I am very thankful for mine.
The Simple Dollar has some advice on "How to Find and Utilize a Mentor, No Matter What You're Doing".
September 2008 Archives
Wall Street Journal: Even Heavy-Metal Fans Complain That Today's Music Is Too Loud!!!
Maven: What is Maven?
Maven: Maven Getting Started Guide
Maven: Guide to using Eclipse with Maven 2.x
Eclipse: Top 10 Tips for New Eclipse Users
IBM developerWorks: Migrating to Eclipse: A developer's guide to evaluating Eclipse vs. Netbeans
eclipse-plugin: Weblogic Plugin for Eclipse
It's coming up on the one year anniversary of my Mom's passing. Antonella Pavese, who had an entirely different relationship with her Mom, then I had with mine, shares so much in a post that I feel I can relate to.
Antonella Pavese: Of things lost, of things found:
Slowly walking our karmic circles over and over again. I'm holding her hand, still cold but trusting, as I steer her away from furnitures and walls.I look at my mother and I realize that all the memories she didn't tell me about, all the memories I didn't listen to are gone forever. All is left is this moment, in which she and I walk in circles, hand in hand, in a medium size apartment in Rome, the capital of a country with a painful past. In a few days, I will be thousands of miles away from this moment and this place. Right now, I'm here.
Thank you for sharing that Antonella. My heart goes out to you.
stackoverflow: What are the best resources to learn about capacity planning
Charles Miller: Spring is Sprung - his thoughts on SpringSource's new maintenance policy.
xkcd: Listen to Yourself
IBM developerWorks: Using Python to create UNIX command line tools
SEOBook: Google's Chinese Wall Between AdWords Ads & Organic Search Results Disappears*
Erann Gat: Lisping at JPL - the history of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab.
That's what John Baichtal at his Wired Blog "Geek Dad" called Cory Doctorow's book sci-fi novel "Little Brother", in his glowing review posted last week.
While you can download the book for free legally from the website, I'm going to want to buy a copy for the bookshelf - it's a great book so far.
One of the best purchases of mine these past few months was following his comic book series "Futuristic Tales" from IDW. As a sci-fi and comic book fan, I gotta tell ya, it was worth every penny.
Media Bloggers Association is offering to its members a plan for libel insurance.
Bottom line: it's a big deal.
Read more at Dan Gillmor's and Seth Finkelstein's.
There is a great Wired retrospective on "Weird Al" Yankovic's career.
Check out Kevin's thoughts on making RSS easier.
Congrats Mat on your new house!
Dana has details of the on going fight on her blog, "smallspark" and go direct to savingpuppies.com to sign the petition now.
InfoQ: JSR 311 Final: Java API for RESTful Web Services
IBM developerWorks: Mastering Grails: RESTful Grails: Build a resource-oriented architecture
InfoQ: Joshua Bloch: Bumper-Sticker API Design
Aaron Swartz: The Semantic Web In Breadth
Mock Objects: "Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests": Chapter 1. What's the point of Test Driven Development?
Code To Joy: A fascinating quote attributed to James Gosling: "James Gosling once said that every configuration file becomes a programming language, so you might as well think that way."
Wiki.Directi.Com: Building a Scalable Architecture for Web Apps - Part I
Previously: InfoQ: How to Design a Good API & Why it Matters
Ben Kenobi, when he told Luke, "the truths we cling to are greatly determined by our point of view", is looking pretty good right now.
And as Google is apt to promote the democratization of data rolls on.
As a software engineer and as a person with an interest in sociology and communications, it's clear this presents a set of opportunities to be explored, problems to be solved. How do we learn of 'truth' when our echo chambers (our social networks, our friends, family, co-workers) are the best tools to keep us from the noise of modern media?
In a presentation at TED.com, Jonathan Haidt explains why Tim Berners-Lee's new foundation is both timely and has such a hard fight ahead. The presentation reinforces that the questions I've been asking in some latest posts aren't that invalid, and there is something more here to explore.
Shout out to Shelley Powers for posting about this (even if so few seem wanting to discuss) and to Antonella Pavese for the heads up on the video.
TED.com: Jonathan Haidt: The real difference between liberals and conservatives:
There are big echos of Dave Rogers in that presentation.
Bottom line - if we want to change the world, we need to start with ourselves.
Related and new at Salon today: Robert Burton: "My candidate, myself": "Even when faced with new facts and insights, most voters don't change their minds about their favorite candidates. A neurologist explains how they might.". Timely.
Tim O'Reilly is sounding the alarm - CNet.com: O'Reilly: Stop throwing sheep, do something worthy:
"(These are) pretty depressing times in a lot of ways," O'Reilly said in an address that first had looked like it would simply be a starry-eyed discussion of enterprise opportunities for Web 2.0. "And you have to conclude, if you look at the focus of a lot of what you call 'Web 2.0,' the relentless focus on advertising-based consumer models, lightweight applications, we may be living in somewhat of a bubble, and I'm not talking about an investment bubble. (It's) a reality bubble."
Lefsetz connects other media industries to the music industry - Lefsetz Letter: Denial:
Is this getting familiar yet? Does this sound like the record business?What we're going through in America replicates what happened in Japan in the 1990s. But rather than taking the bullet, eating the loss, the government continued to try to prop up the country's financial system, to its detriment. It took almost a decade for it to revive. Every analyst says this was a mistake. They should have taken the hit immediately and started over.
The major labels refuse to believe we're living in the twenty first century, they refuse to bite the bullet and get with the program, they want to continue to live in the glory days of the 1990's. Isn't that what Warner's failed Estelle effort was about? Getting people to buy an overpriced CD to get the one good track? As they said in that old 1990's TV show, homey don't play that no more.
The labels have to confront reality, and bite the bullet now.
Dare explains why what bit Sarah Palin - a typical 'forgot your password' function - bit Sarah Palin - Dare Obasanjo: The Problem with Every Implementation of a "Forgot Your Password?" Feature I've Seen Online:
The fundamental flaw of pretty much every password recovery feature I've found online is that what they consider "secret" information actually isn't thanks to social networking, blogs and even Wikipedia. Yahoo! Mail password recovery relies on asking you your date of birth, zip code and country of residence as a proof of identity. Considering that this is the kind of information that is on the average Facebook profile or MySpace page, it seems ludicrous that this is all that stops someone from stealing your identity online.
Lots of people scratched their heads at Google Chrome. Dare explains why Google would pursue it - Dare Obasanjo: The Significance of Google Chrome:
his boils down to the corporate ideology that "anything that is good for the Web is good for Google". This means Google is in favor of anything that increases the breadth of the Web which explains why it is investing in O3b networks in an effort intended to bring the Web to 3 billion people in emerging markets. The more people there are using the Web, the more people there are viewing ads on Google's services and on pages of sites that use AdSense and DoubleClick ads. This also means that Google is in favor of moving as much media consumption as possible to the Web. This explains why purchasing YouTube was so important.
YouTube: The Port Angeles, WA. High School Mondo-Band!!!!:
YouTube: nice version on keyboards:
Congrats to Livia Labate on being voted for the IA Institute Board of Directors.
Kevin Fitzpatrick posted some good advice: Don't hide your ideas.
Anandhan Subbiah, my manager at CIM, redesigned his blog.
And I was Burningbird-ed in reference to a post about Tim Berners-Lee's new foundation initiative. The tech community seems not engaged.
The World Wide Web Foundation has a broad scope as described in its one page concept paper, but in short, where the w3c focuses on technologies and interoperability the w3f looks to to focus on technology and society.
arstechnica.com: WWW creator Berners-Lee launches ambitious Web Foundation
BBC.com: Warning sounded on web's future
The Register: Berners-Lee backs web truthiness labelling scheme
Wow. Talk about timing!
Take the current campaign for President. How could a labeling scheme help or hurt?
Take a walk outside of your political bias for a moment, and realize, you might not be part of the majority, nor may your take on 'truth' be the prevailing 'truth' as per attention influence on the Web (anyone with high SERPs on Google for example).
Marc Ambinder: What We Learned This Weekend:
The McCain campaign has gone thoroughly post-modern on us! Truth? Schmuth? It's all a struggle for power.
ScienceBlogs.com: Cognitive Dissonance And Politics:
...dissonant facts made them double-down. It would be too painful to be wrong, and so they convinced themselves that they were right.
USNews: The Campaign, "The Matrix," and the GOP Offensive Against Truth:
Among historians, there's a raging Great Debate about the question of Truth.
Wall Street Journal: The Triumph of Culture Over Politics:
For this season has given us the first truly postmodern election. Modern political campaigns are amalgams of politics, spectacle and entertainment. Postmodern campaigns teem with fluid identities, unmoored meanings and blurred boundaries to the point that stable terms like "politics," "spectacle" and "entertainment" barely exist as separate concepts. These innovations, if you will, are shifts in the culture, and the total submersion of politics in a cultural atmosphere is a trend perfectly suited to the party of organic culture.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Barack Obama:
In my book "True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society", published earlier this year, I argued that in the digital world, facts are a stock of faltering value. The phenomenon that scholars call "media fragmentation"--the disintegration of the mass media into the many niches of the Web, cable news, and talk radio--lets us consume news that we like and avoid news that we don't, leading people to perceive reality in a way that conforms to their long-held beliefs. Not everyone agrees with me that our new infosphere will open the floodgates to fiction, but it's clear that the McCain camp is benefiting from some of the forces I described.
If postmodern behavior is just human nature (and I am not convinced), then 'truth' is in serious trouble since the Web mirrors human nature.
I guarantee you a labeling scheme, in the political sphere, would favor the those who could utilize attention influence the most effectively, and have little to do with actual 'truth'.
Is the reason why Steven Colbert rocks so damn hard is because he confronts us with our lack of belief in a common 'truth' ?
YouTube: Stephen Colbert on The O'Reilly Factor
Google Video: Colbert Roasts President Bush - 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner
What to do or not do? Are there technological solutions, or does technology have no role to play? Or are we dealing with human nature at work, and if so, is it something to embrace, and we've come to a core reason why computer programming is so... flawed - that software is an attempt to model processes where there is no true or false, with a tool that only understands true or false?
And if it seems odd that I am making connections between tech, media and politics, well Dave Winer posted yesterday "People thought I stopped writing about technology but the technology and politics are all one and the same.".
I'm just asking questions here, I have no answers. And probably need to drink less coffee in the morning.
I like what I see at Stack Overflow so far. Growing an online community of any sort can be tricky, but this collaboration engine looks smart. Additional info at Joel Spolksy's. Hmmm... I might post a Java, Emacs, or Python question shortly to give it a whirl.
Some resources and links:
sacha chua: Emacs: Getting Things Done with Org - Basic
Charles Cave: Using Emacs org-mode for GTD
Linux Journal: Get Organized with Emacs Org-mode
EmacsWiki: Org Mode
brool: Using Org Mode with GTD
For coworkers (you know who you are...):
Jeff Atwood says, It's Clay Shirky's Internet, We Just Live In It
Hugh Macleod says there is only Clay Shirky's Law: Equality. Fairness. Opportunity. Pick Two.
Ted: Clay Shirky: Institutions vs. collaboration:
Clay Shirky is author of the recent "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations" (on my must-read list), and from his bio:Mr. Shirky divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. His consulting practice is focused on the rise of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, web services, and wireless networks that provide alternatives to the wired client/server infrastructure that characterizes the Web. Current clients include Nokia, GBN, the Library of Congress, the Highlands Forum, the Markle Foundation, and the BBC.
In addition to his consulting work, Mr. Shirky is an adjunct professor in NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where he teaches courses on the interrelated effects of social and technological network topology -- how our networks shape culture and vice-versa. His current course, Social Weather, examines the cues we use to understand group dynamics in online spaces and the possible ways of improving user interaction by redesigning our social software to better reflect the emergent properties of groups.
Mr. Shirky has written extensively about the internet since 1996. Over the years, he has had regular columns in Business 2.0, FEED, OpenP2P.com and ACM Net_Worker, and his writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, Wired, Release 1.0, Computerworld, and IEEE Computer. He has been interviewed by Slashdot, Red Herring, Media Life, and the Economist's Ebusiness Forum. He has written about biotechnology in his "After Darwin" column in FEED magazine, and serves as a technical reviewer for O'Reilly's bioinformatics series. He helps program the "Biological Models of Computation" track for O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conferences.
Among his must read essays for anyone developing a social app of any kind:
A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy
Power Laws, Weblogs, , and Inequality
Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing
Communities, Audiences, and Scale
Shirky, to me, is noteworthy for his balanced views on the Web and its applications to and effects from society.
Far more here.
YouTube: Clay Shirky on Love, Internet Style:
The news in the newspaper media and creeping on to TV news as 'breaking' (this was building for a while), is what sounds like real trouble in the investor markets.
If you were an average 401k investor, what should you do to try and save your retirement money?
My instinct, since I am not retiring any time soon, since I have a fixed rate mortgage and manage my debt responsibly, is to stand pat. But I wonder if that is the right path if you are about to retire? Or if you rely on your investment income.
Don't look to the policial blogosphere either. They were too busy talking about 'lipstick on a pig' and 'ominious photos' to have discussed this. There are financial centered blogs - but as with all media - we subscribe to what fits our communities of interest. Hopefully you were subscribed to a good finance blogger. Not me. Wish I was.
Shout out to Metafilter, while a general interest link community, there have been a few discussions over the years indicating issues in the economy leading to today.
Update 7:01AM: Bloomberg TV just called it "the biggest financial shakeup since the Great Depression".
Anyways, here we go.
Boing Boing: "America's financial system was shaken to its core on Sunday."
Wall Street Journal: Crisis on Wall Street as Lehman Totters,
Merrill Is Sold, AIG Seeks to Raise Cash
NYTimes: 5 Days of Pressure, Fear and Ultimately, Failure
NYTimes: Bids to Halt Crisis Reshape Wall St. Landscape
Metafilter: Brokergeddon.
Interesting Economy Blogs:
Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal Economist Brad DeLong
Know more? Especially those that have advice to handle this economic situation that is occurring?
arstechnica.com has an interesting post on Dropbox: "How Dropbox ended my search for seamless sync on Linux.
MTV.com: Living Colour - Cult Of Personality
Look into my eyes, what do you see?
Cult of Personality
I know your anger, I know your dreams
I've been everything you want to be
I'm the Cult of Personality
Like Mussolini and Kennedy
I'm the Cult of Personality
Cult of Personality
Cult of Personality
Neon lights, A Nobel Price
The mirror speaks, the reflection lies
You don't have to follow me
Only you can set me free
I sell the things you need to be
I'm the smiling face on your T.V.
I'm the Cult of Personality
I exploit you still you love me
I tell you one and one makes three
I'm the Cult of Personality
Like Joseph Stalin and Gandhi
I'm the Cult of Personality
Cult of Personality
Cult of Personality
Neon lights a Nobel Prize
A leader speaks, that leader dies
You don't have to follow me
Only you can set you free
You gave me fortune
You gave me fame
You me power in your God's name
I'm every person you need to be
I'm
The
Cult
Of
Per
Son
Al
Ity!
Hey, I was Suburban Guerrilla-ed :) Now back to the subject at hand...
FiveThirtyEight and Electoral-vote.com.
Meanwhile, truth is finally starting to trickle out of the newspaper press.
WashingtonPost: As Mayor of Wasilla, Palin Cut Own Duties, Left Trail of Bad Blood
NYTimes: Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes
But will the much more influential TV newscasts follow suit or keep the 'controversy of the day' story-lines that are to blame for turning so many folks off and away from voting (I know a number of folks who have grown disgusted these past few weeks and are not voting now - great work national newscasts).
David Weinberger on Echo Chambers: Echo chambers: The meme that will not die:
erhaps the persistence of the question is due to our shock at being shown who we really are. When all you can see of yourself is what the sanitized mass media show you and what you can see around you in your physical environs, the differences the Net makes visible unsettle us profoundly.
Sounds like some in the tech community are starting to wake up.
The Web is not built on love. It is a reflection of humanity. That is a vital difference.
The conversation at Doc Searls had a few folks circling in on some interesting conclusions about framing and what I call 'attention influence'.
My friend Daniel Rubin, at the Inquirer thinks this is due to 'stupid media tricks'. I hope he is including all of social media and bloggerdom in his definition of media. Memeorandum pretty much reveals that any media where controlling attention matters is subject to get involved in 'lipstick on a pig' activity. We're in this together. It really is 'We the Media'.
BBC News: Saudi judge condemns 'immoral TV': The most senior judge in Saudi Arabia has said it is permissible to kill the owners of satellite TV channels which broadcast immoral programmes.
Congrats to Jeff Atwood - and yes, I took Emma to a comic book store for the first time yesterday :) She and I had a lot of fun.
I realize I post about Emma here and in a way am already taking part in something like this, still, there is something profoundly unsettling about this.
NYTimes: Twittering From the Cradle:
Call it convenient. Call it baby overshare. But a host of new sites, including Totspot, Odadeo, Lil'Grams and Kidmondo, now offer parents a chance to forgo the e-mail blasts of, say, their newborn's first trip home and instead invite friends and family to join and contribute to a network geared to connecting them to the baby in their lives."It's an interesting model," said Amanda Lenhart, a senior research specialist for the Pew Internet & American Life Project. "Everyone can decide how much or little they want to know about a baby, which avoids the situation of receiving a few too many e-mails about someone's wonderful child, and parents can decide how much they want to share -- in minimal or maximal ways."
But does the world really need online social networking for babies?
How we treat the mentally ill says a lot about how we think of our fellow man.
Local6.com Florida: Naked Dog Walker Shocked With Taser
And caught on film: CNN: Women dies in ER waiting room, her condition thought to be nothing more than "agitation and psychosis.".
And just a reminder from LiveScience.com: Why We Are All Insane
For Mat, Anandhan, and the team: Dobbs Code Talk: Software is a Team Sport: Write-up for the upcoming Software Development Best Practices conference in Boston, MA October 27th-30th. Looks like a good event.
Google: Demystifying the Duplicate Content Penalty: There isn't one folks. Please get that clear.
From Aaron: Pinax and django-hotclub - a project to build reusable Django apps.
Burningbird: Death to Extensibility: "I can't help thinking that we should keep the extensibility and just get rid of the Yellow Screen of Death."
Linux Journal: Programming Python, Part I
Linux Journal: Programming Python Part II
Need to try this: nxml-mode for Emacs.
What's your reaction to Sarah Palin's performance in her interview with Dave Gibson last night? If you were a conservative, it most likely was positive. If you were liberal, most likely negative.
How can I confirm such a crazy statement? How can there be two opposing opinions of the same event? Two different takes on the 'truth' of it?
Go to memeorandum and follow the discussion on blogs that match your political view point and follow the discussion on blogs that don't.
Or switch between CNN and Fox News if you want a massively bad head ache.
Witness reality torn asunder.
Back in 1997 Dave Winer wrote a piece about programming that helped solidify how I felt about my career choice - he summed it up as a pursuit of truth: Programmers:
Programmers have a very precise understanding of truth. You can't lie to a compiler. Try it sometime. Garbage in, garbage out. Booleans, the ones and zeros, trues and falses, make up the world programmers live in. That's all there is! I think programming is deep, it teaches us about the non-cyber universe we live in. There's something spiritual about computers, and I want to understand it....When a programmer catches fire it's because he or she groks the system, its underlying truth has been revealed. I've seen this happen many times, a programmer languishes for months, chipping at the edges of a problem. Then all of a sudden, a breakthrough happens, the pieces start fitting together. A few months later the software works, and you go forward.
When I look at memorandum each day and click away from the warm confines of blogs that share my political view, I am confronted with the the fact that truth is greatly determined by our point of view.
Thank you Obi-wan Kenobi, you bastard.
John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as Vice President is both interpreted as a disaster by liberals and as an inspired move by conservatives.
But one thing is for sure, the move has dominated our attention and driven us a way from weightier topics like the economy and moves taking place across the world, with light weight controversies and indignities (kinda like Britney Spears news does every once and a while).
On this point, two folks I read daily for their points of view (usually opposing), greatly agree:
Doc Searls: Framing wins:
I don't know if the McCain campaign actually intended for this to happen, but the way it looks to me right now, it'll work. Palin is single-handedly turning Barack Obama into John Kerry: a policy wonk quarantined to the bottom end of the FM dial. It's amazing to watch.
Groundhog Day: Competing Messages: Attention Deficit Nation:
...as I watched the media coverage around the announcement, and that of the self-important, self-aggrandizing "blogosphere," it became clear, to me anyway, just what this was about.While this is at least partially about winning attention for McCain's candidacy, some of it even negative attention, it is mostly about taking attention away from Obama's campaign. And, in that regard, it's been a brilliant tactical move. Whether it will be enough to swing the election his way remains to be seen.
Obama at the bottom of the FM dial. And so moved are the policies and important events of the world taking place, while we are dazzled and spun every which way.
Jay Rosen outlined the strategy, in a piece posted on September 3rd, that was prescient: The Palin Convention and the Culture War Option:
John McCain's convention gambit is a culture war strategy. It depends for its execution on conflict with journalists, and with bloggers (the "angry left," Bush called them) along with confusion between and among the press, the blogosphere, and the Democratic party. It revives cultural memory: the resentment narrative after Chicago '68 but with the angry left more distributed. It dispenses with issues and seeks a trial of personalities. It bets big time on backlash.At the center of the strategy is the flashpoint candidacy of Sarah Palin, a charismatic figure around whom the war can be fought to scale, as it were.
It's not like much of the press isn't reporting on the lies and mischaracterizations spewing from McCain/Palin. Witness WashingtonPost.com on the 9th: As Campaign Heats Up, Untruths Can Become Facts Before They're Undone:
From the moment Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin declared that she had opposed the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere," critics, the news media and nonpartisan fact checkers have called it a fabrication or, at best, a half-truth. But yesterday in Lebanon, Ohio, and again in Lancaster, Pa., she crossed that bridge again.
Wired.com on the 10th: FactCheck.org Finds That McCain's 'Facts' Don't Check Out
Fact is the media, mass and independent, are being played like marionettes in a game to control your attention and keep Obama, policies, or real impacting events like the economy, from the public discourse.
Glenn Greenwald at Salon did a good job of tracking one of the latest false controversies - the 'lipstick on a pig' quote that was taken out of context. He mistakenly attributes the mass media as being the first on the story when Memeorandum was spreading the meme a day before it broke across the country: New heights of stupidity:
It isn't surprising that the McCain campaign wants this sort of tawdry, Freak Show/Reality Show vapidity to determine the outcome of the election. If you were them, wouldn't you want that, too? And though it's not news that establishment media outlets are so easily and happily manipulated by these tactics, tactics which enable them to cover "stories" which their empty-headed reporters can easily comprehend, it is still striking to watch the now-decades-old process unfold and observe how absolutely nothing has changed.
It makes you wonder if 'truth' really matters anymore. Marc Fisher at Washington Post goes so far as to wonder if the Boomer ingrained distrust of authority has morphed into something far more ominous: For Working Moms, 'Flawed' Palin Is the Perfect Choice:
In this hyperdemocratized society, the national conviction that anyone can succeed is morphing into a belief that experience and knowledge may almost be disqualifying credentials.Like many at the rally, Victoria Robinson-Worst sees Palin's lack of experience as an asset. "I know people who have experience who are totally incompetent," said Robinson-Worst, who lives in Loudoun County, designs wedding flowers and raises two children. "And I know people who have no experience who step in and get it right. I mean, women can do amazing things."
This is where culture wars, identity politics and self-suffocating academic theories of deconstructionism have led us: Authority is suspect. Experience is corrupting. Ignorance is strength?
Next will be "war is peace." Or have we already heard that one?
Shades of Nick Carr there huh?
Boing Boing posted about a book that might be the most important must-read of the year (I'm buying this today): True Enough: the science, history and economics of self-deception:
Manjoo makes a good case. He walks through a number of net-based conspiracy theories on both sides of the political spectrum, speaks with their adherents, the experts who claim it's all bogus, and then to cognitive scientists and other scientists who explain the gigantic gap between what is so obvious to non-partisans and what is blindingly, passionately important to the adherents.Grounded in history and science, True Enough paints a dismal picture of a species with a limitless capacity for self-deception and selective reasoning. But Manjoo doesn't ascribe the rise of truthiness to fragmented media alone: he calls out PR firms, media outlets and others who have profited from the erosion of the truth.
Here's a link: Amazon.com: True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society (Hardcover)
So what to do?
As a programmer with a drive to find and share 'truth' I have no idea whatsoever. To me, 2+2 will always equal 4. Trusting a sound bite is like criticizing a system's infrastructure without recognizing the context it was built in. I don't give a damn what a politician says on the matter. We should all be looking for the big balls of mud that provide us with truth.
But slacktivist has an idea (which I don't agree with) and that is to fight fire with fire - witness his latest post - John McCain, Friend of NAMBLA.
And a reminder - beware the October surprise: NYTimes.com: Bush Said to Give Orders Allowing Raids in Pakistan. It's about time we close the deal, but why did it take seven years?
linuxconfig.org: Bash scripting Tutorial. One gotchya for OSX folks: replace seq for jot: Mac OS X Hints: A primer on using 'jot' in UNIX.
Add to /private/etc/hosts on OSX:
64.233.169.99 memeorandum.com 64.233.169.99 www.memeorandum.com 64.233.169.99 drudgereport.com 64.233.169.99 www.drudgereport.com 64.233.169.99 popurls.com 64.233.169.99 www.popurls.com 64.233.169.99 originalsignal.com 64.233.169.99 www.originalsignal.com 64.233.169.99 www.digg.com 64.233.169.99 digg.com
arstechnica.com: Why Mozilla is committed to Gecko as WebKit popularity grows:
From a technical perspective, Gecko is now very solid and no longer lags behind WebKit. A testament to the rate at which Gecko has been improving is its newfound viability in the mobile space, where it was practically considered a nonstarter not too long ago. Mozilla clearly has the resources, developer expertise, and community support to take Gecko anywhere that WebKit can go.It's also worth noting that some of Gecko's unique and seemingly idiosyncratic features are becoming useful to third-party adopters. There are a growing number of applications being built on top of the Mozilla platform that leverage XUL with impressive results.
BTW - Songbird is pretty darn cool and I can't wait to see it reach 1.0.
NYTimes: Brave New World of Digital Intimacy: About social networks and software and how we are using them to connect with one another.
Mind Hacks: The distant sound of well-armed sociologists - Reflections on the above mentioned NYTimes story.
wordle.net - generates graphical 'word clouds' from the text provided.
Reflections of a Newsosaur: Newspaper sales fall record $3B in 6 mos.
NPR.org: An Uneasy America: 'Why We Hate Us':
The Reality Club: A coversation On "Is Google Making Us Stoopid".
J-School: Philly.com's Convention Coverage and the Ethic of the Link
J-School: The Future of Journalism
Annenberg's FactCheck.org: is doing a great job fact checking our candidates. Anyone listening?
SciAm.com: The Political Brain - Brain-imaging study shows political predilections are a product of unconscious confirmation bias. How we see reality is biased towards our own currently held beliefs.
In the largest such study ever taken, research carried out by Professor Adrian North of Heriot-Watt University has identified the personality types behind fans of different genres.
Take aways: Indie music fans are pricks. Metal and Classical music fans are very, very similar.
theherald.co.uk: Why heavy metal and classical fans make sweet music together
BBC: Music tastes link to personality
Wired: Study: Country Fans Work Hard, Metal Fans Are Gentle
O'Reilly Radar: I Am Trying To Believe (that Rock Stars aren't Dead):
When it comes to income, I don't think there will be another Rolling Stones any more than I think there will be another Microsoft. Reznor's creative partner Rob Sheridan hints at the same thing in his amazing piece on the state of the music business written last year. He does a masterful job of parsing all the deck chair rearranging going on in the industry today but what he is unable to do is offer a meaningful business model to replace it.Everyone is fishing for the answer (see item #1) but more and more I think it's just not there. After all "sell records" was not some complex business model come down from on high. I can't help but think that if there was an equally effective replacement someone would have thought of it by now.
That's not to say I don't think new and better music distribution and monetization models won't be invented, I just don't think they will capture and concentrate as much value as the one that is dying before our eyes did. I suspect the balance between linear (touring) and leverage (selling stuff while you sit at home) has simply and irrevocably shifted toward the linear.
Weezer: "How To Play Troublemaker (8/21 video - hootenanny lesson)"
Weezer: "Keep Fishing" (Emma loves this!)
Wired: Metallica: Master of YouTube? - Metallica opens a spot on YouTube to highlight fan cover videos. Nice move and nod to the fans.
YouTube: Alice Cooper: Elected:
YouTube: Classic Sesame Street - James Taylor sings to Oscar:
An Army of Solipsists: A Grails Plugin for Spring MVC Controllers.
JaIM.at :: public Jabber / XMPP Instant Messaging Server: Jack Moffitt: Get Twisted On XMPP - The Future Of Twisted Words
I don't talk about my poltical views as much as I used to here on my blog. There are a few reasons for that, more than likely dealing with burnout after the 2004 election and the fact that I know that my co-workers read this (hi folks!) now. So it feels... a little weird.
But still, I can't keep quiet when I see something so infuriating take place.
Our two-party political conversation is little more than marketing pitches for two different corporations. Corporations whose goal is not to gain money, but to gain influence and an opportunity to be written into history via public service.
When an organization is selling us something it is confronted with a certain marketing reality - "benefits sell, features tell". That was drilled into me a long time ago as a telemarketer for Sears, later as a trainer and supervisor.
It is no different here.
So what were the benefits each convention were selling us?
Both conventions closed with inspiring calls to service, wrapped in the clothing of "change". But before those last few minutes, there where three to four days of pitches to the party faithful and the rest of the country that informed us that they were the party we could relate to, that cared about us the most, and that the other choice wasn't a choice at all.
It's kinda like Mac versus Windows. Both offer us the same features in the end. They even run on the same hardware these days. But the benefits they sell us thru soft features like interface, branding, and look and feel divide users into two warring camps. Don't ever tell someone in the Apple faithful that a PC can do just about the same things, or vice versa. People will fight for their chosen brand and avoid the reality that they have bought into a brand in the first place.
This time, in this election, there really are different 'features' each will offer us. But those issues aren't being discussed in the public sphere loudly since they rouse so much passion - for example - women's right to choose. Which one of these parties would deny everyone else.
When that convention goer says that "freedom of choice" is different than being "pro-choice" - that is a triumph of marketing.
And notice how one convention avoided talking about policy whatsoever? Understandable since it plans doosies like pushing along the elimination of company provided health plans.
Instead, both parties sold benefits, soft features, like the inspiring call to the future and bridging of the red-blue divide that is Obama/Biden and and the call to rei