting it out?’ This rule worked well for me for many years, until I started to get closer to 50 years old myself. I realized that time was short, and that the world of books is larger than ever.”
So Ms. Pearl, who is now 58, came up with this ingenious calculus of reading: “Now I have an amended Rule of 50: If you’re 50 years of age and under, you follow the original rule. But if you’re over 50, you subtract your age from 100, and that number is the number of pages you have to read. A psychiatrist — not one I was seeing, a stranger — told me, with a straight face, that this is the greatest gift I have given to humanity.”
Of course, it helps that she has an action figure modeled after her, with a built in shushing action.