December 2004 Archives

A great idea: I hope this takes off.

Jeff Jarvis has a huge list of tsunami related links.

This story has a few twists to it however. Read more at Burningbird.

Rajiv Pant, my former boss at Knight Ridder, is collecting screenshots of companies that have made an effort to help with relief efforts in Asia. If you have any, let him know.

I'm blown away by these companies. Amazon, Apple, Ebay and more.

Additionally, I'm blown away by what a blog can do when focused on a mission. Check it out.

One last thing, local blogger Scrappleface has collected over $5,000 from his readers so far.

I had the honor of answering some questions from Ed Cone about Philly Future.

I gotta tell ya, it's pretty neat being interviewed. You can read it here.

For all too many I know, it doesn't exist unless it's mentioned in Wired. Hopefully this will peak their attention since some software engineer talking excitedly about what's coming down the pike isn't as effective (errr...).

...Like many geeks in the '90s, Cohen coded for a parade of dotcoms that went bust without a product ever seeing daylight. He decided his next project would be something he wrote for himself in his own way, and gave away free. "You get so tired of having your work die," he says. "I just wanted to make something that people would actually use."

...You could think of BitTorrent as Napster redux - another rumble in the endless copyright wars. But BitTorrent is something deeper and more subtle. It's a technology that is changing the landscape of broadcast media.

"All hell's about to break loose," says Brad Burnham, a venture capitalist with Union Square Ventures in Manhattan, which studies the impact of new technology on traditional media. BitTorrent does not require the wires or airwaves that the cable and network giants have spent billions constructing and buying. And it pounds the final nail into the coffin of must-see, appointment television. BitTorrent transforms the Internet into the world's largest TiVo.

One example of how the world has already changed: Gary Lerhaupt, a graduate student in computer science at Stanford, became fascinated with Outfoxed, the documentary critical of Fox News, and thought more people should see it. So he convinced the film's producer to let him put a chunk of it on his Web site for free, as a 500-Mbyte torrent. Within two months, nearly 1,500 people downloaded it. That's almost 750 gigs of traffic, a heck of a wallop. But to get the ball rolling, Lerhaupt's site needed to serve up only 5 gigs. After that, the peers took over and hosted it themselves. His bill for that bandwidth? $4. There are drinks at Starbucks that cost more. "It's amazing - I'm a movie distributor," he says. "If I had my own content, I'd be a TV station."

During the last century, movie and TV companies had to be massive to afford distribution. Those economies of scale aren't needed anymore. Will the future of broadcasting need networks, or even channels?

"Blogs reduced the newspaper to the post. In TV, it'll go from the network to the show," says Jeff Jarvis, president of the Internet strategy company Advance.net and founder of Entertainment Weekly. (Advance.net is owned by Advance Magazine Group, which also owns Wired's parent company, Cond? Nast.) Burnham goes one step further. He thinks TV-viewing habits are becoming even more atomized. People won't watch entire shows; they'll just watch the parts they care about.

Evidence that Burnham's prediction is coming true came a few weeks before the US presidential election in November, when Jon Stewart - host of Comedy Central's irreverent The Daily Show - made a now-famous appearance on CNN's Crossfire. Stewart attacked the hosts, Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson, calling them political puppets. "What you do is partisan hackery," he said, just before he called Carlson "a dick." Amusing enough, but what happened next was more remarkable. Delighted fans immediately ripped the segment and posted it online as a torrent. Word of Stewart's smackdown spread rapidly through the blogs, and within a day at least 4,000 servers were hosting the clip. One host reported having, at any given time, more than a hundred peers swapping and downloading the file. No one knows exactly how many people got the clip through BitTorrent, but this kind of traffic on the very first day suggests a number in the hundreds of thousands - and probably much higher. Another 2.3 million people streamed it from iFilm.com over the next few weeks. By contrast, CNN's audience for Crossfire was only 867,000. Three times as many people saw Stewart's appearance online as on CNN itself.

...Cohen knows the havoc he has wrought. In November, he spoke at a Los Angeles awards show and conference organized by Billboard, the weekly paper of the music business. After hobnobbing with "content people" from the record and movie industries, he realized that "the content people have no clue. I mean, no clue. The cost of bandwidth is going down to nothing. And the size of hard drives is getting so big, and they're so cheap, that pretty soon you'll have every song you own on one hard drive. The content distribution industry is going to evaporate." Cohen said as much at the conference's panel discussion on file-sharing. The audience sat in a stunned silence, their mouths agape at Cohen's audacity.

You'll definately want to read this profile of BitTorrent and it's creator.

The scope of this is just too much to comprehend. I have friends with family in the affected regions of India. They are OK and were just out of danger.

As an aside, it looks like CNN has gotten the message. Their TV news is now matching the coverage of their online wing.

Something people don't always know - a news company can have entirely different staffs for online operations vs. their other outlets.

Information can be found here.

The tragedy unfolding in Asia just grows worst and worst.

Wikipedia has the most thourough summary so far.

The silence from our news networks is contemptable.

A few hours early, but I'm sure you understand. I'm off the net tomorrow.

This Xmas season, it's severely cold here, and snowy across the middle of the US. I will make my yearly plea that we all go out of our way to think of those in need. The homeless can make efficient use of just about anything. Don't just collect those bags of stuff for your tax write-off; give where the need is heaviest. I know it's a down economy, and we're all challenged ? but I see more of Shakespeare?s homeless this year, than I can ever help:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm!
How shall your houseless heads, and unfed sides,
Your loop'd and window?d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these?

Conservatives can try to make Scrooge into a hero, insulting the legacy of Dickens. If you have a heart, you know better than that. Dig out that old stuff in your closet, make someone warm tomorrow, and for the Xmas holiday. You there ? I know you've got that can of black olives in the back of your pantry. And you ... you?ve got a can of chili you didn?t especially like sitting there. Give it someone who might truly enjoy it, instead of tossing it out when you do your spring cleaning.

The homeless, in general, do not bite. Walk up and talk to them, look them in the eye. Let them know someone cares. You may be surprised, even delighted. If you see one as you're leaving your favorite restaurant, offer your 'doggie bag.' Going to McDonalds? Spend a couple of bucks and buy them a "Happy Meal" or better. To paraphrase Bob Marley, mankind *is* our business. You can?t do much about Iraq, but you can feed and clothe that homeless vet, can?t you?

To give you a different and personal spin, try this on for size. I can never forget that my father and his siblings were once ragged orphans, abandoned by their father and grandparents upon their mother's death. If you don't give, you might not be able to read writings from someone like myself in the future. You read me, thanks to the charity of private individuals. Individuals who gave a damn, who wanted to make a difference.

And did.

The cold of winter *is* when want is most keenly felt. Do not forget the needy this season.

Thank you.

I quoted the whole post, which is wrong copyright wise, but Garret probably won't mind. This is too important and he'd understand.

I can relate to his message - in the future you just might not have people like myself either, who grew up with Salvation Army provided Christmases amd spent time sleeping on the Frankford El because I had no where to go.

I said this before in the context of the election, but I'll say it again in the context of life - if you have the resources, you have the responsibility to do something.

In Philly, we have Project H.O.M.E.. A terrific service that will help homeless with temporary relief, and long term, to help them beat their personal struggle with poverty.

One thing I do is keep a phone number on me at all times, their Street Outeach number (215) 232-1984. Call it if you find someone who is homeless. They will drive to your location and attempt to help him or her out. Better yet (and I need to do this myself) volunteer to be a driver by calling the same number. They always need help.

This time it's driven by the fans. I think I've found a like soul there now too. Mentioning Faster Pussycat, Metallica, and Twisted Sister in the same paragraph makes me respect 'em.

2004 Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry will file today, in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, papers in support of the Green Party/Libertarian Party recount effort. Specifically, Kerry will be filing a request for expedited discovery regarding Triad Systems voting machines, as well as a motion for a preservation order to protect any and all discovery and preserve any evidence on this matter...

Kerry's entry into this recount effort changes the math on this matter dramatically. He can likewise show irreperable harm, and unlike the Green and Libertarian candidates, he can also prove a substantial chance for success on the merits because he lost the Ohio vote by a statistical whisker.

It should be noted that Kerry's filing of these requests does not indicate his complete entry into the recount process, but does clearly indicate that he is moving decisively in that direction. His previous stance on the matter was based simply on his desire to defend the right to have a recount in the first place. The evidence of election tampering in Ohio, specifically surrounding Triad, has motivated him to actively join the fight. The Democratic Party is also quietly putting financial resources into the Ohio recount effort.

This morning I woke up to find that the torrent had died. Someone - no one knows who - had put enough pressure onto the operators of Suprnova.org and TorrentBits.com to shut them down. SuprNova.org was amazing, the Wal-Mart of torrents, a great big marketplace of piracy, all neatly dished up and aiming to please. You want this new Hollywood release? Here's a recording from someone who smuggled a camcorder into a screening. - How about the latest episode of that hit HBO series? There you go, and no subscription fees to pay. Just fire up your favorite BitTorrent client - BitTornado, Azureus, Tomato, or that good old-fashioned Bram Cohen code. Click on the torrent, and you're up and downloading, sharing what you're getting with hundreds of others. Share and share alike. What could be more friendly?

For those of you who found the last paragraph littered with weird gobblygook, here's your opportunity to come up to speed: BitTorrent is a computer protocol (a language computers use when communicating with each other) which allows computers to freely and efficiently share information with one another. This free-for-all of sharing is often called peer-to-peer or P2P, and it has become one of the most popular activities on the Internet. Many of you have heard how the record companies are deathly afraid that their markets are about to evaporate as their customers move from buying CDs to downloading pirated music. This much is true: for the last several years, peer-to-peer software has been used to help people find audio files on the internet - files being offered up by other people for you to download, anonymously. Find a song, click on it, and down it comes to your computer's hard drive.

All of this song swapping began before most Americans had access to high-speed "broadband" internet connections. But, as of a month ago, just about half of the home users in the USA access the Internet through a broadband connection. These connections are anywhere from 10 and 50 times faster than the earlier "dial-up" connections which tied up phone lines and kept you waiting for what seemed like weeks as you struggled to download the latest gossip from your favorite website. While it takes some time to download music over a dial-up connection, you'd only wait about ten minutes for an average song. Movies and TV shows, which are much "richer" (more data), take a lot more time to download. The new U2 album, for example, might contain 45 million bytes of data. But an episode of "Six Feet Under" - roughly the same length - would probably run to 450 million bytes of information, ten times the amount. Coincidentally, that's how much faster internet connections are, compared to a few years ago.

This increase in bandwidth has led to an enormous underground trade in all sorts of audiovisual media. It's not just current movies - classics and cult films are available. (I downloaded Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls the day he died, watching it that evening, my homage to the great schlock director.) And, more significantly, nearly every new TV show that airs in the US or the UK is almost instantaneously available globally, because someone watching that show is recording it to their hard disk, publishing the recording to the Internet. This isn't rocket science: computer peripherals which convert TV signals to digital data cost less than $100, and millions of them are out there already.

If you're just one person with one recording of one show, and it's a popular show, your computer's internet connection is going to get swamped with requests for the show; eventually your computer will crash or you'll take the show off the Internet, just so you can read your email. And in the early days of peer-to-peer, that's how it was. Someone would find a computer with a copy of the song they wanted to listen to, connect to that computer, and download the data. It worked, but anything that got very popular was likely to disappear almost immediately. Popularity was a problem in first-generation peer-to-peer networks.

In November 2002, an unemployed programmer named Bram Cohen decided there had to be a better way, so he spent a few weeks writing an improved version of the protocols used to create peer-to-peer networks, and came up with BitTorrent. BitTorrent is a radical advance over the peer-to-peer systems which preceded it. Cohen realized that popularity is a good thing, and designed BitTorrent to take advantage of it. When a file (movie, music, computer program, it's all just bits) is published on BitTorrent, everyone who wants the file is required to share what they have with everyone else. As you're downloading the file, those parts you've already downloaded are available to other people looking to download the file. This means that you're not just "leeching" the file, taking without giving back; you're also sharing the file with anyone else who wants it. As more people download the file, they offer up what they've downloaded, and so on. As this process rolls on, there are always more and more computers to download the file from. If a file gets very popular, you might be getting bits of it from hundreds of different computers, all over the Internet - simultaneously. This is a very important point, because it means that as BitTorrent files grow in popularity, they become progressively faster to download. Popularity isn't a scourge in BitTorrent - it's a blessing.

It's such a blessing that, as of November, 35% of all traffic on the Internet was BitTorrent-related. Unfortunately, that blessing looks more like a curse if you're the head of a Hollywood studio, trying to fill seats in megaplexes or move millions of units of your latest DVDs releases. And, although BitTorrent is efficient, it isn't designed to make data piracy easy; BitTorrent relies on a lot of information which can be used to trace the location of every single user downloading a file, and, more significantly, it also relies on a centralized "tracker"- a computer program which registers the requests for the file, and tells a requester how to hook up to the tens or hundreds of other computers offering pieces of the file for download.

As any good network engineer knows (and I was a network engineer for over a decade), a single point of failure (a single computer offering a single torrent tracker) is a Bad Thing to have in a network. It's the one shortcoming in Cohen's design for BitTorrent: kill the tracker and you've killed the torrent. But network engineers know better than to design systems with single points of failure: that's one of the reasons the Internet is still around, despite the best efforts of hackers around the world to kill it. Failure in any one part of the Internet is expected and dealt with in short order. Various parts of the Internet fail all the time and you only very rarely notice.

Back to today, when the hammer came down. SuprNova.org and TorrentBits.com each played host to thousands of BitTorrent trackers. When these sites went down the torrents went Poof!, as if they'd never existed. This evening the members of the MPAA must be feeling quite satisfied with themselves - they see this danger as passed; never again will BitTorrent threaten the revenues of the Hollywood studios.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

As Hollywood is so fond of sequels, it seems perfectly fitting that today's suppression of the leading BitTorrent sites bears an uncanny resemblance to an event which took place in July of 2000. Facing a rising sea of lawsuits and numerous court orders demanding an immediate shutdown, the archetypal peer-to-peer service, Napster, pulled the plug on its own servers, silencing the millions of users who used the service as a central exchange to locate songs to download. That should have been the end of that. But it wasn't. Instead, the number of songs traded on the Internet today dwarfs the number traded in Napster's heyday. The suppression of Napster led to a profusion of alternatives - Gnutella, Kazaa, and BitTorrent.

Gnutella is a particularly telling example of how the suppression of a seductive technology (and peer-to-peer file trading is very seductive - ask anyone who's done it) only results in an improved technology taking its place. Instead of relying on a centralized server - a fault that both Napster and BitTorrent share - Gnutella uses a process of discovery to let peers share information with each other about what's available where. The peers in a Gnutella peer-to-peer network self-organize into an occasionally unreliable but undeniably expansive network of content. Because of its distributed nature, shutting down any one Gnutella peer has only a very limited effect on the overall network. One individual's collection of music might evaporate, but there are still tens of
thousands of others to pick from. This network of Gnutella peers (and its offspring, such as Kazaa, BearShare, and Acquisition) has been growing since its introduction in 2001, mostly invisibly, but ever more pervasively.

If Napster hadn't been run out of business by the RIAA, it's unlikely that any need for Gnutella would have arisen; if the RIAA hadn't attacked that single point of failure, there'd have been no need to develop a solution which, by design, has no single point to failure. It's as though both sides in the war over piracy and file sharing are engaged in an evolutionary struggle: every time one side comes up with a new strategy, the other side evolves a response to it. This isn't justa cat-and-mouse game; each attack by the RIAA, generates a response of increasing sophistication. And, today, the MPAA has blundered into this arms race. This was, as will soon be seen, a Very Bad Idea.

Pointing up the single greatest weakness of BitTorrent take down the tracker and the torrent dies - has only served to energize, inspire and the resources of an entire global ecology of softwaredevelopers, network engineers and hackers-at-large who want nothing so much, at this moment, as to make the MPAA pay for their insolence. Imagine a parent reaching into a child's room and ripping a TV set out of the wall while the child is watching it. That child would feel anger and begin plotting his revenge. And that scene has been multiplied at least hundred thousand times today, all around the world. It is quite likely that, as I type these words, somewhere in the world a roomful of college CS students, fueled by coke and pizza and righteous indignation, are banging out some code which will fix the inherent weakness of BitTorrent - removing the need for a single tracker. If they're smart enough, they'll work out a system of dynamic trackers, which could quickly pass control back and forth among a cloud of peers, so that no one peer holds the hot potato long enough to be noticed. They'll take the best of Gnutella and cross-breed it with the best of BitTorrent. And that will be the MPAA's worst nightmare.

Hey, Hollywood! Can you feel the future slipping through your fingers? Do you understand how badly you've screwed up? You took a perfectly serviceable situation - a nice, centralized system for the distribution of media, and, through your own greed and shortsightedness, are giving birth to a system of digital distribution that you'll never, ever be able to defeat. In your avarice and arrogance you ignored the obvious: should have cut a deal with SuprNova.org. In partnership you could have found a way to manage the disruptive change that's already well underway. Instead, you have repeated the mistakes made by the recording industry, chapter and verse. And thus you have spelled your own doom. It's said that the best sequels are just like the original, only bigger and louder. Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for one hell of a crash. This baby is now fully out of control.

I've enabled anonymous moderated story posting at Philly Future. Now, anyone can post a story, and the site's membership team will decide if it is worthy to go live. Previously, you had to be a member to post.

The absolute worst place to spend your time on the web is in someone else's comments threads having an argument. What a waste of effort. Far too often people argue just to win. I have a hard time dealing with that. I have a hard time dealing with people that just want to win at any cost. I know, I know, it's life. People's pride is in the way. Dave would say it's human nature. But there is a part of me that holds on to a belief that people are better than that.

I need to swear it off once and for all. The time I spend trying to argue is time better spent elsewhere.

It's the name: "MSN Spaces", and the theme: "Create your online space". Why this has been overlooked by so many folks, I have no idea. Even if the execution leaves something to be desired right now, the idea is terrific. Right on the money.

BBC: Fast web access is encouraging more people to express themselves online, research suggests.

Very, very sad. You can't stop rock n' roll. Nor can you stop BitTorrent. BitTorrent is a protocol. Not just one piece of software or a network. So make a bet on it. Here is an unofficial SuprNova.org Closure FAQ.

You can get details here.

Dave Winer marks today what happened when weblogs.com went down and was reborn as Buzzword.com. As the Wired article states, one hell of a flame war went off. Some people had legitimate issues over how it was handled, but others attempted to take advantage and make it personal. No doubt, some of this was in retribution for past real grievances. But it was far too public to have accomplished much except bad blood. A lot of it was spilled. What I'm about to talk about is not related to this, but than again, maybe it is.

Vinnie Paul Abbot lost a brother December 8, 2004. His band mate, his brother, was murdered on stage, while they were performing, by a derranged fan who was upset at the breakup of their former band - Pantera.

Phil Anselmo was lead singer of Pantera. He became like a brother to Vinnie and Darrel. You don't spend twelve years together thru the ups and downs in life without becoming close. Pantera, speaking as a fan, always resembled to me the sound of a closed fist. They, like Metallica used to, had a "unifying" sound going on. It's hard to describe, but you can feel it when you listen. Heavier than heavy. That can only comes from band mates who are close. In fact, you could say that Pantera carried the torch for metal when Metallica dropped it in their quest for? well I have no idea. But what I do know is that fans loved Pantera for it. Unlike so many other metal bands, they seemed to somehow get heavier album by album.

Phil traveled to Texas, to mourn the loss of his band mate, his brother, but didn?t attend the funeral - he wasn't permitted: "to respect the Abbot family's wishes, and they do not want me there. I believe I belong there, but I understand completely?. I wish his family the least grief they could ever have, and I know it's impossible. Just bless his family, bless his friends. I love him like a brother loves a brother. . . . I'm so sorry to his family and everyone else who was senselessly killed in Columbus, Ohio." Why didn't the family want him there? Bad blood.

As Pantera grew famous, Phil started to lay out grievances with his band mates in more and more public ways. Not simply attacking the opinions of his band mates - but attacking them personally. In magazines. On stage. Phil eventually started his own side project. Recrimations were made both ways. Pantera pretty much imploded. Phil continued to rip on Darrel, and just recently told Metal Hammer magazine that Darrell "deserves to be beaten severely."

You can imagine how bad Phil feels. My heart goes out to him.

Now I look over to one of my fellow bloggers, someone who?s opinion I value enough to read regularly, ralling a cry to "blogbat" another blogger while calling him pond scum. This very same blogger called on the community to take a pledge for civilized discourse so that the country can come together after the election. He has legitimate things to critique of the other blogger. Giving a in-depth critique of someone else's views, positions, and so forth is a great thing and blogs are terrific for this. Hyperlinks are terrific tools. But he made it personal without giving the chance for discussion. How is this "civilized discourse"? It looks like anything but. "Fact checking his ass" is good. Calling someone "pondscum" and telling others to "blogbat" him without attempting to reconcile...err.... not so good. I've been accused of flaming others on occasion, but I try my best not to blog-to-blog anymore - the consequences can be very bad. Links increase the impact of anything we say exponentially.

If I attack someone personally, instead of attempting to deal with what they are saying or doing first, I decrease the chance to reconcile, or to persuade and bridge. If I publicly attack someone personally, I know now that I pretty much eliminate those opportunities. Unless I want to bring someone or something down (and Lord knows there are some people and things that should be), than I try not to do it. I try to attack their ideas, attack what they are doing. I'm blunt. I can't help that. But I avoid attacking them personally. That is, unless it is personal. If so, I try one on one communication first. If the other person takes it public - well I gotta defend myself.

I think these are principals that heavily linked to pundit bloggers should think about. You have a responsibility. You help define the truth as far as Google searchers see it. Need I remind you to search for "miserable failure" or "bush mandate" on Google?

Otherwise, all you are doing, in the words of Jon Stewart, is "hurting America". Don't be a partisan hack. Have real discussion and argue your view based on it's merits.

If you think this is preachy, or that I am boring, I don't give a shit. This is a hard road to take, but I hope I live up to these responsibilities.

(yeah, yeah I know... isn't this how Democrats lost the election? We were too 'nice'?... errr... you're probably right!)

..Crumpled bits of paper
Filled with imperfect thought
Stilted conversations
I'm afraid that's all we've got

You say you just don't see it
He says it's perfect sense
You just can't get agreement
In this present tense
We all talk a different language
Talking in defence

Say it loud, say it clear
You can listen as well as you hear
It's too late when we die
To admit we don't see eye to eye

So we open up a quarrel
Between the present and the past
We only sacrifice the future
It's the bitterness that lasts

Wow. Very interesting.

Phil Wolff has posted a great collection of links, texts, checklists, and templates.

There are two open source software packages that are packed with applications I use at work and at home: GNUWin II and TheOpenCD. It's much faster to download the applications individually, and I take that approach myself, but if you spend time installing software on friends PCs every now and then, this can be a real time saver.

Wired: Hollywood Wants BitTorrent Dead.

I was fooled, and so were plenty of others at Blabbermouth and Metafilter (yes, that's my first link posted there - damn I feel stupid!), by this editorial at the Iconoclast that clamied that "while the murder of even a semi-human barbarian like Mr. Abbott is tragic and to be lamented, it would be wrong to ignore Mr. Abbott's complicity in contributing to the soul-deadening culture of death, ugliness, depravity and inhumanity that spawned his killer. ". It's a paraody. An insulting, over the top parody. And a lot of us fell for it.

Philly Future, has been a one person volunteer effort for five years. I believe this latest iteration provides me with the tools to change that. I'd like Philly Future to live up to its original promise: to be a platform for citizen driven, local online journalism. It has become the place to find Philly bloggers. I am getting at least one request to add to the site a day! 69 at last count! Independent bloggers are the greatest, most original writers out there. But how to take the next step?

Two things I am already doing:

1. I've offered a very public hand of friendship and cooperation to PhillyBlog.com. They have not responded to my offer however. This is after many, many emails and my reaching out on their own forums.

2. Sent emails to start discussions with a few thought leaders in the space to gather their opinions.

What do you think? How come I feel the answer is right under my nose?

Shelley has officially kicked-off the Wordform project. Like CivicSpace is to Drupal, its goal it to take a current platform, and improve upon it significantly. I'm looking forward to watching where this project goes :)

Speaking of CivicSpace, take another look at Philly Future. A ton of changes this weekend. I still need some design help, but I'm far more happy with its information architecture now.

...Baby boomers and their music rebelled against parents because they were parents ? nurturing, attentive, and overly present (as those teenagers often saw it) authority figures. Today?s teenagers and their music rebel against parents because they are not parents ? not nurturing, not attentive, and often not even there. This difference in generational experience may not lend itself to statistical measure, but it is as real as the platinum and gold records that continue to capture it. What those records show compared to yesteryear?s rock is emotional downward mobility. Surely if some of the current generation of teenagers and young adults had been better taken care of, then the likes of Kurt Cobain, Eminem, Tupac Shakur, and cer?tain other parental nightmares would have been mere footnotes to recent music history rather than rulers of it.

To step back from the emotional immediacy of those lyrics and to juxtapose the ascendance of such music alongside the long-standing sophisticated assaults on what is sardonically called ?family values? is to meditate on a larger irony. As today?s music stars and their raving fans likely do not know, many commentators and analysts have been rationalizing every aspect of the adult exodus from home ? sometimes celebrating it full throttle, as in the example of working motherhood ? longer than most of today?s singers and bands have been alive.

Nor do they show much sign of second thoughts. Representative sociologist Stephanie Coontz greeted the year 2004 with one more op-ed piece aimed at burying poor metaphorical Ozzie and Harriet for good. She reminded America again that "changes in marriage and family life" are here to stay and aren?t "necessarily a problem"; that what is euphemistically called "family diversity" is or ought to be cause for celebration. Many other scholars and observers ? to say nothing of much of polite adult society ? agree with Coontz. Throughout the contemporary nonfiction literature written of, by, and for educated adults, a thousand similar rationalizations about family "changes" bloom on.

Meanwhile, a small number of emotionally damaged former children, embraced and adored by millions of teenagers like them, rage on in every commercial medium available about the multiple damages of the disappearance of loving, protective, attentive adults ? and they reap a fortune for it. If this spectacle alone doesn't tell us something about the ongoing emotional costs of parent-child separation on today?s outsize scale, it's hard to see what could.

...If yesterday?s rock was the music of abandon, today?s is that of abandonment. The odd truth about contemporary teenage music ? the characteristic that most separates it from what has gone before ? is its compulsive insistence on the damage wrought by broken homes, family dysfunction, checked-out parents, and (especially) absent fathers. Papa Roach, Everclear, Blink-182, Good Charlotte, Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam, Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, Tupac Shakur, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Eminem ? these and other singers and bands, all of them award-winning top-40 performers who either are or were among the most popular icons in America, have their own generational answer to what ails the modern teenager. Surprising though it may be to some, that answer is: dysfunctional childhood. Moreover, and just as interesting, many bands and singers explicitly link the most deplored themes in music today ? suicide, misogyny, and drugs ? with that lack of a quasi-normal, intact-home personal past.

Don't let her bias (which shows itself in her opening paragaphs) stop you from reading this through. Once you get past it, you realize the question she is asking is important, deciding to read the lyrics (read the lyrics?!?! that's fucking revolutionary!) is a first step to understanding, and the connection she makes is right on the money. No matter how much you want to deny it.

Make sure to read the following article she cites too:

This is the sound of one generation reproaching another ? only this time, it's the scorned, world-weary children telling off their narcissistic, irresponsible parents. "You were never there when I needed you," blurts Shaddix at his absent father on "Broken Home." "I hope you regret what you did."

Happy Birthday!

That's the headline at the Herald-Dispatch. Closeness between the audience and the musician is part of rock (and metal and punk in particular).

Blabbermouth has headline after headline of artists coming out to share their thoughts and praise of Darrel.

"Walk", Vulgar Display Of Power (1992)

Can't you see I'm easily bothered by persistence
One step from lashing out at you...
You want in to get under my skin
And call yourself a friend
I've got more friends like you
What do I do?

Is there no standard anymore?
What it takes, who I am, where I've been
Belong
You can't be something you're not
Be yourself, by yourself
Stay away from me
A lesson learned in life
Known from the dawn of time

Respect, walk

Run your mouth when I'm not around
It's easy to achieve
You cry to weak friends that sympathize
Can you hear the violins playing you song?
Those same friends tell me your every word

Is there no standard anymore?
What it takes, who I am, where I've been
Belong
You can't be something you're not
Be yourself, by yourself
Stay away from me
A lesson learned in life
Known from the dawn of time

Respect, walk

Are you talking to me?
No way punk

I don't get this. Why isn't the administration supporting our troops?

Speaking of which, Alex has posted a terrific idea at his site that makes it easy for you to help our soldiers keep in touch with their families. He's encouraging folks to pass it around, and I agree.

if you develop web applications and you aren?t looking today for ways to include dynamic interface techniques like those made practical by XmlHttpRequest, you?re going to end up losing to someone who is.

I wouldn't fret folks, it sounds like he's going to be able to concentrate his energy where his heart is. I?m looking forward to seeing what he's working on.

Congrats Dan :)

Reverend reverend is this some conspiracy?
Crucified for no sins,
An image beneath me.
Whats within our plans for life?
It all seems so unreal,
I'm a man cut in half in this world,
Left in my misery...

The reverend he turned to me
Without a tear in his eyes
It's nothing new for him to see
I didn't ask him why
I will remember
The love our souls had
Sworn to make
Now I watch the falling rain
All my mind can see
Now is your (face)

Well I guess
You took my youth
I gave it all away
Like the birth of a
New-found joy
This love would end in rage
And when she died
I couldn't cry
The pride within my soul
You left me incomplete
Memories now unfold.

Believe the word
I will unlock my door
And pass the
Cemetery gates

Sometimes when I'm alone
I wonder aloud
If you're watching over me
Some place far abound
I must reverse my life
I can't live in the past
Then set my soul free
Belong to me at last

Through all those
Complex years
I thought I was alone
I didn't care to look around
And make this world my own
And when she died
I should've cried and spared myself some pain...
Left me incomplete
All alone as the memories still remain

The way we were
The chance to save my soul
And my concern is now in vain
Believe the word
I will unlock my door
And pass the cemetery gates

Gunman storms stage, kills 4 at Ohio nightclub including guitarist "Dimebag" Darrell Abbott.

More at Blabbermouth.

More at Zack Wylde's message board.

More at Metafilter.

My stomach feels twisted and my heart hurts. I know my brother is feeling it too.

Remarks made by Governor Howard Dean on the Future of the Democratic Party. Given at The George Washington University on December 8, 2004.

Thank you for that introduction. It's a pleasure to be here.

Let me tell you what my plan for this Party is:

We're going to win in Mississippi
...and Alabama
...and Idaho
...and South Carolina.

Four years ago, the President won 49 percent of the vote. The Republican Party treated it like it was a mandate, and we let them get away with it.

Fifty one percent is not a mandate either. And this time we're not going to let them get away with it.

Our challenge today is not to re-hash what has happened, but to look forward, to make the Democratic Party a 50-state party again, and, most importantly, to win.

To win the White House and a majority in Congress, yes. But also to do the real work that will make these victories possible -- to put Democratic ideas and Democratic candidates in every office -- whether it be Secretary of State, supervisor of elections, county commissioner or school board member.

Here in Washington, it seems that after every losing election, there's a consensus reached among decision-makers in the Democratic Party is that the way to win is to be more like Republicans.

I suppose you could call that philosophy: if you didn't beat 'em, join them.

I'm not one for making predictions -- but if we accept that philosophy this time around, another Democrat will be standing here in four years giving this same speech. we cannot win by being "Republican-lite." We've tried it; it doesn't work. The question is not whether we move left or right. It's not about our direction. What we need to start focusing on... is the destination.

There are some practical elements to the destination.

The destination of the Democratic Party requires that it be financially viable, able to raise money not only from big donors but small contributors, not only through dinners and telephone solicitations and direct mail, but also through the Internet and person-to-person outreach.

The destination of the Democratic Party means making it a party that can communicate with its supporters and with all Americans. Politics is at its best when we create and inspire a sense of community. The tools that were pioneered in my campaign -- like blogs, and meetups, and streaming video -- are just a start. We must use all of the power and potential of technology as part of an aggressive outreach to meet and include voters, to work with the state parties, and to influence media coverage.

Read about it here.

More at Military.com.

Then again, this administration doesn't care about our soldiers.

Just listen to Donald Rumsfeld: "You can have all the armor in the world on a tank, and it can [still] be blown up."

Keep on the look out for ways to help families with loved ones in the services.

Dean and DFA are doing terrific work keeping the passion that arose during the presidential campaign alive and focused. Howard Dean will be webcasting a major speech today. I'll let the email many of us were sent speak for itself:

Dear Karl,
Live Webcast December 8, 2004

Governor Dean will lay out a vision for the future of the Democratic Party this Wednesday at 12 p.m. Eastern in Washington, D.C.

He will outline not just a direction for our party, but a concrete destination: a party built from the ground up.

That means a party powered by millions of small donors, not millionaires. It means a party that speaks plainly and commits to concrete outcomes that affect real people. And it means a party that competes in every single race, for every single vote, in all fifty states.

You can watch live video of the speech on Wednesday morning at the Democracy for America web site:

www.democracyforamerica.com

Be sure to join us for the live webcast on Wednesday at 12 p.m. Eastern. Thank you.

Thank you,

Tom McMahon
Executive Director
Democracy for America

P.S. -- Since I last wrote to you, about the need to protect every vote in the Washington Governor's race, over 15,000 small donations poured in to put the Washington Democratic Party over the top -- they raised enough money to pay for a full hand count and ensure that every vote counts.

Democratic candidate Christine Gregoire's campaign manager wrote a personal thank-you to the Democracy for America community. Read his letter and all the latest news at the blog: www.democracyforamerica.com

Wow, I'd imagine it took a lot to push the forum maintainers at DU to do this. It's always a shame when people decide to use invector to make an argument instead of arguing the merits of their point. I have a real hard time trusting people like that and they can hurt the cause they are pursuing. There is passion and their is self destruction. Keep your passion on the goal - not on trying to control people already on your side.

More at Metafilter.

BTW - Where is DU's RSS feed? I need to write them. What's up with that? Ehh?

...how does a band like good charlotte turn into the whiney mess that they are when i bet their first concert was soundgarden circa badmotorfinger.

and where are the guitarists. where are the solos.

not that long ago you had eddie van halen and angus young and alex lifeson and the dudes in maiden

It seems whenever I'm about to start building something, someone else has already started to pave the way. Hey, that's a good thing. I'm not complaining :)

...When it came to the formation of the democracies of the West, the concepts of liberalism and democracy, while not inseparable, were surely complementary, with the emphasis on the former. Among the founders of the American republic were serious men who were more dubious about democracy than about liberty. They certainly did not believe in -- indeed, they feared -- populism; populism that, unlike a century ago, has now become (and not only in the United States) the political instrument of "conservatives," of so-called men of the "Right." It is significant that in Europe, too, the appeal of the term "liberal" has declined, while "democratic" is the adopted name of a variety of parties, many of them not only antiliberal but also extreme right-wing nationalist.

Liberalism in its noblest, and also in its most essential, sense has always meant (and, to be fair, here and there it still means) an exaltation, a defense of the fundamental value and category of human dignity. But much of scientism and technology (yes, including the orthodoxy of Darwinism and the absolute belief in progress) declares that there was, there is, and there remains no fundamental difference between human beings and all other living beings. But if that is so, what happens to the emphasis on human dignity? Either human beings are unique or they are not. Either thesis may be credible, but not both. That is not just a question for religion.

That's because the Eagles kicked so much ass - it's downright scary.

My bet is half of Philly is already preparing to be let down.

We're friggin wimps. We should be enjoying the moment and cheering on our team. They've knocked on the door of the Super Bowl three times in a row. Other cities would die to have the Eagles as their team. But for us, that just isn't enough. We want it all. We want it all. And we want it now.

John Battelle comments on Google's recent moves and concludes they are joining the "architecture of participation":

...what really distinguishes open source is not just source, but an "architecture of participation" that includes low barriers to entry by newcomers, and some mechanism for isolating the cathedral from the bazaar. This architecture of participation allows for a real free market of ideas, in which anyone can put forward a proposed solution to a problem; it becomes adopted, if at all, by acclamation and the organic spread of its usefulness.

All of the most significant open source communities have some centralized "cathedral" elements -- look at the way Linus controls what goes into the Linux kernel, or the way Larry Wall controls what goes into the design of Perl. But the most successful open source communities surround that cathedral with a bazaar that is significantly open. In the case of Linux, this is the original Unix architecture, a set of "small pieces loosely joined" (to quote the title of David Weinberger's book about the architecture of the WWW). In the case of Perl, it was CPAN, as much as anything.

In this, I think he nails why the Dean campaign was so effective utilizing Meetup.com. Meetup.com was the Dean campaign's "bazaar" that indeed was a set of small groups, loosely joined, but united in purpose. It's why his organization, Democracy for America, is still alive and kicking now, and if it doesn't lose its way, will continue to do so for a long time to come.

Thanks for wishing us a happy five years blogging Mr. PapaScott :) Sorry for missing yours. Happy belated five years for you too.

It's getting real close to my own 5 year EditThisPage anniversary. It's a good opportunity for me elaborate on my own personal history a bit:

Back then, I was already a blogger, maintaining my personal site using a free version of Frontier for Windows, amongst other hand built tools of my own. Blogging was so new, I was, in fact, the only known blogger in all of Knight Ridder, the company I was working for. Additionally, I was publishing a RSS feed on the Kosovo war that was being aggregated by My.Userland and My.Netscape. These efforts brought me some visibility in the company, and more than a little notoriety with some folks there. Many thought I should not be doing what I was, and should stop. A good thing I didn't.

When Dan Gillmor was exploring options to run his weblog, word had reached him about me, and he asked for my opinion. Whether Dan using Manila (DaveNet: Oct. 25, 1999) was influenced by me, or the other way around - I have no idea anymore - but one thing was for sure, I had to have a way to experiment outside the confines of work. I didn't want simply extend my ego online with a new blog about myself, hense PhillyFuture was born.

Happy anniversary to you, to us, to Manila and to its gone, but not forgotten hosting environment EditThisPage.

EditThisPage and Blogger.com (Blogger.com preceded EditThisPage (DaveNet: Dec. 08, 1999) by a couple months I think, while Manila, the software behind EditThisPage, came out almost simultaneously with it) provided models that it seems all other blogging tools and environments have looked to for inspiration and have striven to improve upon.

One thing I need to add: I miss working with Dan and the folks at KR. Being surrounded by journalists and their idealism during that time was something special. Especially Dan. Our talks about technology were just terrific.

All of us were kinda like homesteaders back then. But in my humble opinion ? it's now when things get interesting. After all ? you need to have paved roads to have a Mustang, and our roads aren't all the way there yet, but are getting close. And the Lord knows ? I want a Mustang!

Support making sure all votes were counted in Ohio and that allegations of fraud are fully investigated. Details here.

Indepencence Hall 1:00 to 4:00 PM.

You did it folks (well those of you who decided to donate and pass the word)! Let's hope the real winner is inaugurated as Washington's governor.

Shelley has the details here.

After reading that Rafe was using it, I thought I'd give it a try. You'll never go back to managing bookmarks entirely with your browser again. I'm using its output to help build my Links page on this site.

The following are some links for my own reference:

XML.com: Introducing del.icio.us.

Manageability: Groovy and Del.icio.us.

Jeffrey Veen: Publishing Links With Perl.

Roger L. Costello: Building Web Services the REST Way.

Jon Udell: del.icio.us.

The Register: Philly sells Pennsylvania to Verizon.

TechDirt: Rendell Signs No Muni Bill Into Law.

Engadget: Verizon and Philly cut deal on citywide WiFi, basically shaft rest of Pennsylvania.

Slashdot: Verizon-Pushed WiFi Bill Becomes Law in PA.

Free Press: Pennsylvania citizens get a raw deal from Rendell on broadband bill.

John Sundman and Friends: PA HB 30 Now Law *sigh*.

Sharon Shea-Keneally, principal of Mount Anthony Union High School in Bennington, Vermont, was shocked when she received a letter in May from military recruiters demanding a list of all her students, including names, addresses, and phone numbers. The school invites recruiters to participate in career days and job fairs, but like most school districts, it keeps student information strictly confidential. "We don't give out a list of names of our kids to anybody," says Shea-Keneally, "not to colleges, churches, employers -- nobody."

But when Shea-Keneally insisted on an explanation, she was in for an even bigger surprise: The recruiters cited the No Child Left Behind Act, President Bush's sweeping new education law passed earlier this year. There, buried deep within the law's 670 pages, is a provision requiring public secondary schools to provide military recruiters not only with access to facilities, but also with contact information for every student -- or face a cutoff of all federal aid.

Damn. Not cool. Not cool at all. You have my sympathy Shelley. And my anger. No honor there. Someone should apoligize.

Blackbox voting files lawsuit and serves papers in dramatic way. I can't wait to see the video from this. Great work Blackbox voting!

I keep saying this, but a few people I know just don't get it: if you want to make a difference, if something is bothering you and you want to see it change: you need to do it by donating and volunteering your time. Get involved. Step up. Rock on. Just don't sit there and bitch.

Half of the work I do these days involves developing bridges between Comcast.net and third parties via web enabled APIs.

Brent Simmons's The virtues of XML-RPC is a timely read.

So is Jon Udell's The power of the URL-line where he trumpets the RESTful approach.

A project I am involved in uses both techniques.