Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley, book page at Princeton University Press

Link to Amazon.com page, including searchable index

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07:11 AM | Comments (0)

October 26, 2004

Media Watch: Meme madness

by Doug Millison for SiliconValleyWatcher.com

Now that The New York Times has given its seal of approval, does that mean the Web-as-meme-machine metaphor has peaked, or will it share the limelight for a few more months with "blog," the other trope recently pushed to the forefront of public consciousness?

"Memes (the word rhymes with dreams and is short for mimemes, from the word mimetic) are infectious ideas or any other things that spread by imitation from person to person - a jingle, a joke, a fashion, the smiley face or the concept of hell," writes Sarah Boxer in "Buzzing the Web on a Meme Machine."

Her article includes a host of links to help keep track of the latest memes ... plus instructions on how to propagate your own meme, chain-letter style.

Google has passed Yahoo! in stock valuation, reaching giddy heights that were just beginning to seem possible when the first wave of Web pioneers adopted "meme" from Richard Dawkins and other deep thinkers.

The meme concept has been bubbling around the Internet for well over a decade and will now, it seems, boil over in the rebirth of mass media fever for all things WWW.

Pass it along.

Links:

Buzzing the Web on a Meme Machine by Sarah Boxer, The New York Times, 26 October 2004

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09:01 AM | Comments (0)

October 25, 2004

Media Watch: Making Wiki waves

by Doug Millison for SiliconValleyWatcher.com

Will the public accept as authoritative an encyclopedia and a news service open to input and editing from just about anybody on the Web?

That's the question Simon Waldman asks about Wikipedia, in a Guardian feature story today, "Who knows?"

"It has no editors, no fact checkers and anyone can contribute an entry - or delete one," Waldman writes. " It should have been a recipe for disaster, but instead Wikipedia became one of the internet's most inspiring success stories."

The Guardian's trumpeting Wikipedia's success would seem to indicate that people will accept a radically new approach to developing authoritative information sources on the Web by enabling thousands of people to collaborate and pool their knowledge.

Waldman's article makes fascinating reading, with facts and figures and anecdotes about the massive Wikipedia project. Here's an excerpt:

To put Wikipedia's achievements in numerical context, at the same time it was celebrating the publishing of its one millionth entry (a Hebrew article on the Kazakhstan flag) in less than four years, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography launched its latest edition. It had taken 12 years to complete, yet contained a comparatively tiddly 55,000 biographies. It also cost some £25m to create. Wikipedia has so far been bankrolled by Wales, but the total cost so far is still around £300,000.

The current Encyclopedia Britannica has 44m words of text. Wikipedia already has more than 250m words in it. Britannica's most recent edition has 65,000 entries in print and 75,000 entries online. Wikipedia's English site has some 360,000 entries and is growing every day.

The same phenomenon that enables political bloggers to prove or disprove statements made by the Bush and Kerry campaigns works to keep the Wikipedia free of error, but it's a process that takes time.

Perhaps this collaborative knowledge work is even better suited to the rhythm and pace of breaking news, with its inherent need for frequent updates as more facts emerge about a particular story?

Wikipedia is betting yes, with the announcement of Wikinews, "a proposed project with the goal to collaboratively report and summarize news on all subjects from a neutral point of view."

From the Wikinews mission statement:

On January 15, 2001, a group of people started a daring experiment: They let the whole world create an encyclopedia in all languages, freely available to everyone on the planet, forever. In the following months and years, it was not just technology that made this dream a reality, but also an incredibly dedicated community of volunteers who wrote articles and formulated the policies and guidelines for the project. They did so through an open, evolutionary process, in a belief in the possibility of consensus, in a desire for the betterment of the human condition, and in love of the human spirit.

The idea behind the Wikinews project is no less daring. We seek to create a free source of news, where every human being is invited to contribute reports about events large and small, either from direct experience, or summarized from elsewhere. Wikinews is founded on the idea that we want to create something new, rather than destroy something old. It is founded on the belief that we can, together, build a great and unique resource which will enrich the media landscape.

Wikinews will already be useful even if we start out by having relatively few original reports - because it will provide free, neutral, aggregated summaries of the news from elsewhere. It will already be useful even if the subject range which we cover will initially be full of gaps - because in these subject areas, we will already benefit from the collaborative wiki model. It can grow to become more useful every day.

While Wikinews aims to be a useful resource of its own, it will also provide an alternative to proprietary news agencies like the Associated Press or Reuters; that is, it will allow independent media outfits to get a high quality feed of news free of charge to complement their own reporting. Thanks to copyleft, anyone can create their own free news source - even a non-neutral one - on the basis of our work. Even if our articles will initially be few, they will be free, permanently available and not require registration before reading.

While we are faced with many new challenges, Wikinews will adopt the key principles which have made Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia websites what they are today: neutrality, free content, and an open decision making process.

We seek to promote the idea of the citizen journalist, because we believe that everyone can make a useful contribution to painting the big picture of what is happening in the world around us. The time has come to create a free news source, by the people and for the people. We invite you to join us in this effort which has the potential to change the world forever.

Excuse me, but was somebody saying something about the Web being completely taken over by profit-minded suits and their bean-counter battalions?

Links:

Wikinews a new news service open to all contributors.

Who knows? by Simon Waldman, Guardian, 26 October 2004

Wikimedia Main Page, with links to Wikimedia and other projects

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10:09 PM | Comments (0)

Media Watch: Mac co-creator blasts current models

by Doug Millison, SiliconValleyWatcher.com

Jef Raskin, one of the original design team, doesn't think much of today's Mac. But, he does like the new Garrett Wade knife sharpener.

Most savage quote:

Perhaps the longest surviving legacy of your original design is its "appliance" nature. Has this simplicity of design been key to the Mac's popularity?

Yes, but unfortunately, the Mac is now a mess. A third party manual (Pogue's The Missing Manual) is nearly 1,000 pages, and far from complete. Apple now does development by accretion, and there is only a little difference between using a Mac and a Windows machine.

Link:

Talk time: Jef Raskin, interview by Jason Walsh, in the Guardian

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10:20 AM | Comments (0)

October 24, 2004

Media Watch: A brilliant dunce?

by Doug Millison, SiliconValleyWatcher.com

Randall Stross's assault on Steve Jobs in yesterday's New York Times takes Apple-bashing in general and Steve Jobs-bashing in particular, to a breath-taking new high.

I doubt even Jobs' bitterest enemies would call him "a brilliant dunce" - a label that Stross insists, in the first sentence of his article, even Jobs' "biggest fans" would apply.

Sorry, but I don't think anybody who was around when the two Steves, Jobs and Wozniak, built one of the earliest microcomputers, would call either of them a dunce.

Jobs was among the first who recognized the vast potential market for a personal computer, at a time when most folks saw them as hobbyist projects for home tinkerers. He was also the first person to recognize the value of the graphical user interface as a way to make the personal computer a product that just about everybody would want to own and use -- not even wonderboy Bill Gates managed to see that, he was only able to rip off Jobs' innovation.

Stross turns these creative leaps against Jobs in this mean-spirited piece, however.

According to Stross, Jobs' transformation of the office and home automation landscape was just a flash in the pan.

Jobs' "strategic vision, which had informed the founding of Apple and the birth of the Macintosh, seemed to have deserted him," Stross writes.

In Stross' revision of Silicon Valley history, Next, the company Jobs founded after leaving Apple in the mid-80s, amounts to nothing but the sign of Jobs' post-Apple "obscurity."

Perhaps Stross missed the San Francisco launch of the Next computer, where Jobs' vision was apparent to the thousands of Silicon Valley luminaries and the international press who gathered for the debut.

Today's desktop, Mac or Windows or otherwise - with its vast silicon and optical storage, high-fidelity music, high-resolution display, and operating system software that made it all work together, linking a vast repository of text, images, music in a seamless web (years before the WWW made that an online reality) - is no more than Jobs' Next computer at a price point everybody can afford now that manufacturing advances have made the necessary components into commodities.

Jobs lucked into Pixar, Stross suggests, not realizing what he had until Disney dumped success in his lap.

Stross does give Jobs some credit for Pixar's massive success, even as he digs the Jobs-as-dunce needle deeper: "In the early years at Pixar, he had incredible technology and no idea what to do with it. But once the strategic vision came into focus, he started on a roll that is unlike any other and continues to this day."

Stross writes at length about Pixar's success compared to DreamWorks, another movie company that tried to jump on the digital bandwagon with sometimes embarrasing results. Amazingly, despite making this direct comparison, Stross seems to miss the point that not every CEO manages to hone such a strategic vision even when looking at the same technology base and studying the same audience.

Xerox, after all, didn't manage to see the value of the graphical user interface that Jobs used to revolutionize computing. And, of the many companies and people experimenting with digital movie making technology in the 1980s and early 1990s, how many besides Jobs have achieved the creative, critical, and commercial success he's enjoyed with five feature film blockbuster hits in a row at Pixar?

Stross uses Pixar's success as a club to give Jobs a final whack for not making Apple the market share monster in personal computers that Pixar is in movies.

Stross quotes a letter that Job wrote to Pixar shareholders in 1997: "It is chiseled in stone at our studio that no amount of technology can ever turn a bad story into a good one" and adds "One could add that the same maxim applies to Apple."

Apple a "bad story?"

Stross forgets his history, joining the long list of Silicon Valley water-cooler wise guys who have counted Jobs out so often in the past.

Links:

Pixar's Mr. Incredible May Yet Rewrite the Apple Story by Randall
Stross, New York Times, 24 October 2004

NeXT article in Wikipedia explains the technology breakthroughs of Jobs' project after the Mac.

Previously in Silicon Valley Watcher:

A Tale of Two Silicon Valleys by Doug Millison, examines contrasting media portrayals of Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison.

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08:45 AM | Comments (0)

October 21, 2004

Media Watch: Cracking the whip at News.com

News.com is by far the best online news service for the technology industry and it has a near maniacal devotion to producing extremely high quality content. I defy any blogger, or collection of bloggers to mimic News.com in its quality and breadth of editorial (unless those bloggers are trained journalists BTW)

But life is tough at News.com and the long suffering hacks have been told they must increase their productivity.

The reporters must produce at least one feature per week on top of the rising daily news workload. Editor Jeff "Mad Dog" Pelline always gets his way I'm told.

BTW, my good buddy Tom Abate, from the SF Chron, has a couple of zinger stories about Jeff (when Jeff worked at the Chronicle and Tom was at the Examiner) that point to his dogged determination to get the scoop.

I must point out that the "Mad Dog" nickname does not originate from News.com (he is known under a different name), but is from a past life elsewhere. Jeff has always been extremely gracious and pleasant in my encounters with him.

11:04 AM | Comments (0)

Media Watch: A Tale of Two Silicon Valleys, redux

Back on the two Silicon Valleys tip again - this time looking at the Silicon Valley that liberates people ... while the shadow side exploits them.

Ian Keldoulis' article in today's New York Times Technology section, "Where Good Wi-Fi Makes Good Neighbors," is heart-warming (warms my heart, at least).

What's not to like about a New York University student who shares his wi-fi connection with neighbors, and uses it to encourage them to use a neighborhood BBS?

Keldoulis explains that the student is taking part in "Neighbornode, a project created by John Geraci that is part of a bare-bones software package provided by NYCWireless, a volunteer advocacy group instrumental in turning places like Bryant Park into public hot spots. The group is encouraging people to set up their own hot spots and electronic bulletin boards to let communities of otherwise anonymous urbanites find one another."

I wonder if anybody is doing anything like this in Silicon Valley. I share my Airport Extreme wi-fi connection with my next-door neighbor, a sweet little old lady (80-something!) with a killer iMac who was previously suffering from dial-up Internet connection death-watch when she tried to read the latest political news on the Web and email far-flung family and friends.

But I hadn't considered a neighborhood BBS. Maybe that would be a good way to get something done about the little rat-dog that yaps incessantly next door when its owners forget to put him back inside before they go to work....

Shadow side ... slowly moving into the light

Some Silicon Valley companies (and many others elsewhere) that manufacture overseas have been criticized for exploiting workers in countries with low wages and weak labor force protection, beginning in the '80s when chip makers set up wafer fab facilities in places like the Philippines, if not earlier.

It's welcome news, then, when Therese Poletti reports that " HP, IBM, Dell set 'code' for treatment of workers, firms to audit working conditions in foreign plants," in today's San Jose Mercury News.

Writes Poletti, "Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Dell, which were accused earlier this year of having 'dire working conditions' at factories outside the United States, announced Wednesday that they have agreed on a 'code of conduct' for the treatment of workers and the environment."

Poletti notes that "In January, the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development, a non-profit organization based in the United Kingdom, issued a report stating that workers who make computer components for IBM, Dell and HP in Mexico, China and Thailand are suffering 'atrocious conditions for extremely low pay.' "

This is the sort of thing that individual companies and industry groups must do, unless they want to suffer backlash and boycotts, like that of college students who work to alleviate overseas worker exploitation by companies like Nike and other famous brands.

Links:

Where Good Wi-Fi Makes Good Neighbors by Ian Keldoulis, New York Times, 21 October 2004

NYCwireless Community Hotspot Project

< a href="http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/technology/9956462.htm">HP, IBM, Dell set 'code' for treatment of workers, firms to audit working conditions in foreign plants by Therese Poletti, San Jose Mercury News, 21 October 2004

11:03 AM | Comments (0)

Media Watch: Media trips

That's the name of a compelling new blog riding the wave unleashed when creative people started adopting Photoshop (and other digital media tools) and the Web.

Explains the blog's founder, David Goldschmidt:

Sampling popculture is not a crime. It is not an act of civil disobedience. Sampling popculture (or media mashing) is a means for artistic, political and personal expression. And Media trips is a blog that promotes artists and producers who exercise their FAIR USE rights. It is a guide to artists and producers who (sample) (remix) (mash) popculture content to create something new and original. "Popculture content" means any audio, video, image or text produced by the world's major media and entertainment corporations. For my purposes, a "mediatrip" is any original aesthetic or narrative that integrates content ripped from film, TV or other sources.

Media literacy (the ability to communicate using text, audio, video and HTML) is the new literacy. And media-mashing is the new criticism. It is time to teach students how to critique the Media's (FOX, CBS, AOL, etc.) broadcast content instead jailing them for violating oppressive copyright laws. Media-mashing is a legitimate form of social criticism.

It's been a long time coming. In 1993 I conceived and developed and helped to launch Blaster, a magazine for "screenagers" (people who had grown up with videogame joysticks and computer mice in their hands) who were embracing interactive multimedia creation and online communications along with skateboards, graffiti art, indie rock, and other alternative lifestyle activities.

Back then, the model was 'zines - fun, creative, hand-made magazines and newsletters. Now it's sites like Fark's Photoshop hacks pages, Media trips, and a growing number of blogs where digital pranksters show their stuff. Very cool.

Media trips

Fark

Thanks to NEWSgrist editor Joy Garnett for the link to Media trips where she is guest blogging.

09:54 AM | Comments (0)

Media Watch: Silicon Valley's favorite novelist interviewed on slashdot.org

Novelist Neal Stephenson has long been a favorite in Silicon Valley, from the publication of Snow Crash and his early celebrity in Wired magazine. He answered questions from geeks in an insightful Slashdot.org interview.

Stephenson discusses hacking, the lack of respect for science fiction as a literary genre, machine intelligence, who would prevail in a smackdown with rival cyberpunk novelist William Gibson, the convergence of novels and computer games, and new publishing models, among other topics.

Most thrilling quote:

The first time was a year or two after SNOW CRASH came out. I was doing a reading/signing at White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. Gibson stopped by to say hello and extended his hand as if to shake. But I remembered something Bruce Sterling had told me. For, at the time, Sterling and I had formed a pact to fight Gibson. Gibson had been regrown in a vat from scraps of DNA after Sterling had crashed an LNG tanker into Gibson's Stealth pleasure barge in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. During the regeneration process, telescoping Carbonite stilettos had been incorporated into Gibson's arms. Remembering this in the nick of time, I grabbed the signing table and flipped it up between us. Of course the Carbonite stilettos pierced it as if it were cork board, but this spoiled his aim long enough for me to whip my wakizashi out from between my shoulder blades and swing at his head. He deflected the blow with a force blast that sprained my wrist. The falling table knocked over a space heater and set fire to the store. Everyone else fled. Gibson and I dueled among blazing stacks of books for a while. Slowly I gained the upper hand, for, on defense, his Praying Mantis style was no match for my Flying Cloud technique. But I lost him behind a cloud of smoke. Then I had to get out of the place. The streets were crowded with his black-suited minions and I had to turn into a swarm of locusts and fly back to Seattle.

Slashdot.org users continue the discussion in their responses to the interview, of course, prolonging this interesting experiment in interactive, online journalism.

Links:

Neal Stephenson Responds With Wit and Humor interview by Slashdot.org participants

NealStephenson.com

07:54 AM | Comments (0)

Media Watch: Silicon Valley World Series

What can Silicon Valley learn from the Yankees-Red Sox ALCS series?

That's the Major League Baseball American League Championship Series between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, in case you don't follow baseball or perhaps live on another planet. (Readers outside the US may be excused for a lack of awareness of this latest passage in the American national pastime.)

The Red Sox came back from a 3-0 deficit in the seven-game series to win four games in a row (each with its own dramatic twists and turns with a come-from behind thriller in all but the last of the ALCS games) and move on to the World Series.

Beyond the thrills and chills, the Yankees-Red Sox play-off series offers several lessons for everybody in Silicon Valley.

1. Never say die. The Red Sox overcame a "curse" that has oppressed players and fans alike since the team's last appearance in the World Series in 1918. Johnny Damon - the Red Sox outfielder with mountain man hair and beard - persisted through a frustrating batting slump in the first six games of the series only to score six of the Red Sox runs last night, a dazzling, record-setting performance.

It's true that the Sox have been able to stay in business and acquire the players (resources) they need to compete - just as Silicon Valley companies need to do. But the refusal to give up made the difference.

2. Play through the pain. A corollary to Lesson No. 1. In the ALCS series, this trait was most visible in pitcher Curt Schilling's heroic performance in game six despite an ankle injury that drew TV cameras to his blood-stained red socks throughout the broadcast. Sometimes you just have to bear down and be brave.

3. Creative management wins. Red Sox manager Terry Francona out-maneuvered a Yankees dream team assembled with virtually no limit to the amount of money that could be spent acquiring the game's best players.

4. Insist on a fair, level playing field. Francona pressured the umpires to revisit some egregious judgements in last night's (and earlier games in this series) game...and they reversed some bad decisions, in the Red Sox's favor.

5. Follow the rules. One of the ugliest moments in the series came last night when the Yankee's billion-dollar man, Alex Rodriguez, while charging towards first base after hitting the ball into the infield, broke the rules when he tried to swat the ball out of the hands of the defender who was waiting to tag him out. Rodriguez made himself and his team look bad in this display of poor sportsmanship, which felt even cheaper and more desperate in light of the Yankee's loss.

6. Your words will come back to haunt you. Yankee fans - tens of thousands of them - taunted the Red Sox with a "Who's your Daddy?" sing-song chorus last night and throughout the play-off series, rubbing in their faces the long history of Yankee dominance in this famed rivalry. They shut up quickly enough when the Red Sox started spanking their beloved Yankees, and the refrain could be heard, ghostly, but undeniably reverberating in the stadium as the Yankees went down last night.

Microsoft executives - just to mention one example near and dear to many of us here in Silicon Valley; other cocky companies and executives also come to mind - may want to remember this lesson the next time they pop off with slimy remarks about Apple Computer, such as Steve Ballmer's recent comments about iPod owners being thieves, as Apple moves on to trounce Microsoft in the digital music market.

Link:
Boston pops ... champagne!  by Jim Caple, with links to other ESPN.com coverage of the series

07:01 AM | Comments (0)

October 20, 2004

Media Watch: SF Chronicle scoops Google's optimistic "assumptions"

Verne Kopytoff of the San Francisco Chronicle appears to be first with a story about Google's rosy business forecasts, working from "internal documents" that he says provide more information than the company's founders are expected to deliver with its first quarterly earnings report as a public company tomorrow.

Writes Kopytoff:

Everyone agrees that Google is expanding rapidly. The questions are how much and for how long.

The internal Google documents obtained by The Chronicle give unusual detail about the matter. They include advertising forecasts that have not been publicly disclosed.

Google predicted that the number of advertiser accounts will jump from 280,000 this year to 378,000 in 2005, according to the documents. From 2004 to 2008, the number of accounts is expected to more than double to 652,050.

Google made the forecasts as part of its specifications for a new billing system that was to be built earlier this year by BFS Finance, a subsidiary of the conglomerate Bertelsmann AG. The numbers, labeled "assumptions," were intended to help in designing the project.

A Google spokesman declined to comment other than to say that the company has thousands of advertisers.

Kopytoff fleshes out the scoop with facts, figures, and analyst observations. It's worth reading in its entirety for a snapshot of the Silicon Valley upstart poised for explosive expansion.

The cynic in me insists on wondering if Google planted this story, however. It makes the company look awfully good, at a time when it's coming under increasing pressure from search engine competitors, and with Microsoft eager to nip a desktop rival in the bud.

Equally possible: given the Valley's boom and bust cycle, and the troubled history of Internet companies in particular, the hopeful projections may be remembered as a flash of optimism before the balloon deflates.

Links:

Google forecasts growth: Search engine sees 372,000 new ad accounts in 4 years by Verne Kopytoff, San Francisco Chronicle, 20 October 2004

Recent Silicon Valley Watcher coverage:

Media Watch: Search & destroy by Doug Millison, 18 October 2004

Tech Watch: VCs searching for search engines in all the wrong places by Tom Foremski, 18 October 2004

07:53 AM | Comments (0)

October 19, 2004

Media Watch: A Hacker Manifesto

That's the title of a new book that explores the shifting boundaries and conflicts over intellectual property and piracy ... and defines a powerful "new progressive class, the hacker class."

The book, by McKenzie Wark, Professor of Cultural and Media Studies at Lang College, New School University, in New York, will appeal to readers with intellectual and political interests, judging from the publisher's description:

A double is haunting the world--the double of abstraction, the virtual reality of information, programming or poetry, math or music, curves or colorings upon which the fortunes of states and armies, companies and communities now depend. The bold aim of this book is to make manifest the origins, purpose, and interests of the emerging class responsible for making this new world--for producing the new concepts, new perceptions, and new sensations out of the stuff of raw data.

A Hacker Manifesto deftly defines the fraught territory between the ever more strident demands by drug and media companies for protection of their patents and copyrights and the pervasive popular culture of file sharing and pirating. This vexed ground, the realm of so-called "intellectual property," gives rise to a whole new kind of class conflict, one that pits the creators of information--the hacker class of researchers and authors, artists and biologists, chemists and musicians, philosophers and programmers--against a possessing class who would monopolize what the hacker produces.

Drawing in equal measure on Guy Debord and Gilles Deleuze, A Hacker Manifesto offers a systematic restatement of Marxist thought for the age of cyberspace and globalization. In the widespread revolt against commodified information, McKenzie Wark sees a utopian promise, beyond the property form, and a new progressive class, the hacker class, who voice a shared interest in a new information commons.

Links:

A Hacker Manifesto book page at Harvard University Press

A Hacker Manifesto at Amazon.com, which says, "McKenzie Wark's A Hacker Manifesto might also be called, without too much violence to its argument, The Communist Manifesto 2.0. In essence, it's an attempt to update the core of Marxist theory for that relatively novel set of historical circumstances known as the information age."

Thanks to the always interesting political art blog, NEWSgrist, where I learned about the new book and which provides details of the book launch party on October 21 in New York.

09:29 PM | Comments (0)

Media Watch: The triumph of "deep geekdom" - from Silicon Valley to off-Broadway

That's the trajectory followed by The Last Starfighter, in 1982 a video game from Atari created to celebrate the creation of megahit, PacMan, now resuscitated as an off-Broadway musical.

Courtesy of the ever-fascinating blog, Boing Boing, comes a review of the production from blogger Jason Scott.

An excerpt from Scott's tribute to "deep geekdom":

1982. Atari Games, to celebrate the creation of their Atari 2600 Pac-Man Game (which, I might add, was one of the most pathetic, slapdash, slipshod piece of programming ever to churn out of a development studio) held a massive "Pac Man Day" in Citicorp Center in New York City. Being a confessed "Pac Maniac", I couldn't resist. To complete the picture, you have to know that I had that great uncontrolled 11-year-old hair of unequal length, and an old army fatigue jacket with a "PAC MAN" t-shirt transfer on the back. Now, it was me and literately THOUSANDS of kids jammed into the inadequately-planned celebration area at the Center, with all of us vying for places to stand and have fun. They had the contest, which only had maybe a dozen of us actually show enough nerve to go up on stage, and due to a REALLY LOUD chomping sound, I placed somewhere around third. Of course, this is up to dispute, because the place essentially turned into a riot (I can still recall my father up on a balcony, screaming at me to stand against a wall so I wouldn't be stepped on) and they generally just THREW stuff into the crowd, but I was third.

This is a memory I will hold dear until all of time. It was not a depth. It was a pinnacle. It was a heady, breathless moment in time in which my own fannish interest in something led me to a situation, a unique situation, that could barely be explained to others without sounding truly off-the-wall, absolutely beyond saving. And like many such unique events, you hold a fear in your heart, beyond the memory, a fear that as time goes on you will not feel such things again.

So, as I sit here typing these words to you, I know I have achieved something of equal, deep geekdom.

I have attended an off-broadway musical based on The Last Starfighter.

Scott's review is worth reading in its entirety.

Sounds as if we've reached the outer limits of re-purposing content and have reached the point where the Serpent devours its own tail.

Links:

Review of "The Last Starfighter: The Musical" at the blog, ASCII by Jason Scott

Storm Theatre, where "The Last Starfighter" currently plays in New York

Boing Boing

Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World link to page in Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow, courtesy of Amazon.com's searchable index (page 412 in the classic Viking or current Penguin Twentieth Century Classics edition)

06:53 AM | Comments (0)

October 18, 2004

Media Watch: The Blogosphere is more like a Plug-o-sphere...

...or an endless hallway of mirrors.

Early this morning I was doing a little bit of ego surfing when I ended up on Drew B’s take on Tech PR weblog. Drew was taking credit for a trackback that led me to the weblog of Charles Arthur, a tech reporter for The Independent in the UK.

I had left a comment with Charles that we should consider a trans-Atlantic hook-up of sorts. And that led Drew to conclude in his weblog, that there is indeed a JV underway—which triggered this latest ego-linked journey back to Drew’s weblog.

As I was writing a comment, thanking him for taking an interest in such things, it struck me again, just how incredibly self-promoting the Blogosphere is. I know bloggers who are constantly mentioning each other’s weblogs (not I) and dropping names all over the place. As I was saying to Ed (Zander,) just before he got the Motorola gig... “Ed, you need a bigger challenge than Silicon Valley can provide."

What rankles me about standalone journalism--as some like to call blogging--is that you have to do many jobs and one of them is publicist. And since blogging is personal, personal opinion, personality—you have to be a self-publicist. This is not a pleasant label at all. Having grown up in the British culture there is an unwritten understanding that “one should not blow one’s own horn.” I agree. It’s always better for someone else to do it for you.

So please send a link to Silicon Valley Watcher to your friends!

Here is Drew B’s excellent weblog:
Introducing Charles Arthur blog to Tom Foremski blog!

And here is Charles Arthur's weblog:
Charles...on anything that comes along

From the New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy:
blow one's own horn

08:35 AM | Comments (0)

Media Watch: Search & destroy

Against the daily news backdrop of bombings and aerial attacks, veteran Silicon Valley journalist, John Markoff's article,"Google Envy Is Fomenting Search Wars" in today's New York Times comes as no surprise.

Business as war is a trope that journalists haven't been able to leave alone in the 20+ years I've been covering Silicon Valley, even in the most peaceful times. It's become distressingly common as fighting has intensified in Iraq and the rest of us citizen-soldiers are supposed to keep Silicon Valley, and the rest of the homeland, safe from terrorists.

Markoff's martial prose covers all the hot spots in the latest war to control the personal computer desktop: Google's challenge to Microsoft with a Desktop Search function that searches the Web as well as files on the user's computer, the new Google Print feature to compete with Amazon.com's Search-Inside-the-Book, plus Google SMS to enable Web searches from a cell phone.

Microsoft, Yahoo!, and a host of new contenders - Vivissimo, Idealab, Amazon's new A9 search engine, Apple's upcoming Tiger - are in there fighting, too. And what a fight it is!

Markoff notes an "explosion," a "burst of activity," "furiously intensified efforts." Even as new battles begin, these armies of software engineers and marketing guerillas are "refighting the battles of the past."

Just as CNN or MSNBC or Fox News lets ex-generals second-guess the latest military maneuvers in Iraq, Markoff invites expert observers to comment on the chances of Microsoft and Yahoo! checking upstart Google's bold advance.

Unfortunately, also like the Iraq war, when the smoke clears and the dust settles and the casualties have been carted off the battlefields, questions arise: just what's been won? And, who won it?

Markoff astutely observes that "the search market, one of the Internet's most profitable areas, will increasingly be shaped by brand and other nontechnology factors."

This confirms what I heard from some very smart software engineers at a search engine start-up firm a few years ago, during my stint as an editor at Knowledge Management magazine.

They demonstrated technology that could run circles around Google and Yahoo!, producing search results far more precise and useful, albeit on enterprise information sets much smaller than the burgeoning Web.

Why not sell it to them? I asked.

They're not interested in making the necessary investment to implement it for the Web, was the reply.

Convinced that Internet users were reasonably satisfied with search results, the established search engine companies realized that brand name recognition and high-profile advertising programs would win the market share war. They were happy to leave the high-horsepower indexing schemes and advanced algorithms to companies that serve niche markets like enterprise knowledge management.

In the restaurant business, it's not the steak, it's the sizzle.

In the search engine wars, will shock and awe prevail?

Links:

Google Envy Is Fomenting Search Wars by John Markoff, New York Times, 18 October 2004

08:15 AM | Comments (0)

Media Watch: Best news show bar none

Jon Stewart at the Daily Show hosts the best TV news show out there.

Few in Silicon Valley are familiar with his work because the show airs at 11pm weekdays.

Chris Dichtel sends over this link to Stewart's recent appearance on CNN's "Crossfire."

Here is a link to the CNN transcript of Crossfire.

Affiliate link:

Jon Stewart's top selling book

04:00 AM | Comments (0)

Media Watch: Keeping up appearances of impartiality even in private

Do reporters have to hide their opinions, even in private emails? That seems to be the way things are heading.

There is an excellent discussion on this in the magazine “Editor and Publisher” and the reaction in newsrooms around the country:

“The latest controversy began after Farnaz Fassihi, The Wall Street Journal's respected Middle East correspondent, sent an e-mail to about 20 friends and relatives in September while covering the war in Iraq. Among other things, the e-mail complained about the dangers to reporters, quoted Iraqis growing disillusioned with the U.S. effort, and stated frankly that despite "President Bush's rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster." The letter found its way to the Web, then got print coverage, and was even cited in "Doonesbury" this week. “

Many reporters have been forbidden by their employers to publish a blog or a personal site because that might reveal opinions that could harm the reputation of the newspaper as an impartial news provider.

However, this attitude towards impartiality is nonsensical. Everyone has opinions and it is better that they be known rather than hidden. The premise that some news organizations are operating under is, “let’s maintain the appearance of impartiality”. Would a reporter slant a story to reflect their opinion? Maybe. But trying to hold up a false appearance of impartiality is much worse.

Reporters should be free to offer their opinion on subjects that they cover, in weblogs, email, bars, anywhere. It doesn’t prevent reporters from producing fair and balanced work. In fact, it makes it better. I’d much prefer to hear it straight from the reporters in the thick of it, than bland news stories that attempt to mask any underlying bias.

This applies to business journalists covering Silicon Valley and the tech industry. There would have been a lot less hype about in the dotcom days if reporters in the field were more able to write news stories that had room for their opinion.

Editor and Publisher: To E-Mail or Not to E-Mail: Can Reporters Offer Views in Private Correspondence?

03:13 AM | Comments (0)

October 15, 2004

Media Watch: NTKnow watches Web 2.0

The latest issue of that cheeky UK newsletter, Need to Know, offers an irreverent take on the recent Web 2.0 show in San Francisco, a refreshing change from the near hagiographic treatment some of the people and companies received in the local Silicon Valley press.

Here's the relevant item:

Currently residing in the "Where Are They Now?" file: Web 2.0 was a convention with a disturbing meld of the usual suspects and the usual convicts. Spruced geeks failed to recognize each other with trimmed hair and proper non-T shirts. Previously dapper VCs and analysts either dressed down, or were still living in their 2001 suit. Either way, they're not aging well - and these Golden Oldie Nostalgiafests can't be helping. In the end, gentle shock at how long it's been seemed to be the only reason for being here. The geeks, in their hearts, know there's no real money-making plan in what they're planning next. The VCs, deep in their blackened coal-pit guts, know the same. Still, didn't stop anyone on the old "Web 1.0", did it? We can't quite believe the entrepreneurs will be able to pull *another* blinder on the investing public, but stranger things have happened. And there is some hope in all of this: if you thought that hell would freeze over before the rich kids of tech would pay even lip-service to open licenses, fair use, and publicly stabbing Hollywood in the eye over the Internet, let alone using their *actual money* to do so, do bring a woolly jumper to Web 3.0: Yet More Hell On Earth. http://www.transmitmedia.com/svr/vault/polese/ - what the rigour of ten years hard work do: Polese then http://www.gsinstitute.org/about/directors.shtm - now. Dave Winer, however, remains scarily well preserved. http://www.bowblog.com/archives/000872.html - over here: a bit like they wanted to sell you timeshares

The newsletter, distributed via email every Friday, is worth reading in full, of course. Subscribe at the web site.

Link

NTKnow

10:15 AM | Comments (0)

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Media Watch: A Tale of Two Silicon Valleys

Two articles in today's San Jose Mercury News convey two very different pictures of Silicon Valley, as reflected in the way they portray two of the high-tech hothouse's most visible chief executives.

Steve Jobs, in Mike Langberg's "The swagger is back," is the youthful Levi's- and sandal-clad upstart, opposed to Larry Ellison, all grown-up and sophisticated in an expensive Sartoria Attolini suit, as depicted in Mike Cassidy's "Ellison suited to NFL's brutal competition."

The differences go deeper, of course.

Langberg's Jobs, with his well-chosen and undoubtedly pricey casual clothes, embodies the attention to style that has made Apple products industrial design leaders almost from the start.

The chain of Apple retail mini-stores Jobs launched yesterday - the pretext for Langberg's article - "are made from imported Japanese stainless steel .... Perforated with hundreds of small holes for ventilation and fire-prevention sprinklers, the walls look much like the front of Apple's stainless steel Power Mac G5 computers."

But, the Koolhaasian interior design leaves Langsberg cold.

"I felt like I was standing inside a giant Sub-Zero refrigerator" he reports.

It's not just the architecture that makes Langsberg chilly. He complains that, despite a recent bout with cancer, Jobs persists in his familiar "unshakable -- even arrogant -- confidence in his ideas."

I wonder. Could it be - given the dramatic success he's achieved, having lost Apple to a soda-pop salesman then returning to bring the company back from near-death, and having juiced the movie business with Pixar and its digital wizardry - that Jobs' confidence is justified?

Cassidy touches on the pillar of Ellison's Silicon Valley reputation, his $14 billion net worth, as he builds his article around a rumor that the Oracle chief wants to bring a National Football League team to Los Angeles. Purchasing an NFL team would be merely the latest example of Ellison's well-known habits of conspicuous consumption.

Cassidy moves beyond money and goes to the essence of the Ellison legend, painting him almost as a time-traveling Roman aristocrat (complete with expensive Italian suit) drooling blood-lust over gory Coliseum games.

"Where else is he going to find brutal competition, blood, mud, macho men and a primal drive to win at any cost?" Cassidy asks. "I mean, once the PeopleSoft trial is over."

"Ellison must be thinking," Cassidy rhapsodizes, " 'Finally, a game where it really isn't enough for me to win. My opponents actually do have to lose.' "

Cassidy is having almost too much fun, in my humble opinion, with this fantasy of Ellison pummeling his opponents on the football field.

Silicon Valley has long presented two faces to the people who know it best.

"Fortress" companies like National Semiconductor and Intel enforced strict work discipline in a chew-them-up-spit-them-out approach to employee relations. Ellison is just the latest in a long line of Silicon Valley CEOs who exude the take-no-prisoners, work-'til-you-drop, tough guy ethic.

Apple was an early model of the touchy-feely enterprise that woos productivity increase by tickling employee senses with tasteful interior decoration, elegant food in a comfortable company cafeteria, on-the-job massage, and sensitivity training. (Although Jobs himself is said to be a bear to work with, whence the need for the compensation of soothing surroundings and other pleasing perks.)

This isn't the only divide that splits Silicon Valley these days. The gap between 40- and 50-something Baby Boomers and the 20- and 30-something Dot.com Bombers probably creates more on-the-job culture clashes than any other.

The Jobs/Ellison sandals/suits dichotomy seems to be the one with real legs, however, dating back some 20 years, when hippified hackers and their home-brewed microcomputers startled the computer industry "suits" at the first Renaissance Computing Faire. But, that's another story.

Links:

The swagger is back by Mike Langberg

Ellison suited to NFL's brutal competition by Mike Cassidy

08:18 AM | Comments (0)

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October 14, 2004

Media Watch: Game-designing women

What does it mean that women make up only one in 10 of the people in the computer games industry?

That's the question Katie Hafner poses in her New York Times article today, "What Do Women Game Designers Want?"

Male domination is more complete than the 10 percent figure might suggest, since "most tend to be in jobs in customer service, marketing and quality assurance," Hafner observes. "Relatively few women work as game designers and producers, and even fewer are programmers."

Hafner covers the male taste for shoot-em-up violence, "the testosterone-fueled attitude among upper management that ... pervades many game software companies," and the "chicken-and-egg" dilemma of how to get more women into game design when few women play computer games while growing up.

Hafner highlights Austin, Texas-based video game company, Ion Storm, and its star designer, Denise Fulton, and Silicon Valley programmer Nicky Robinson who managed to blast into the blood-and-guts brigade with Battle Tanx and Army Men.

Things didn't have to work out this way.

I remember attending a party, in the late '70s, in Menlo Park with my brother and some of the people he went to school with at Stanford. They had been out of school for a few years then. Among the party-goers was David Oppenheim, one of my brother's college roommates; a few years would pass before he created the first MIDI interface for the Macintosh and started OpCode, a trailblazer in music software.

Op introduced me to a friend of his, a woman who had just designed a video game for Atari. I believe this was Dona Bailey, and that the game was Centipede, which Atari released in 1980, the first arcade game designed by a woman.

I remember her excitement about her work and about the way she had successfully made a place for herself among the men who then dominated not only video games, but the entire field of computer programming.

The female drive to parity in this male bastion seems to have been a case of one step forward, two steps back, unfortunately.

In today's New York Times story, Hafner notes that Nicky Robinson now serves as director of technology at LimeLife of Menlo Park, working on mobile phone applications for women ... a career move that would seem to indicate that sex roles in Silicon Valley remain rigid, despite the wishes of even the most successful game-designing women.

Links:
What Do Women Game Designers Want? by Katie Hafner, New York Times, October 14, 2004
Ion Storm
LImeLife
Centipede Wikipedia article

07:55 AM | Comments (0)

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October 13, 2004

Media Watch: Netscape 10 years after

What a Web we've woven this past decade! Now gather 'round, young whippersnappers, and I'll tell you the story about the time I met Marc Andreesen when he still called the browser "Mosaic NetScape."

Once upon a time, 10 years and a couple of months ago, I met the fresh-faced programmer on his very first round of press interviews. My interview with him appeared in the November 1994 issue of Morph's Outpost on the Digital Frontier, a magazine for interactive multimedia developers and designers that I created and edited in those halcyon days of yore. Like Andreesen, many of the people our magazine pulled together as a community went on to make the World Wide Web a viable publishing and communications platform.

Best quote from Andreesen in that interview: "I was going for a degree in electrical engineering until I found out how hard it was."

CNET has a good package of stories today reliving Netscape's history, from its rocket ride to a $5 billion buy-out by AOL through its subsequent decline, and new hopes for a Firefox revival.

But, I've got a bone to pick with one of them, "Where are Netscape's pioneers today?" by Paul Festa.

Festa's article is fine, as far as it goes. But he fails to mention three key people who worked with Andreesen to create the browser: Eric Bina, who together with Andreesen wrote the original UNIX version of the Mosaic interface while working at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications in 1993; Jon Mitterhauser, who wrote the NCSA Windows version of Mosaic; and Aleks Totic who wrote the NCSA Mac version. Andreesen went out of his way to give them credit for their efforts in my interview with him back in '94.

(Festa does mention Mitterhauser in the lead story in the CNET package, "Netscape: Bowed, but not broken.")

Andreesen and the original Netscape team made one excellent decision that I quizzed him about in that interview, in the company's office on the main drag in Mountain View. They chose not to pursue what was at that time considered the Holy Grail: interactive TV.

"It's going to be years before we have interactive TV," Andreesen told me. And he was right.

Whether or not it's been enough years yet remains to be seen, in light of Microsoft's latest kludgy effort to merge the PC with the Tube.

Links:
A decade on the Web with Netscape by CNET News.com Staff
Where are Netscape's pioneers today? by Paul Festa
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Netscape: Bowed, but not broken by Paul Festa
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Netscape's first press release via CNET
Windows of opportunity in Microsoft's media push CNET round-up of Microsoft's Media Center launch
Morph's Outpost on the Digital Frontier, news story in Wired issue 1.04

08:45 AM | Comments (0)

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Media Watch: How technology failed in Iraq

Without the defense and aerospace industries, Silicon Valley might still be harvesting prunes instead of chips. Yes, war and the rumors of war have been very good to entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, shareholders, and employees of companies that supply the military. Now a dirty little secret is emerging.

Despite all the boasts of "smart" bombs and networked military forces, bloody experience in Iraq demonstrates that high-tech's military promise is this war's pitfall.

That's the thrust of David Talbot's meaty article in the November issue of Technology Review, MIT's prestigious magazine.

"The Iraq War was supposed to be a preview of the new U.S. military: a light, swift force that relies as much on sensors and communications networks as on heavy armor and huge numbers," Talbot writes. "But once the shooting started, technology fell far short of expectations."

Talbot's piece reads like the latest Clancy techno-thriller. But the dead and wounded soldiers and civilians are real enough.

Talbot buttresses this dismal picture with evidence from "a forthcoming, largely classified report on the entire Iraq campaign, under preparation by the Santa Monica, CA, think tank Rand."

One big problem: we didn't learn from the high-tech failures of the first Iraq war.

Watching our President refuse to acknowledge or admit a mistake in the current blood and fire nightmare over there, I guess that doesn't surprise me.

No worries about job security in Silicon Valley's defense and aerospace related shops, however.

Technology-driven "force transformation" will march on, if not in step with freedom and democracy, certainly a step or two ahead of the Grim Reaper.

Links:

How Technology Failed in Iraq by David Talbot

06:45 AM | Comments (0)

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October 12, 2004

Media Watch: Silicon Valley love affair gone sour

Idealistic 20-something entrepreneurs slave over a kitchen table or in a stuffy garage, invent something cool and useful, win thousands of loyal fans, hit the financial jackpot ... only to find themselves detested, accused of selling out. Sound familiar?

That's the story Vauhini Vara tells in the Wall Street Journal about Ben and Mena Trott, founders of Six Apart Ltd., maker of Movable Type blogging software.

Just another casualty of blogging blowing up big, it seems. Move from the home office to a San Mateo office building, sell to corporate clients in addition to giving the product away to starving geeks, start making - gasp! - money ... the hip meme flees as fast as it descends.

The final indignity, Vara writes, seems to have been instituting a licensing policy that would require customers to pay if they want to run Movable Type on more than three machines. (At the risk of sounding indelicate, what does it say about the Wall Street Journal and its ability to spot trends, that this story appears now, months after Six Apart made its hated move?)

The pricing strategy undeniably reverberates with a certain Microsoftian ka-chinggg.

Although - just curious, you understand, not trying to start any arguments here - how many computers does the garden-variety blogger use, anyway?

And, if this blogger can afford more than three computers to blog on, is it too much to expect that she, or he, might peel off a few shekels for a relatively small software purchase?

Does it always have to be true, as the wanna-be's watch the golden lucky few, that misery loves company and hates success - as long as it happens to somebody else?

Links

Folksy No More, Blogger Firm Taps Big Clients by Vauhini Vara
Six Apart Ltd.

08:00 PM | Comments (0)

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Media Watch: SF-based business reporter Laetitia Mailhes is recovering from a serious horse riding accident

The good news is that Laetitia is doing well and is expected to be out of the intensive care unit in Santa Rosa Memorial hospital by the end of this week, if not sooner, reports Chloe Veltman, her close friend.

Laetitia suffered a head injury while horse back riding in Point Reyes over the weekend. Doctors have decided that the head injury will probably not require surgery. Laetitia has been awake and talking, but remembers very little about the incident.

Many in the Silicon Valley community have met or know Laetitia--the very talented journalist for Les Echos--the French sister publication to the Financial Times. I will post regular updates and I wish her a speedy recovery.

Many of Laetitia's friends have already visited, and I know that Scott Morrison is planning to drive up to Santa Rosa on Wednesday afternoon. He will be happy to carry any message from friends and well-wishers. Drop him a note: scott.morrison@ft.com. Cards, flowers, baguettes and any other non-digital things can be sent to the FT office in SF, 251 Post, Suite 200, 94108, care of Scott.

03:21 PM | Comments (0)

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Media Watch: Ad-click bubble alert

Web site ad clicks may add up to less than publishers hope, according to an Asia Times Online report.

"A growing number of housewives, college graduates, and even working professionals across the country are in a rush to click paid Internet ads to earn anywhere between US$100 and $1,000 every month," writes Priyanka Bhardwaj, a New Delhi-based journalist.

Bhardwaj outlines a scheme offered by Click2freemoney.com, and explains:

Delhi has thus been taken over by the so-called Internet ad firms that promise to coach and share the secrets of the trade with prospective candidates to help them earn dollars for an upfront fee of $20-$100. Typically, online ad clickers get their money remitted by opening accounts through PayPal or StormPay, which enables money transactions if you have an e-mail address. Most clickers, however, opt to pay commissions to middlemen and encash earnings in rupees. Clickers say they pay $7 commission for every $50 earned. Traffic to ads for home loans and insurance is particularly spreading fast in India, none of which obviously holds any relevance for Indian clickers. "I have no interest in what appears when clicking an ad. I care only whether to pause 60 seconds or 90 seconds, as money is credited only if you stay online for a fixed time," says a user.

It's only a matter of time before Internet advertising companies and their clients catch on, of course. Then, on to the next scam!

Links:
Indian housewives puff up ad click bubble by Priyanka Bhardwaj
Click2freemoney.com

09:55 AM | Comments (0)

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Media Watch: Dept. of Corrections

Real journalists publish corrections, so here goes.

In last week's item about VNU, VNU hammer down on News Centre, I got Fullrun's name wrong. They publish a fine subscription-based site, Fullrun, and offer a free 30-day trial.

Links:
Fullrun
Drew B's take on tech PR

08:14 AM | Comments (0)

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Media Watch: Silicon Valley Culture, redux

Home to geek wizards who invented high-resolution imaging technologies that have revolutionized the art scene - home to a digital printing company that has, alas, in this season of partisan fervor, censored two politically-charged art works: that's Silicon Valley!

Art critic, Kenneth Baker, features [updated, 12 Oct 04; see comments for this item] the story in today's San Francisco Chronicle.

Zazzle, a Palo Alto-based printer, refused to print two politically-charged works by Clinton Fein, destined for display at the Toomey-Tourell Gallery: Like Apple F -- ing Pie and Who Would Jesus Torture?

Like Apple F -- ing Pie, writes Baker, "makes a U.S. flag from lines of the Taguba report in red on white and a blue field with white 'stars' clearly recognizable as the Abu Ghraib torture victim photographed standing atop a tin container, hooded, with arms outstretched and wired."

The second work features George W. Bush on the cross, "sporting a missile erection," beneath the words "Who Would Jesus Torture?"

Zazzle spokesperson Matt Wilsey says the company destroyed the images because Fein uploaded objectionable images to the company's web site, violating company policy, running the risk of offending web site visitors, some of whom he claims are as young as six years old.

Wilsey says Fein is "trying to stir the pot" and Zazzle is not having any of it.

Baker reports that Fein was able to have images printed elsewhere at the last minute.

Chances are, those precious six-year-olds will encounter images of Abu Ghraib torture victims and Bush's warmongering arrogance elsewhere, too.

Links:

2 of Clinton Fein's political works run afoul of his printer's policies by Kenneth Baker

Clinton Fein and the Art of Political Protest by Deborah Phillips (at the Toomey-Tourell Gallery site)

Artists take to the streets by Paul Chavez, Associated Press, 11 October 2004

05:52 AM | Comments (0)

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October 11, 2004

What's that rhythmic pssh sound?

It's not all chips and geeks and corporate fraud in Silicon Valley, not by a long shot. We've got culture, too. Loads of it.

Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle music critic, celebrates the installation of Symphony Silicon Valley in the newly restored California Theatre in downtown San Jose, calling last Saturday night's concert "a promising foretaste of things to come as this young organization continues to establish its identity on the cultural landscape of the South Bay."

Kosman, tactfully, makes none of the allusions to the sometimes bitter north-south rivalry and objectively overwhelming superiority of San Francisco's cultural landscape that so often make stewards of Silicon Valley culture defensive and resentful . . . when it doesn't motivate them to relocate to the glittering neighbor to the north and bite the freeway commute bullet.

Au contraire, Kosman sings praises to "veteran conductor Sergiu Comissiona" and his choice to program the film music of Copland, Korngold and Gershwin. Of the refurbished venue, Kosman says, "The sound is warm and inviting, the sightlines clean, the ambience intimate."

One fly in the ointment: "the presence of a mysterious mechanism somewhere at the center of the house that emits a rhythmic pssh sound, like some kind of architectural inhaler."

Or is that just the slow, sucking sound of Silicon Valley digital music technologies sapping symphonies everywhere, as chips and software replace violinists, harpists, drummers, pianists, and their pesky union representatives?

Link: Cinematic romp for Symphony Silicon Valley by Joshua Kosman, Chronicle Music Critic

02:06 PM | Comments (0)

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Media Watch: Watching the watchers

Here's a corporate spy who sounds every bit as relentless as the villain Daniel Quilp in Charles Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop, or the ubiquitous nosy concierge in Paris apartment buildings:

He watches what Web sites they go to, restricts instant messaging to fellow employees and uses software to monitor their every keystroke. He has fired workers who were caught doing particularly inappropriate things....

That's Dan Fost describing one employer who monitors email and instant messaging to track which employees are working and which are slacking, in his interesting San Francisco Chronicle article today.

This boss's Secret Santa will have some nice surprises for him at this year's office Christmas party, no doubt.

But, he works at the cutting edge of a growing trend. Fost offers plenty of market research evidence to support this thesis.

This will just get worse, as the PATRIOT act tightens its grip in the US and civil liberties continue to erode, and as paternalistic corporations follow suit.

Goldbrickers beware!

In the meantime, you may choose to look around for employers who aren't quite so uptight, recognizing that kicking back for a few minutes with non-work related email or web surfing may be just the ticket to increasing productivity in the following few hours.

Links:
Keeping track of cyberslackers: Web and e-mail monitoring by bosses becoming common in the workplace by Dan Fost
The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens, plot summary and online text

11:52 AM | Comments (0)

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Media Watch: Browsing the browsers

Nothing unusual about an insightful, well-written essay about the profusion of web browser alternatives to Internet Explorer . . . except that it appears on the editorial page of today's New York Times!

It's a measure of the distance we've traveled and the degree to which the Web has become a fixture in our lives, just part of the landscape.

Verlyn Klinkenborg, who contributes occasional op-ed essays to the Times as an "editorial observer," reveals the soul of a tinkerer, explaining that "eight different Web browsers reside in my computer" simply for "the slightly obsessive fun of it."

A decade ago, mass media journalists were racing to write articles with titles like "Wow! 24 Weird & Wonderful Hours in the Wild & Wacky World of the World Wide Web."

Now, they take the Internet for granted . . . and more than a few wind up stealing their best story ideas from bloggers.

Perhaps, one day, the celebrity journalists at top-tier publications will even learn to credit the bloggers for scooping them.

Klinkenborg doesn't flinch at sharing the unvarnished truth with the Times' vast audience, either, exploring in some detail "what went wrong with Internet Explorer."

Now there's a breath of fresh air I'd like to feel blowing a bit more freely in the tech business press, where this kind of clear and simple observation somehow rarely makes it through the clutter of paid advertisements from Microsoft.

Link: Sampling a World of New Ways to Grapple With the Web by Verlyn Klinkenborg

08:45 AM | Comments (0)

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October 10, 2004

Media Watch: "Lies and the Lying C.E.O.'s Who Tell Them"

That's the headline of Gretchen Morgensen's update on the Oracle v. PeopleSoft saga, in today's New York Times business section . . . proof that Silicon Valley's shadow side continues to intrigue mass media audiences and the journalists who indulge them.

Morgensen frames her story as "just the latest round in an ugly and long takeover fight between two software giants," summing up a jaded public's response: "Ho-hum" - but with a tacit understanding that the newspaper-reading public has been, in fact, fascinated by the twists and turns of this sordid tale.

The article pulls readers deep into the moral swamp that is Silicon Valley business ethics. She aims to address "the issue of corporate lies, the executives who tell them and the companies that help to paper them over."

She concludes:

So this is where we are now in corporate America. Even in the post- Enron era, some executives still think nothing of misleading investors, analysts and their customers. And when they get caught dissembling, their companies respond in a way that may provide legal protection but also allows the lie to live.

How in the world does corporate America expect to regain investors' trust when it makes boneheaded moves like this?

The problem is even bigger than this, of course.

The headline's reference to Al Franken's best-selling book about right-wing politics indicates that Silicon Valley now takes its proper place in the pantheon of corporate cheats and criminals who symbolize - for tens of millions of Americans and uncounted numbers of people outside the US - the culture of American business.

Contrast this to the many promising developments announced at the Web 2.0 show in San Francisco last week - exciting new ways the Web and related technologies may make life and work easier and more enjoyable, powered by a new wave of enthusiasm that rivals the excitement that accompanied the Web's breakthrough to public consciousness in the early 1990s.

For each great new idea that bubbles up from Silicon Valley to capture the imagination and promise that, somehow, technology can help redeem this soiled and broken world, trails an army of equivocating, money-grubbing, power-hungry executives, investors, and their of legal attack dog packs: schizoid Silicon Valley.

Which do we want it to be? Must we live with both? If so, how?

Links:

Lies and the Lying C.E.O.'s Who Tell Them by Gretchen Morgensen

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right by Al Franken

07:52 AM | Comments (0)

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October 07, 2004

Media Watch: Finally, a literate tech biz writer

Any tech business writer who quotes Thomas Pynchon has got to be OK.

Andrew Orlowski's article in The Register today, about the success privacy groups have achieved in "persuading a First Circuit Appeals Court to reopen a case with some nasty unintended consequences for email users," meets that criterion, in addition to being worth reading in its own right.

"Thomas Pynchon last year described the internet as 'a development that promises social control on a scale those quaint old 20th-century tyrants with their goofy moustaches could only dream about,' " Orlowski writes, quoting Pynchon's introductory essay to a new edition of George Orwell's prophetic novel, 1984.

Pynchon's not to everybody's taste, admittedly, but when you're hooked, you're hooked, and it's always a pleasure to encounter somebody else who knows his work. My hat's off to Mr. Orlowski.

Pynchon has issued warnings about the internet and privacy before. In his introduction to Jim Dodge's delightful novel, Stone Junction, Pynchon wrote, back in 1997:

The other day in the street I heard a policeman in a police car, requesting over his loudspeaker that a civilian car blocking his way move aside and let him past, all the while addressing the drive of the car personally, by name. I was amazed at this, though people I tried to share it with only shrugged, assuming that of course the driver's name (along with height, weight and date of birth) had been obtained from the Motor Vehicle Department via satellite, as soon as the offending car's license number had been tapped into the terminal -- so what?

Stone Junction was first published in 1989, toward the end of an era still innocent, in its way, of the cyberworld just ahead about to exponentially explode upon it. To be sure, there were already plenty of computers around then, but they were not quite so connected together as they were shortly to become. Data available these days to anybody were accessible then only to the Authorized, who didn't always know what they had or what to do with it. There was still room to wiggle -- the Web was primitive country, inhabited only by a few rugged pioneers, half loco and wise to the smallest details of their terrain. Honor prevailed, laws were unwritten, outlaws, as yet undefinable, were few. The question had only begun to arise of how to avoid, or, preferably, escape altogether, the threat, indeed promise, of control without mercy that lay in wait down the comely vistas of freedom that computer-folk were imagining then -- a question we are still asking. Where can you jump in the rig and head for any more -- who's out there to grant us asylum? If we stay put, what is left to us that is not in some way tainted, coopted, and colonized, by the forces of Control, usually digital in nature? Does anybody know the way to William Gibson's "Republic of Desire?" Would they tell if they knew? So forth.

In the light of the PATRIOT Act in a post-9/11 ambience, Pynchon seems downright prescient.

Links
Email privacy strikeout suspended by Andrew Orlowsk's

Pynchonoid.org A blog written and edited by yours truly, Doug "Full Disclosure" Millison, with all the links you'll need to get completely up to speed on America's most enigmatic and entertaining novelist.

1984 by George Orwell, with an introduction by Thomas Pynchon

Introduction to Stone Junction by Thomas Pynchon

12:52 PM | Comments (0)

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Media Watch: Is this horse race fixed, or what?

Surprise! Web traffic ratings - the foundation of many a revenue stream, trickle or fire-hose strong - may be worthless, warns Wired News.

The story, by Adam L. Penenberg, slams two popular web traffic ratings agencies, Nielsen/NetRatings and comScore Media Metrix, which deliver "wildly different results."

The story seems to have been sparked by Wired News' own experience. Penenberg reports that "Nielsen reported that the site attracted 1.87 million visitors, while Media Metrix put traffic at almost half that: 1.096 million."

Sounds like the Presidential campaign polls: impossible to trust (because of inherent problems with polling methodology) at best, and dangerously misleading at worst.

Penenberg's story is getting wide play, popping up in ArtsJournal, among other places on the Web.

Links:

Web Industry Still Flies Blind by Adam L. Penenberg.

ArtsJournal: Daily Art News

08:17 AM | Comments (0)

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Media Watch: VNU hammer down on News Centre

From Full Run comes news that Dutch media giant VNU is closing its News Centre today, and laying off the six journalists who write for a number of VNU publications, including Computing, IT Week, and Vnunet.

Full Run says VNU will try to find new jobs for the News Centre journalists . . . but the company may have to scramble to keep this talent from moving to competitors.

And, the cuts may go deeper, totalling 23 possible redundancies in editorial, sales and marketing, says Full Run. Casualties include Colin Barker, former editor of Computing.

These cuts come after Guy Phillips, publishing director of VNU titles Computeractive and Personal Computer World, resigned last week. Full Run reports that Adrian Hands, associate publisher in VNU's consumer tech division, also left the company on Friday.

Department of Full Disclosure: Tom Foremski and I together provided a range of Silicon Valley tech and business news for several VNU publications in the late 1980s and 1990s. Watch for updates as we dig deeper into this story as it unfolds.

08:04 AM | Comments (0)

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October 06, 2004

Media Watch: Taking spectator sports to the next level . . . of boredom

It's safe to say that parents everywhere will wish that the New York Times wouldn't glorify videogame players, as the paper does in its Technology section lead story today (October 7), "Taking Their Game to the Next Level" by Eric Taub . . . but they may reconsider when they read about players whose winnings in videogame competitions total in the tens of thousands of dollars, and about the very lucky few whose earnings from endorsements have reached hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Taub plays it for all it's worth, comparing one player to "a pianist preparing for a concert," in a well reported, vividly written, engaging story. The story's publication coincides with final competition at the World Cyber Games in San Francisco this week.

Having come of age before the earliest videogame machines even came into existence, however, the whole subject leaves me chilly.

I will admit I spent many a happy hour - pun intended - at the Dutch Goose bar, near Stanford University in Menlo Park, watching the action at the first coin-operated videogame machines. Atari founder Norman Bushnell installed them there for testing and market research. I'll even cop to donating a coin or two myself. But, that was nearly three decades ago, the technology was new, and I was still a beer drinker.

Taub's story did seriously impress me in one respect. Prior to reading it, I didn't imagine anything could be more boring than the hot new television sport: watching other people play poker.

Imagine my surprise when I read that thousands of spectators attend videogame competitions, and their popularity is growing.

Sorry, but these folks just have too much time on their hands.

Story link: Taking Their Game to the Next Level by Eric A. Taub

08:56 PM | Comments (0)

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Media Watch: JotSpot's the golden boy today

Palo Alto, California-based start-up JotSpot basks in the glow of the San Jose Mercury's top news storyslot today. The rather breathless story, Palo Alto start-up enhances 'Wiki' sites, by Matt Marshall, trumpets the company's still-in-development product: a tool for creating "Wiki" web sites and related applications - sites and apps that can be easily created and updated by a "social network" of mere mortals, not propellor-heads.

Marshall spotlights the $5.2 million in venture capital the company has raised from Silicon Valley venture firms Mayfield and Redpoint Ventures, as well as JotSpot founders Joe Kraus and co-founder Graham Spencer, two of the original founders of Excite.com, a search engine darling of the dot.com bubble. JotSpot will unveil the product at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

Business Week has a story about JotSpot today, too, Do-It-Yourself Software for All? by Rob Hof. Hof goes into more detail about potential JotSpot competitors, mentioning an open-source program called TWiki , IBM's Lotus Notes, Groove Networks' Virtual Office , and Microsoft's SharePoint, in addition to Socialtext, the Palo Alto start-up mentioned in Marshall's Mercury News article.

JotSpot press release: JotSpot Launches, Unveils Application Wiki

08:51 AM | Comments (0)

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October 05, 2004

Media Watch: San Francisco’s Herb Caen was one of the best "bloggers"…he called it three-dot journalism

Okay, I’m teasing the blogosphere, and I ask for its merciful understanding, but all the chatter about blogging does remind me of that old chestnut about a group of blind people trying to describe an elephant. One part of the blogging elephant for me, (and this is purely by touch) is how similar it feels to “three-dot journalism.”

And it seems fitting that blogging, and blogging software such as Movable Type, developed in this area, because this is where Herb Caen, the greatest practitioner of three-dot journalism lived and worked.

Three-dot journalism is a term that arose in the 1930s to describe gossip columns that followed the type of format used by Walter Winchell, who reported on New York’s Broadway scene.

However, San Francisco journalist Herb Caen is the one that mastered this form of reporting. His daily column was very similar to that of a weblog, and would be familiar to any weblog aficionado of today.

(The San Francisco Chronicle occasionally reprints classic Caen - here's a 1958 classiccolumn where he coined the word "beatnik."--Doug Millison)

Herb Caen’s format was one long column, divided into 15 to 20 items, separated with: . . . and containing a similar spectrum of content that is found in many blogs today: ranging from what he had for lunch, to rants on social issues that bothered him, or the description of a momentary glimpse of a San Francisco landmark through a break in the fog. (Herb Caen was married many times, but he never left San Francisco, a town he loved, and loved to call “Bagdad-by-the-Bay.” It was a nickname that once had a fair amount of local support, but clearly falls on barren ground today.)

Mr. Caen was was a true journalist; he didn’t stop until he physically could not hammer out his stories on his “Loyal Royal” typewriter. His first column was published in 1938, and Mr. Caen died in 1997, writing his column until almost the very end. He received a special Pulitzer in 1996.

And it was always compelling content. If you lived in San Francisco, you read Herb Caen. It was as simple as that.

Herb Caen’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle was always on the back page of the first section of The Chron, next to the Macy’s ad, and was as inseparable from San Francisco as the crema foam on a North Beach espresso.

It was part of the culture of living in San Francisco, reading Herb’s column at breakfast. If you, or somebody you knew was mentioned in his column, it was a happy day.

And he made it all look so easy--always the mark of a master. The tone of his column was always just right: kind, generous in spirit, yet not shying away from championing social issues, or criticizing a person or politician.

His was a very honest form of journalism because the opinions in his columns were clearly labeled as his own, or those of someone he talked with that day. You knew who his buddies/cronies were, you knew where he ate lunch or dinner yesterday, who sat at the table, who picked up the bill.

It wasn’t just three-dot journalism, it was also what I like to call “up-front journalism,” a term that is sorely needed these days, especially with the crisis in credibility that many news organizations are facing.

Up-front journalism is something that you will see as a key component of the media projects my team and I are working on.

I continue to be inspired by Mr. Caen’s work, his modest, humble attitude, and his dedication to his craft.

Here is an interview with Mr. Caen from the San Francisco Chronicle.

Advertisement: Our affiliate link to Herb Caen books on Amazon.

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06:02 PM | Comments (0)

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Media Watch: Is Google's success hurting bloggers and other online media publishers?

Some readers have suggested that to augment the $1.45 I made on Wednesday, I should add a tip jar, or donation button added to my web site, as others have done, and that readers might throw in a buck or two.

I thank all those that offered those suggestions, but, I really, really, dislike tip jars, especially on sites run by professional journalists.

Tip jars are tacky and demeaning to our profession, akin to begging, and it has to stop. If I wanted a tip jar I’d work at Starbucks.

Tip jars exist because there is no good mechanism available that can recover a good chunk of the value inherent in news, blogs and other online media content.

Google Adsense is a good step in that direction, but it is far from being an efficient mechanism for anything other than Google generated content. It is very difficult to serve up contextual ads around news stories for example, as my buddy, Moreover co-founder Dave Galbraith, has often pointed out. That means poorly targeted ads, and therefore few click-throughs.

Yet there is a pot of gold the size of Manhattan waiting for the developer that figures out an efficient mechanism of collecting the value of content produced and published online.

Google ads are great for Google type content, which is a page of links harvested by machines. Google publishes those pages on the fly, and serves up ads alongside. Google advertising prices, which are set by an auction process, reflect very efficiently the value of a Google published page of links.

But most bloggers and professional online journalists are producing content that just has to be more inherently valuable to online readers than a search page full of links. Wouldn’t you agree?

However, since Google is the largest online publisher of web content (with a gazillion pages of search results published every year) this means online advertising on Google is cheap. Yet Google can still make a ton of money because its costs per page are extremely low.

So, does this mean that bloggers, and anybody else that is counting on Google ad revenues to pay for their content production, can only survive if they can match Google’s cost base?

I know that there are increasing numbers of bloggers making a decent income because of their use of Google Adsense. But they have to produce a ton of highly compelling content and attract very high levels of traffic.

The ROI in producing a single page of blog entries, or online news content, must be a googol (unit definition) of magnitude worse than Google’s ROI in publishing a web page of links.

Since Google is a machine-based technology, it is highly scalable and cheap. Human generated content production, such as online news and blogging, cannot compete within that scenario.

Humans are not scalable, they are expensive, and they are a pain to deal with. Servers are getting cheaper, and are getting easier to administer.

So, are we doomed? Is Google killing online journalism because of its runaway success as a publisher of web content? Has this abundance of Google published content depressed the overall price that can be charged for online ads?

Too many widgets on the market depresses the value of widgets, doesn’t it?

05:10 PM | Comments (0)

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Media Watch: Steve Jobs is back

Something upbeat from the San Jose Mercury, Apple Computer co-founder, Steve Jobs, has recovered from a rare form of pancreatic cancer and is back to work, according to a story by Dawn C. Chmielewski.

“All I can say is that he was in excellent spirits,’’ says Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak in an email quoted by the Merc. Jobs’ experience demonstrates that clean living doesn’t necessarily promise good health: Jobs was famous, back in his early Apple days, for offering elegant and delicious vegan cuisine at press events.

12:31 PM | Comments (0)

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October 04, 2004

Media Watch: How to get a "scoop" in the New York Times

Please allow me to introduce Doug Millison, an editor and journalist who has been covering Silicon Valley for longer than he cares to admit. You'll be seeing more of his work as we roll out the Silicon Valley Media Watch site later this week.

It helps to have genuinely interesting news, of course - although the Grey Lady has been known to launch a dud now and again. Giving the New York Times an exclusive is another way to go. That appears to be the case with a story published late this evening, October 4, at the Times web site, Cheaper Part for Fuel Cells to Be Announced on Tuesday, by Matthew Wald . . . and dated October 5.

Wald reports that Mountain View, California-based PolyFuel will announce "a breakthrough in fuel-cell membranes by using an alternative material: a hydrocarbon that it says costs only about half as much per square meter" compared to membranes made with fluorine compounds by competitors, including "better living through chemistry" megacorp, DuPont. With petroleum prices hovering near the $50 mark, that's potentially exciting, and potentially profitable news.

Wald appears to be the first on the Web with the story. As I write this, PolyFuel has yet to update its web site with a press release of the announcement. When PolyFuel does publish a press release, it will be interesting to see how much of Wald's story is the result of original reporting, and how much of the material came from PolyFuel.

Don't get me wrong - I mean to cast no aspersions on the fine work of Mr. Wald or the Times, even in this era of intense media critique as bloggers relentlessly pound the mainstream media for perceived errors in covering the Presidential campaign (among many other faults and shortcomings.)

At the same time, after 20 years covering Silicon Valley high tech business news, I won't be surprised to find more than a few similarities between the PolyFuel press release and the Times story. When I used to report daily Silicon Valley news for business magazines in Europe, Japan, and Australia, I was always surprised to see how many industry analyst quotes, market research figures, and company "talking points" managed to migrate from the company press release to the story as published in top-tier publications.

It's also interesting to note that Forbes published an article by Lisa DiCarlo just a couple of weeks ago, on September 20, Putting New Life In Batteries, that quoted PolyFuel CEO, Jim Balcom on the growing demand for better power sources.

But, Wald and theTimes got the "scoop" on this one.

UPDATE, October 5: PolyFuel posted a press release at its web site sometime after the Times story appeared yesterday evening.

08:15 PM | Comments (0)

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