Alexis Madrigal : The Atlantic

Know Your Internet: What Is Pinterest and Why Should I Care?

2012-02-09T14:16:53-05:00

On the cold, crowded beach that is the Internet, another monster wave has been spotted on the horizon. This wave is called Pinterest and it looks like it could be -- or already is -- the Next Big Thing in social media. This week, Techcrunch blared, "Pinterest Reaches 10 Million U.S. Monthly Uniques Faster Than Any Standalone Site Ever," based on Comscore data. Last week, a study was making the rounds that claimed to show that Pinterest was driving more referral traffic than Google+.

We're getting to that point with Pinterest where (in tech circles at least) it feels awkward to ask what it is even if you're not exactly sure. This is your quick guide to the site.

What is Pinterest?

Pinterest is a social network currently in a loose invitation-only beta. It fits into the category of "visual bookmarking." Like Tumblr (or Ye Olde Delicious), the service uses a browser bookmarklet, which makes it easy to post things from around the Interwebs. Pinterest's user gimmick/interface is that it lets you "pin" any photo from the Internet to a "board" on its site.

Why should I care about Pinterest?

Pinterest has broken out of the pack of new social networks to become a formidable source of traffic, particularly to retail sites. It has a very slick user interface and strong revenue model. And the site has a fascinating demographic breakdown: it's strongest among young women in the center of the country.

How does Pinterest work?

The genius of the UI is that when you hit the "Pin It" button, it pulls out all the images on the page you're visiting, allowing you to select just the right one. Using individual photos instead of the whole URLs means that Pinterest's boards end up slick and aesthetically appealing. Below, you will find a typical board, in this case, my homage to the French Press cozy, an accessory so bourgeois that it is battling the French aristocracy to enshrine capitalism at the heart of society. Also, they keep expensive coffee delightfully warm!

On Pinterest, anyone can "repin" one of my photos to one of their own boards. This is similar to the Tumblr reblog or Twitter retweet both in that it makes content virally contagious AND that it serves as a system-wide metric for what's hot. The most repinned things go to the site-wide Pinterest topic pages, which drives a lot of traffic to the original pinners of those photos.

What do people post on Pinterest?

Pinterest isn't like Reddit, which is a mix of news and community-created weird stuff. People rarely post content created by the media at all. Instead, people post links to retail sites. They curate vast selections of goods that they want to think about purchasing. I've found it's actually ridiculously helpful for planning wedding "details" because you can quickly accumulate a bunch of examples of things of a type.

But just so you can get the flavor of the place, here are the hottest five things on the site:

1) A photographic triptych of couples holding hands. One photo shows kids, the other mid-20s hipsters, and the last old people. Marry bee posted the image in the "Dreams and Wishes" category.
2) Roasted banana cupcakes with mascarpone cream cheese frosting. OMG, cupcakes! No, seriously. Jessie Partridge pinned the image to the "Eat your cake too" board.
3) A fancy light from Ochre.net. It's a pretty hanging lamp posted by Rachel Mueller onto her "house ideas" board.
4) A nice sea foam green bathroom. Dawn Richmond posted this onto her board, "Bath Inspiration."
5) More cupcakes. Courtesy of Bentley Hulshof.

Who uses Pinterest?

This may be the most interesting thing about Pinterest. Though hard data is difficult to find, it appears to be dominated by younger women. My strolls through the site's content have found the ratio to be at least 5:1, which Google Ad Planner data seems to support. In particular, Pinterest appears to be especially strong among women 18-34 living in households with incomes between $25,000 and $75,000 per year. This makes Pinterest a reverse image of the coastal, male-dominated social networks like Reddit.

Who runs Pinterest?

Pinterest was co-founded by Ben Silberman, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp, who are press shy and relatively unknown. They now have financial backing from a bunch of Silicon Valley types and are headquartered in Palo Alto, California. Their latest round of venture financing came to $27 million and was led by heavy-hitters Andreessen Horowitz.

How does Pinterest make money?

Here's another interesting aspect of Pinterest's game. Unlike other social networks, which waited years to monetize through advertising, Pinterest has taken a different route. They're monetizing already by taking a cut on sales that pins on their site help generate. They partnered with a firm called SkimLinks, which automatically scans through every link posted on the site to see if it goes to a retail site with an affiliate program. If it finds that kind of link, it secretly adds an affiliate code that ensures Pinterest will make some cash from sales that derive from that link. It's a clever game, particularly given the site's users' retail focus, but Pinterest probably should have disclosed the practice more openly.

Also: with a site full of people who are dedicating their time to posting links to retail sites, we're sure Pinterest is going to find a wealth of ways to make money.

The Steve Jobs 'Reality Distortion Field' Even Makes It Into His FBI File

2012-02-09T11:30:42-05:00

The late Apple leader's 1991 FBI file is now part of the public record.

When Steve Jobs was up for an appointment to the President's Export Council in 1991, the Federal Bureau of Investigation did what it does for all such appointments and went looking for dirt.

They want to know if you'll sell out the government, if given the opportunity. So they ask a lot of questions about the life and values of a prospective appointee.

The FBI conducts these background checks by going around and interviewing people who one has associated with. Did Steve Jobs live beyond his means? Has he done drugs or alcohol?
Did he have any deep, dark secrets?

What people say goes into a file, and Steve Jobs's (heavily redacted) file has just been released by the FBI. Cruising through its 191 pages, we find most of the biographical detail that we've come to expect. Jobs comes across as a reputable guy, but it's clear that if you did business with him, he would cut you.

One thing that stood out to me is that Jobs' so-called "reality distortion field" makes an appearance in the file. Steve Jobs ability to bend his teams to his chosen reality has been noted as far back as 1981, when Bud Tribble coined the phrase. In more recent years, the term was used to describe the way Jobs seemed able to effortlessly gin up attention and excitement about Apple's products. And now we know it will forever enshrined in the government's official repository of knowledge about the man.

What Was Steve Jobs's High School GPA? Not 4.0, or Even 3.0

2012-02-09T10:54:53-05:00

On the standard 4.0 scale, Steve Jobs, master of the universe, got a 2.65 at Homestead High School from 1968 to 1972. For those who've forgotten the number-to-letter conversions, that means he got mostly Bs and Cs.

He earned this record while palling around with Steve Wozniak and other local nerds at the Homebrew Computer Club and working at Hewlett Packard.

This little tidbit is courtesy of Jobs' newly released FBI file, which was compiled in 1991 when the then-NeXT Computer chief "was considered for an appointed position on the U.S. President's Export Council." (If you'd like to verify the number yourself, it's on page 79 of the PDF.)

When we talk about the wonder of the United States' entrepreneurial system, I don't think we usually mean that we let kids who receive bad grades get ahead in the world. But perhaps the abilities it takes to get a perfect high school record do not perfectly overlap with the skillls it takes to build a $450 billion company. Or maybe it was just all luck.

Some People (i.e. Leonard Cohen Fans) Still Buy CDs, Even Online

2012-02-08T13:44:52-05:00

As a tech writer, it is a good thing to remind myself that my habits are alien to most people in America. Not only do I pay for all my music, but I do it via the subscription service, Rdio, not Spotify or Pandora, or I get vinyl.

Meanwhile, out in America, there are people buying CDs. Even when these people go on to the Internet to buy music, they order the CDs and have them delivered. Billboard's latest numbers provide a perfect snapshot of the wide gulf in music purchasing behavior between (presumably) young and old. Fans of Lana Del Rey, whose album debuted at #2, one notch above Leonard Cohen's first studio album in eight years, bought downloadable music or a CD in a store. Cohen's fans were spread across brick-and-mortar retailers, downloads, and Internet CD sales.

Thirty-five percent of Cohen's new album's sales came from physical albums sold via Internet retailers. To compare, only 1% of Del Rey's first-week physical CD sales came from Internet sellers. On the other hand, 74% of Del Rey's sales were downloads, while digital sales represented 30% for Cohen.

I can understand brick-and-mortar purchases; I love a good music store as much as the next nerd. I can understand buying music for download: it's nearly instantaneous and usually a bit cheaper. But that last group, the big green slice of Leonard Cohen's pie. I do not understand them at all. Perhaps they are audiophiles who value the tiny difference between CD-quality and near-CD quality. Or perhaps they have dial-up modems that make downloading music difficult.

Whoever they might be, their consumption preference reminds us to think about the technologies that people actually use, rather than the ones they might use at some point in the future.

Cryppies, Day Ladies, and Whiffling: The Just-Declassified Lingo of the NSA

2012-02-06T16:31:40-05:00

A newly public document provides a fascinating peek into the lives and gibes of the National Security Agency's cryptographers.

Every industry has its jargon. I'm sure yours does. In journalism, we call headlines "heds" and the little teaser sentence after that a "dek." No one knows why we misspell these things, and yet we do because this is our house and everyone must know the rules!

However, if you work for the National Security Agency, particularly in the realm of codemaking and codebreaking, your lingo is of more interest to the public than journalism's orthographic idiosyncrasies. And thanks to a recently declassified document that National Journal's Marc Ambinder dug up, we can now peer in at the secretive agency through the jargon used at Sigint City.

Following is a selection of definitions you can find in the full document, which was cheekily compiled by David Hatch, chief of the Operational History Division of the Center for Cryptologic History. Though, to be honest, we already whiffled the list to find you the good stuff.

Burn: to reproduce xerographically; a burn machine was an early office reproduction machine.
Consumer (aka Customer): those who receive NSA reports through regular distribution channels. This is an attempt to introduce terminology from business and commerce into the intelligence community.
Cryppie: shortened form of "cryptanalyst"; used (and taken) by some as affectionate, by others as derogatory -- listen carefully for the tone of voice and check to see if the speaker is smiling or not.
Day Lady: a mildly pejorative term used by workers on evening or overnight shifts to describe a person of either sex who works only "normal business hours"; often characterized by a compulsive concern for wearing a necktie or avoiding jeans.
Desk Rats: that's OK, you know who you are.
Diddy Bopping: copying manual Morse transmissions.
Flag Carriers: Agency senior executives, so named because the backdrop for their badge photographs includes an American flag.
Fort Fumble: a not altogether affectionate designation for Fort Meade and the NSA headquarters by those stationed elsewhere.
Ghost: to float among offices while awaiting a permanent position.
Hammered: describes text with a significant number of garbles, misprints, or omissions that render it unreadable or call into question its validity.
Hours of Boredom/Moments of Terror: an unofficial slogan used to describe duty in NSOC or other watch offices.
Knobbing: the act of searching for target communications by twisting a dial manually on intercent equipment.
Korling: acronym for "Korean lingust," an occupational specialty. It would look less like a Scottish sport or Canadian beer if spelled with a hyphen.
Mom's: a nickname for the cafeteria, possibly derisive.
Sigint City: a term that came into some currency at the end of the 1980s to refer to the complex of NSA buildings on Ft. Meade, a reflection of the number of facilities and the wide area over which they were spread. While catchy in itself, the term inappropriately slights other important aspects of the NSA mission, for example, information security.
Slip and Slide: to idle or waste time.
U Street U: nickname for the Agency training school overflow building located on U Street in the District of Columbia during the 1950s. In itself, this is a diminutive for the slightly disparaging nickname "U Street University."
Whiffle: to read rapidly through a stack of traffic to cull out usable items; this term is becoming obsolete as computerization reduces the amount of printed traffic routinely delivered to analysts.

Via Marc Ambinder

Image: Oliver Hulland/The Atlantic.

Earth Station: The Afterlife of Technology at the End of the World

2012-02-06T02:10:56-05:00

The Jamesburg Earth Station is a massive satellite receiver in a remote valley in California. It played a central role in satellite communications for three decades, but had been forgotten until the current owner put it up for sale, promoting it as a great place to spend the apocalypse. It stands feet from a trailer park and down the road from a Buddhist retreat. This is the story of one of the old, weird ties between Earth and space.

Let me tell you about Jensen Camp. The 30 homes of the trailer park house about 100 people in a variety of ramshackle arrangements. By most accounts, drugs and alcohol are a problem, but many who live there are simply independent souls without much money. The water at the camp has too much fluoride, so people's teeth fall out and kids' bones break and don't heal. Everyone -- tenants, landlord, county officials -- knew about the problem, but no one did anything about it until a pastor at a Monterey megachurch bought the place in 2008. People bought bottled water when they could, but drank from the tap when they had to. A few miles up the road is the Zen monastery of Tassajara, where a sign has to remind visitors, "Life is transient." Jensen Camp is a few miles from Carmel-by-the-Sea, one of those California coastal towns where the average home price is over $900,000.

Jensen Camp may be "wracked with drug and alcohol problems, domestic abuse and unsafe living conditions," but it is more than its problems. A chef named Mike Jones set up shop next to the Cachagua General Store and has kept a blog about the Camp's characters and his organic catering business since 2005. His stories are full of food and family, guns and drugs, drinking and fighting, helping out and being helped.

The Cachagua Valley is wild and beautiful, lichen hanging off trees and wild turkeys running around doing whatever they do. Even radio signals have a hard time penetrating the valley, which is one reason that, less than a quarter mile from Jensen Camp, the Communications Satellite Corporation and AT&T built the Jamesburg Earth Station. The Earth Station is a massive dish-shaped receiver that was used to communicate with satellites perched over the Pacific Ocean for more than three decades.

It was thanks to Jamesburg that people saw the Apollo 11 moon landing and Richard Nixon's trip to China, Vietnam War reporting and the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, not to mention tens of thousands of more ordinary events. A Chinese delegation sent by the first prime minister of China even visited Jamesburg, a milestone in helping connect the world's most populous country into the global communications grid.

When we talk about the space program, we think about rockets and command modules and astronauts and blinking satellites in the night sky. But every piece of hardware in orbit required far more infrastructure down on the ground. Satellites, for example, were simple. Their only job was to stay put in space and bounce signals from one place to another; the real magic of satellite communications occurred on the ground in the detection, decoding, and transmission of those electronic signals from space.

Yet while every NASA scrap and tin can is prized by collectors and archived in museums, the history of people like John P. Scroggs, the manager of the Jamesburg Earth Station manager, is almost unknown and on the verge of being lost for good.

In fact, aside from a few references in old newspapers and a stack of photos buried in the archives at Johns Hopkins University, the only person who possessed interesting stuff from Jamesburg's glory days is Eric Lancaster, who I met underneath the canopy of the oak trees outside the Cachagua General Store. He'd told me that he had "some real documentation of Apollo trips. Notes, signatures, serious dated stuff." Lancaster hinted that the documents might be very valuable, and they were certainly the kind of thing I was looking for. He hadn't scanned anything and didn't use the Internet, so we arranged a meeting and my fiancee and I drove to Cachagua.

Lancaster wore a black leather coat and a white shirt unbuttoned to below his chest. He seemed nervous as he rose to shake hands with me. Next to a small backpack, on top of a plastic chair, there was a stack of mildewed manila folders held together by rusting metal clips.

"I was thinking that we might be able to make a few bucks, maybe even sell these to you guys," Lancaster said.

I knew I wasn't going to buy them, but I wanted to see what was inside anyway.

* * *

Neil Armstrong reflected in Buzz Aldrin's spacesuit helmet.

The first trip to the moon is known as a technological triumph, and rightly so. Traveling 238,000 miles, landing on another celestial body, and returning to the Earth is no small feat. But the Apollo 11 mission might have been the single most successful media event in history. Not only did Neil Armstrong say, "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," but people across the globe saw him do so live. In the moments before Armstrong actually stepped on the moon, the chatter between Buzz Aldrin and Earth was not only about the moon, but about lunar media production.

"You've got a good picture, huh?" Aldrin asked as Armstrong began to descend down the ladder. "There's a great deal of contrast in it, and currently, it's upside-down on our monitor, but we can make out a fair amount of detail," Bruce McCandless confirmed from NASA's command post in Houston, before dishing out the correct aperture settings for the camera to help the astronaut out. "Okay," Aldrin replied, and Armstrong got to the foot of the ladder.

It was at this moment that something unexpected happened. Apollo 11's transmission was being captured by multiple tracking stations simultaneously. Goldstone in the Mojave Desert had been expected to capture the broadcast and send it on to Houston and the rest of the world. But the best picture was actually coming from a tracking station in Australia called Honeysuckle Creek via the Moree Earth Station on that continent. So seconds before Armstrong touched the moon's surface, NASA made an on-the-fly switch to the Australian feed, which sent the broadcast up to a satellite and down to the earth station at Jamesburg, across the street from the Cachagua General Store, which at the time was also a saloon. A local character, Grandma DeeDee, told a Monterey County Weekly reporter that in the 60s, locals would "ride horses in the bar and shoot pistols at the bartender's feet." Another local, ne'er-do-well Grant Risdon, echoed the hijinx at the bar, fondly recalling a time "when the cops were afraid to come out here, because their radios didn't work on this side of the mountain. It was the last stand for the outlaws."

When the Christian Science Monitor visited the station the day before the Apollo 11 broadcast, the reporter and his photographer would have passed the store on their right, and then hung a left less than a quarter of a mile down the road into the Earth Station. "It has taken man thousands of years to reach the Moon, but it takes less than 20 seconds for a picture from the Moon to be distributed to millions of television viewers on earth," the story concluded.

Earth Station Jamesburg is the principal earth facility that has permitted a worldwide audience to participate in history in the making

So it was that the most glorious moment of the space program and most momentous television broadcast ever, then, ended up routing through this corner of central California. Countless other satellites broadcasts from Asia would soon, too. Science writer Lee Dye summarized Jamesburg's role in a 1972 feature for the Los Angeles Times. "Earth Station Jamesburg is the principal earth facility that has permitted a worldwide audience to participate in history in the making," Dye wrote.

The Jamesburg Earth Station was co-owned by the Communications Satellite Corporation (Comsat) and AT&T. Dozens of similar ones were built in other countries around the world to communicate with newly launched satellites. The earth stations were part of the system initiated by John F. Kennedy, which created the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization. Intelsat, as it was known, was co-owned by more than 80 nations, though basically controlled by the United States and its Cold War allies.

Although NASA launched the satellites, Intelsat paid for them, passing the costs on to the national corporations (like Comsat) that controlled the earth stations and finally on to the customers who wanted to use the satellite links.

In the early 1970s, 98 percent of the traffic on the system was telephone conversations; the earth station could handle 5,000 simultaneous conversations and 12 television hookups. The faintness of the signal from the satellite meant that it had be amplified a lot. That, in turn, meant that Jamesburg needed a massive HVAC system to keep the satellite receiver at the ridiculously low temperature of -450 degrees Fahrenheit, just nine degrees away from absolute zero. "If the temperatures were not kept low," Dye explained, "molecular activity would be so great that it would compete with the weak signal."

Satellite communication was a triumph of 20th-century progress. It is the connection point of the glorious space exploration of NASA and the important but less dramatic telecommunications research at places like AT&T's Bell Labs. When Dye was writing, both of those tremendous projects were bundled together into the 90-foot dish in the valley that was the last stand for outlaws. "The system is so complex and so futuristic that it boggles the mind, but nowhere is that more apparent than here in the Cachagua Valley," Dye wrote. And he was only talking about the technology.

A schematic of how the Apollo broadcasts could reach viewers on Earth. Jamesburg is visible.

* * *

In the early 1970s, 26 people worked in the 20,000-square foot main building at the Jamesburg Earth Station. By the time I visited the place, it was empty except for its owner, Jeffrey Bullis. Though he bought the Jamesburg Earth Station, Bullis did not intend to use it as a communications facility. He already had a business to run, a contract electronics manufacturing firm in San Jose that had made him a considerable amount of money. Before that, he'd worked for the Otis Elevator Company, been a welder, a fleet manager, and a heavy equipment operator. This was his place to relax. "I just bought it for the land really," Bullis said. "It was that kind of thing."

The plan had been to build the Earth Station into a wild house for Bullis and his family, especially his son Adam, who loved to box and play guitar, ride ATVs and shoot guns. He seemed at home in the valley and liked to spend time up there. They went so far as to get an architect to draw up plans to redo the whole thing, busting through some of the walls and dropping a big fireplace right in the middle of the old operations room.

But then Adam was diagnosed with cancer, and succumbed to it in August of 2007. He was 23. Suddenly, Jamesburg was not a happy place for Jeffrey Bullis. Since then, he has been pondering selling it; he finally put it on the market last month. He's asking $3 million for all 160 acres of land and the earth station. A local TV station picked up the story and soon every nerdy corner of the Internet was talking about it. For the first time since the 1970s, Jamesburg was famous! I searched the Internet for more information. But almost everything that you can find on the Internet about Jamesburg was created in the last six weeks in the flurry of attention that the TV news report generated.

I wanted to tell the story of what this place actually was, so I called up Bullis and we met at Jamesburg on a Saturday morning.

There was a small, unassuming sign at the entrance to the property and a gate that looked like it had been left unlocked for us. We drove through it under the eye of a video surveillance camera. Bullis was waiting for us at the small caretaker's house at the bottom of the property. We all shook hands.

You think, "This place was designed for the post-apocalypse." Because it was.

Tall and solidly built, Bullis looked like the cross between Idaho-born kid and electronics millionaire that he is. He's got big hands and wore a fleece with southwestern-patterned epaulettes. When I hopped into his car for the brief ride up the road to the satellite receiver, I instinctively reached for my seat belt. "You're not putting that on," he informed me. No, men do not wear seatbelts on the playground that Bullis purchased from AT&T in 2003.

We drove past some scattered cattle, just a few head that keep the grass down, then curved up a hill. I took stock of what I knew about the Earth Station building. It is 20,000-plus square feet. The dish is ninety feet across and housed in a building several stories tall. There is a massive HVAC system, backup batteries, and room for generators. If the satellite was put back in working order, it could receive communications from all over the place. Fourteen T-1 lines run into the place. The walls are two-feet thick solid concrete. Add in the bucolic setting, the cows and orchard and river and you think, "This place was designed for the post-apocalypse." Because it was.

Security, in these not-quite end times, was mostly incidental. "We shoot our guns off often enough to where people don't want to come up here," Bullis told me.

And suddenly, there it was, gleaming white against the sky and earth. It cast a long shadow, just like it does on Google Earth. Nothing about the shape or nature of the satellite receiver would surprise anyone who has seen a DirecTV dish. But the scale, the size. It's inhuman. I ran around it and up the metal stairs, looking out at the valley, thinking about the people who'd stood there before, and how they thought they were doing their part for the free world and science and progress. In the photos my fiancee took of me at its base, I was almost too small to see.

Jamesburg Earth Station.

The rest of the Earth Station seemed low-slung in comparison to the massive dish, but it is not. The ceilings must have been 20 feet high. Bullis led us in with the exhortation, "Grab a flashlight." He kept the lights and heat off to avoid astronomical energy bills. The first things I saw were the lockers of the men who once worked there. They were empty, but I ran my flashlight inside them anyway, thinking I'd find some traces of the workers. Nothing.

We walked down a corridor. My flashlight illuminated racks of lead batteries to our left. Then, the lights powered on with a sound I'd only heard in empty gymnasiums -- ka-chunk, and a hum. Fluorescents shone above us, revealing the spareness of the space.

Bullis led us into the old breakroom. On the wall was a huge map that plotted the various satellite-earth station connections with push pins and yarn. Blue yarn for the Pacific Routes, yellow for the Atlantic information trade, green atop the Indian ocean. The rest of the room could have been found in any office park in America.

The old map in the breakroom at Jamesburg.

Our next stop was the main operations room, which was as big as a roller-skating rink. When Bullis bought it, the room had been "filled with rack after rack after rack of electronics. Of course it was all obsolete when I bought it."

Now, the room is nearly empty save for a pool table on a dirty patch of carpet, and a podium that looks perfect for giving a military briefing. Cords dangle from the ceiling. Against the wall, a large whiteboard with beautiful mid-century lettering says, "JAMESBURG OPERATIONS STATUS." Nothing is written on the board except for a few inscrutable acronyms and the date, April 2003. Behind the podium, a poster with a waving American flag on it reads, "United We Stand." A chalkboard next to it features a drawing of Beavis from Beavis and Butthead as well as the score of a long forgotten darts game. Our voices echo on my recording.

The now-empty operations room.

"The kids come in here and roller blade and have all kinds of fun," Bullis said, stooping to pick up a cigarette dropped by a careless pool player. We pass by an exercise room with weights and multiple cardio machines. "Like I said, my son used to work out here all the time."

A few offices were converted into bedrooms, but the rest of the building is one huge, empty room after another. Another housed all the old landline telephone equipment. "We converted it into a shooting range, as you can see," Bullis said, gesturing towards a target in front of some hay bales down at the end of the room. A basketball hoop hung to its left.

Passing through, we reached the famous system for chilling the satellite receiver, enabling broadcasts from the moon. It powered up with a sound like a spaceship. The chillers still worked, as did an ancient laptop that the last AT&T employee left behind. It was running DOS.

Finally, we reached a room filled with filing cabinets. The historian in me lit up. Here we'd find records of how the place ran. I imagined schedules with employees' names and rosters with amounts of food and fuel consumed. There'd be lists of broadcasts that ran through the station and photographs of important events, diaries even. Coffee rings would show that humans once labored here, proudly. I would find all the little details to transport me back to the time when this place was part of our national project, and maybe in the smell of the carbon paper and the blue ink of the signatures, I could sense what that time was like.

"What's in there?" I asked Bullis, pointing to the cabinets.

"Old stuff," he said, and he was right.

I started pulling open cabinets and digging through files. But the more I looked, the more I realized that I was looking through manuals for long-lost electronics, directories of parts suppliers, and schematics of the building. Much as I wanted them to exist, there were no people in these documents. The stories had been leached out.

The control room for the satellite receiver itself.

Bullis drove us back down to the caretaker's house at the bottom of the property. That's where he stays most of the time now. I asked to use the bathroom in the house, and as I came back out, I saw a photo of his son on a small wooden table by the front door. When I shook his hand to say goodbye, I said, "I'm sorry about your son." He said, "Life goes on."

All told, while Bullis has owned the station, twenty-six dumpsters worth of stuff have been pulled out of the Jamesburg Earth Station and sent to a recycler. A local guy named Eric Lancaster was hired to do the demolition.

* * *

After our trip through the station itself, I realized I wanted to talk to someone who knew the Earth Station when it was up and running. The Internet, I already knew, returned nothing for this search. The only place where I thought I'd find someone who knew something was the General Store. We made the fifteen-second drive from Bullis' place, pulled into the parking lot, and went inside. I found a woman named Liz behind the counter of the small, surprisingly well-stocked store.

Liz is a mountain person. When I asked for her last name she said, "You don't need my last name," but not in an unfriendly way. Probably in her early 50s, she is strong and spry, country like an oak tree. We started talking and I said something about how strange it was that this tiny little place at the end of the world had been a major node in the global telecommunications grid.

She thought about it for a minute and then told me a remarkable story about her relationship with technology during the last 40 years living up the mountain a bit east of where we stood. She did not exactly answer my question, but made a point nonetheless.

"I pretty much stayed on the mountain. There are no phone lines. There is no electricity," she said. "I have my iPhone and I can get 3G and I can get what I want and I have a little solar panel and propane and candles. I've been off the grid forever. Now, I have the small solar panel and I can turn on the light and charge my cell phone. I'm not used to it. My daughter tells me, 'You can plug things in!' And I say, 'I don't have anything to plug in.' Blow out the lights, not turn out the lights, is my thing."

Her boss, the chef Michael Jones, filled in the rest of Liz's story on his blog (punctuation all his). "Liz lives in a trailer on the mountain with no power and no water...two horses, a goat and two dogs. Cats don't count. She carries water in plastic buckets to the critters....and to her own self," he wrote. "She pays child support to a scumbag in Missouri or one of those other M states or square states.....Her daughter that I know is an honor student at Davis.......Because she has no power or water, Liz hangs with us after working her 10 hr shift at The Store. We are her TV."

There are no phone lines. There is no electricity. I have my iPhone and I can get 3G and I can get what I want and I have a little solar panel and propane and candles. I've been off the grid forever.

And for this couple of minutes, I was her TV and she was mine. Did she know anyone who worked at the Jamesburg Earth Station? "I knew a couple of the people who worked there for a long time, and then some of them have passed away," she responded. "Gosh and some of them are retired and moved away. It was a good job to have if you were out here because it was close to home."

How'd she end up living with no power? She and her man were nomads, living out of their cars and taking in the natural beauty of the place. People heard about them and kept asking them to take care of different properties. So they did, and then she did it alone.

I could have talked a long time, but I didn't want to overstay my welcome. She said I should leave a note about my story, seeing as most people who live around there pass through the store and sit out on the porch chatting. She gave me a lined card and a pen and a push pin and we said goodbye. Before I left, I saw that there were coffee mugs with 'Jamesburg Earth Station' written on them. I tried to buy one from her, but instead, she gave it to me.

The Cachagua General Store on the day I met Liz.

A few days later, I got a message on my voicemail.

"Hi, my name is Eric Lancaster. I found your note down at the General Store in Cachagua. I have some real documentation of Apollo trips, notes, signatures, serious dated stuff. I worked up there and I have some stuff that I kept. I have photos ... Apollo 15, Apollo 16, Apollo 14 trips. Like straight notes from NASA, original stuff. Call me back."

He gave his phone number with the last seven digits, then the area code. He concluded, "I'm serious. I'm not fooling around. It's the real deal stuff dating back all the way to '71 with lots of information. Call me back."

Lancaster sounded so young in his message. I'd been expecting an old man. How could he have worked at Jamesburg with a voice so young? I called him back.

Turned out that Lancaster had spent his whole life around Cachagua. As a kid, he had heard the dish moving to keep fixed on its satellite. "We used to climb up on it," he said. "We used to feel it move." Some people at Jensen Camp thought that the satellite was nefarious. "One guy thought it caused him not to be able to sleep in his house, so he put metal siding on," he said. "But it's the water out here [that] affects the people, not the satellite."

What I wondered was why -- out of all the stuff that had gone in those dumpsters -- he'd decided to keep these few pieces of paper.

It felt like some illicit deal, this meeting out in the middle of nowhere, as if we were being handed some documents we were going to pass off to the Russians before fleeing to Czechoslovakia.

"They are neat. I thought, 'I better keep those.' There are communications between here and NASA," Lancaster told me. "I have photos of when the Republic of China came over here to visit in 1971. It talked about them staying at the Holiday Inn." Lancaster thought they might be important. "There might be stuff in there that's not supposed to get out to the public," he said.

And so it came to pass that we were standing under the huge oak trees staring at four mildewed folders sitting on a plastic chair right before that eventide moment where the golden yellow light retreats and everything goes gray. I had my camera with me and was hoping to photograph whatever was in the folders, so I was anxiously watching the color bleed from the world.

There Lancaster and his girlfriend were, facing my fiancee and me, and they had just asked us to buy the documents and suddenly it felt like some illicit deal, this meeting out in the middle of nowhere, as if we were being handed some documents we were going to pass off to the Russians before fleeing to Czechoslovakia.

My fiancee, also a journalist, quickly explained that the standard ethics of our profession prevented us from buying anything, but perhaps the story we wrote would end up sparking interest in the documents from potential buyers. I explained that I knew a space memorabilia collector who might be able to help them find a purchaser, too. Interest in Jamesburg might be high on account of all the stories about the place floating around the Internet, I said. They stared at me blankly, perhaps because they were disappointed but also because they did not know that millions of people had read about the very bizarre home for sale not five hundred yards from where we were standing.

Seizing the moment, I said I better take some photos quickly before the light got bad and opened up the first file folder.

* * *

A photograph from Eric Lancaster's collection of images taken at the Jamesburg Earth Station.

Lancaster was right. The files did contain several references to the Holiday Inn down in Monterey. That's where the Chinese Satellite Communications Study Group stayed when they came to visit Jamesburg in July of 1973. They rode around the backcountry in a limousine, followed by John P. Scroggs in a station wagon.

During the day, the Americans showed the Chinese delegation how the earth station operated and at night, everyone had dinner together. They ate fruit salad with honey dressing as well as salmon and abalone. One afternoon, they had a BBQ. They drank Monterey riesling and Coors. The visit, along with the rest of the Chinese delegation's trip, was a key event in the opening up of the Chinese communication system. George Sampson, a former general and VP at COMSAT who coordinated the trip, detailed how it all happened in a 1985 oral history.

It all began with Nixon visiting China in 1972, which is widely considered a landmark in global international relations. The visit was broadcast all over the world and to do so, a Nixon assistant sent Sampson over to set up the technical infrastructure. While he was there, he built a relationship with Chinese technologists and talked up joining Intelsat, the global satellite network. He described how earth stations worked and how they could set up their own to communicate throughout their large country and with the rest of the world. Satellite communication was of sufficient interest to the Chinese that Chou En Lai, the first prime minister of the country, met with Sampson in Washington, DC.

Eventually, the Chinese sent a team over to the US to check things out for themselves, and it was this group, led by the government's top long-distance communications official, Liu Yuan, who arrived in Jamesburg on July 18 and stayed at the Holiday Inn.

The recording of the recording of the Chinese communication specialists' trip to Jamesburg.

The visit, recorded in old eight-by-ten photographs and letters, is sitting in one of the folders on the plastic chair. Included is a letter Sampson sent Scroggs, reminding him, among other things, not to "make any reference to the opposite sex" because "such remarks which might be humorous to us are quite offensive to the Chinese."

The decaying, overexposed photos are beautiful. I have two favorites. In one, a young Chinese man talks into a telephone, presumably with someone in China awaiting his call. The grin on his face looks so genuine: We are seeing someone make a transoceanic call for the first time. Two Americans in picture-perfect period costumes look on with smiling faces.

The other is more meta. It is nominally a photo of the combined group of American and Chinese engineers posing in front of the earth station. But a Chinese photographer stepped into the shot, so it actually records the recording of the event, and the satellite pointing west towards China.

As I frantically took photos of the old pictures, Lancaster's girlfriend read aloud from the Apollo documents that formed the rest of their collection. Most of it consists of testing procedures and operations for the various Apollo missions. These are work documents without much flavor. But among the technical bits, we found a letter that Scroggs sent his staff. It was a letter meant to be saved.

The letter John P. Scroggs sent his workers.

If I had to guess, I'd say Lancaster has the last copy of that "souvenier" left on earth. I would also say that it is pretty much the only human trace of what it was like to work at Jamesburg before it was demoted from our national dreams and the site and the people who worked there became subject to the logic of a market that immune to its sublime project. Before the earth station was mothballed, sold, and gutted, the people who worked there did important things. Scroggs, I later found out, died in 1985 and is buried at the El Carmelo Cemetery in ritzy Pacific Grove.

I finished taking photographs. There wasn't much else to say. Lancaster seemed a bit out of sorts, but also excited that I'd be writing about him. I promised to mail him a printout of the story. I think saving the documents he did and holding on to them for years was a kind of heroism, a tribute to his country. He knew that these documents should not be thrown away, for one reason or another. And if he can convert his act of preservation into a few bucks, more power to him.

Lancaster and his girlfriend packed the files into the backpack and walked back across the road over the creek, the one that often floods this whole area. In years past, when the water got too high, the Jamesburg Earth Station was Jensen's emergency shelter.

* * *

A space colony painting that Gerard O'Neill was particularly fond of.

A few years after the Chinese Satellite Communications Study Group left Jamesburg, counterculture icon Stewart Brand published a piece in CoEvolution Quarterly by physicist and space promoter Gerard O'Neill, which proposed the idea of a self-sustaining space colony.

As O'Neill described it, the space colony would have had been a utopia with nice homes and beautiful flora and fauna. The colonies could be modeled on the most "desirable" places on Earth. "A section of the California coast like Carmel could be easily fit within one of the 'valleys' of a Model III Colony," O'Neill explained. Paintings were even made of what that might look like.

Many of Brand's friends and colleagues derided the idea as an abandonment of the values of the counterculture. But one critique, by solar inventor Steve Baer, was more subtle and more damning. It got at the way O'Neill tried to leave behind the inevitable grit of human life.

The project is spoken of as if it were as direct as... flinging people into space. But I know that instead it consists of order-forms, typewriters, carpets, offices, and bookkeepers; a frontier for PhD's, technicians and other obedient personnel.
Once on board, in my mind's eye I don't see the landscape of Carmel-by-the-Sea as Gerard O'Neill suggests... Instead, I see acres of air-conditioned Greyhound bus interior, glinting slightly greasy railings, old rivet heads needing paint - I don't hear the surf at Carmel and smell the ocean - I hear piped music and smell chewing gum. I anticipate a continuous vague low-key "airplane fear."

Space travel would not be like Carmel-by-the-Sea, but Cachagua. It would take a lot of Jensen Camps and Jamesburg Earth Stations to make anything as grand as a space colony work. The area above the Earth might be known as the heavens, but there would be no escaping being human. No matter how glorious the triumph, humans have to grind through all of it, scheduling meetings and making coffee, documenting and processing, trimming and forgetting. No technology stands outside society, and no society exists without the people who build it.

In our technological narratives, progress advances like the tide, lifting up everyone and everything. But we rarely look closely to see the unevenness of the diffusion of our inventions. In a poor valley somewhere a few miles from Carmel, a satellite receiver took in pictures from the moon during a time when locals still rode horses to the camp saloon. Technology may move onward and upward, but everything retains its links to the old and weird and human.

Jamesburg Earth Station is now known on the Internet as a "great place for Armageddon" and also appears on my favorite coffee mug. The building and the last remaining documents that testify to its importance are now both for sale. This is what 20th-century dreams look like in the 21st century.

My Jamesburg Earth Station mug.

11 Million Slices: Inside Domino's Super Bowl Pizza War Room

2012-02-03T16:38:44-05:00

Sunday is the biggest day of the year for your team.You drink lots of water and try to mentally prepare yourself for the huge weekend ahead. It's going to be hard, but you've been preparing for this moment since the season began.

You are an information technology specialist at Domino's Pizza, and 30 percent of the 11 million slices of pie your company will sell on Super Bowl Sunday will be ordered online. This is your war room:

The funny thing is that this story is true. Super Bowl Sunday is Domino's biggest day of the year. The Super Bowl is for pizza joints what Valentine's Day is for florists.

Perhaps the best part of this story is the straight-faced tone that Phil Lozen, Domino's Pizza social media specialist, managed to maintain via email while developing a long football metaphor about the IT of pizza:

Our preparation begins well before kickoff - and even before the season begins - in July or August. It culminates in more than 55 members of our Information Systems (IS) "defense" camping out at headquarters to watch and anticipate every move the system makes to ensure flawless execution... Why over 55 people in one room? Each person has an expertise in a different facet of the system:

* Application owners check the initial code of our applications, making up our defensive line.
* Those watching our operating systems are our second line of defense, or "line backers"... who react to every situation on the "field."
* Those observing the network will jump in and "cover" if anything looks dicey on a larger scale, serving as our "cornerbacks."
* In case someone tries a "Hail Mary" play to hack into part of our system, we have our Security team there as our "safeties" - our last line of defense!

Good luck, team! Win one for Herman Cain!

Images: Domino's Pizza.

Here's the Number That Matters in Facebook's IPO Filing

2012-02-02T16:55:59-05:00

To justify the kind of valuation it is seeking, Facebook is going to need to make a lot more money per user.

After waiting for so long to see the numbers inside Facebook's success, it's easy to be overwhelmed by all the new data we have about the social network and company. But there is one number that matters more than all the others:

Revenue per monthly active user: $4.39*

In particular, I want to explain why this number matters so much to you as a user of Facebook, not just for Facebook at a corporate level.

To justify the kind of valuation that Facebook is seeking, the company is going to have to generate a lot more revenue that they currently do. Some of that revenue growth could come from getting more users onto the service. But Facebook has snapped up a lot of the easy users -- that is to say, people with the Internet who live outside of China. User growth will continue outside the western countries for a few more years.

However, even if Facebook gets to 3 billion users, if it doesn't increase its revenue per user, the company will only generate $13 billion in revenue per year, as analyst Trip Chowdry has pointed out. That's not going to justify a market capitalization of $100 billion. Google, for example, generated $38 billion in revenue -- nearly three times Facebook's hypothetical three-billion-user hypothetical -- and has a market cap of $190 billion.

So, if tripling the size of the social network to 3,000,000,000 users is not going to be enough to justify its valuation with its current revenue per user, there is only one strategic direction for Facebook to go. It needs to generate more revenue per user. A lot more.

Facebook's current model is working well, obviously, but how can they double the amount of money they squeeze out of each user? Two things are likely to happen:

1) A lot more advertising. There's just no way around it. Facebook's main products are the eyeballs of the people on the site, which they sell to advertisers in tiny slices. More display advertising will head to Facebook. We'll probably see different types of advertising, too. Remember that Mark Zuckerberg's vision is the "frictionless sharing" of everything, so I expect to see something like the ill-fated "Beacon" plan resurrected. It'll be more subtle this time, but Facebook will get better at showing you products that you and your friends like. You'll be frictionlessly sharing all your tastes with your friends ... and advertisers.

2) More Facebook Payments. Already, Facebook generates 15 percent of its revenue from other companies selling credits to purchase virtual items, primarily in games produced by companies like Zynga. It seems to me that Facebook has to bend a lot more people into using Facebook Payments. If they can manage to become the default payment method for virtual goods purchased across the Internet, they should have no problem meeting the revenue targets they must have to justify their current valuation.

Point to all this being, when Facebook was merely trying to grow its user base, the incentives between Facebook and you, as a user, were pretty tightly coupled. Now, particularly in the United States, user growth is slowing and getting more money for each user is necessary. My guess is that Facebook's need to monetize at higher levels and users' desires will come into conflict more often the higher its revenue per user climbs.

* Bloomberg's Mark Gimein argues that the revenue-per-user number should actually be $5.02 based on Facebook's mid-year 2011 user numbers, which also seems like a fair way to compute this statistic. Either way, as he told me in an email, "the bottom line is still the same."

Image: Reuters.

Quantifying the Golden Age of Television: It Really Was 1950-1970

2012-01-31T14:05:02-05:00

Proof that I Love Lucy really was the pinnacle of filmed entertainment. Except for the The Wire, of course.
Samuel Arbesman has a fascinating post up in which he attempts to quantify the Golden Age of Television. His method was to use how long a show ran as a proxy for its quality, which seems like a decent option. By that metric, as you can see above, the period from 1950 to 1970 produced a remarkable number of long-lived shows. He also notes that there was a brief quality (or popularity) bubble in the last 1990s. That would be due to shows like the West Wing and Friends.

Completely unrelated but fascinating datapoint: 40 million American still see an episode of I Love Lucy each year. The show debuted in 1951.

Will the New Tech of 2012 Prove as Successful as the Tech of 1912?

2012-01-31T13:51:12-05:00

A Wall Street Journal opinion piece offers that the United States is about to undergo a technology-led boom much like the one that followed the deployment of the car, electrification, telephony, stainless steel, and radio amplifier in the early 20th century. By the authors' calculations, Americans are 700 percent wealthier than we were back then and technology is why.

This is an optimistic story, not one of decline, because they believe that three current technologies will have a similar impact as the foundational tech of the last century.

In January 2012, we sit again on the cusp of three grand technological transformations with the potential to rival that of the past century. All find their epicenters in America: big data, smart manufacturing and the wireless revolution.

I'm open to the idea that we are myopic about long-term change and don't pretend to know what the long-term economic health of the United States will be. But nothing they note seems like it could deliver tens of millions of jobs to people who are aligned with the industries created by the tech of 1912.

The era of near-perfect computational design and production will unleash as big a change in how we make things as the agricultural revolution did in how we grew things. And it will be defined by high talent not cheap labor.

So, when agriculture was transformed by mechanization, suddenly all kinds of farmers flooded the cities to take manufacturing jobs. Now those manufacturing jobs will be accomplished without them. So now those masses of people will get work doing ... what, exactly? The practical point of big data and smart manufacturing is often to squeeze ever more efficiency out of ever fewer people.

Sometimes, I look at the last century and I think, the most underrated part of their technologies were that they required lots of people doing bearable stuff for decent money.

Image: Production line. Library of Congress.

DOE Responds to Complaints About Its Commitment to Open Government

2012-01-31T12:42:49-05:00

After a journalist called attention to the difficulty of finding documents about the prospective Yucca Mountain nuclear repository last week, the Department of Energy responded in near-record time. Cammie Croft, director of New Media & Citizen Engagement, addressed the concerns in a reasonable blog post on Energy.gov. She pulled together a specific list of Yucca Mountain documents and explained the general problem that governmental bodies have:

One of the biggest challenges for federal websites - including Energy.gov -- is managing the millions of PDFs the government has online. That challenge existed before our redesign and still exists today. The problem is that unless older PDFs are correctly metatagged with relevant keywords, they may not show up in search results. The Energy.gov of today, however, is much better than what was offered before. And it's getting better every day as we migrate additional documents and Departmental office websites to the new platform. Within a couple days of the concern being raised, we were able to quickly elevate additional Yucca Mountain documents, update their metadata and make them more findable. These documents were always available -- and with improved metadata and a dedicated landing page for context, they are now more search friendly.

While we are incredibly proud of the new Energy.gov platform, there are Energy Department program office websites and subsequent documents that just aren't part of the platform yet. To improve the availability and transparency of our information, we're in the process of migrating the remaining program office content into the system - but this process takes some time.

If you've ever tried to manage a huge amount of content, you will feel some sympathy for the government's position. Managing tons of stuff that wasn't created digitally is a huge problem. Attaching the correct metadata is very difficult and sometimes the OCR doesn't work well for full-text searching. It's rough.

On the other hand, if you've ever tried to find a government document and been unable to, it's easy to find Croft's position unacceptable. It seems like the DOE should have a better system for dealing with the documents with with it has been entrusted.

I have to wonder if there is some way that these two problems could actually cancel each other out. If journalists and other interested parties could systematically identify those documents they want most, the DOE could prioritize their efforts better. Back when I was at Wired, we tried to create something like this with a wiki. It sort of worked, but not really. While it was nominally a crowdsourcing project, I was the primary member of the crowd.

Who knows, maybe a system that combined a subReddit with some librarians and journalists would work?

Facebook's Very First SEC Filing

2012-01-31T11:44:33-05:00

Facebook is widely expected to go public in the very near future with a valuation north of $75 billion. It's a moment that tech watchers have been anticipating for half a decade and will make millionaires out of many, many early Facebook employees.

But let's go back to May of 2005, less than a year after Facebook was initially incorporated. TheFacebook, as it was then called, measured its users in the low millions. Only American college students could be on the network, and they were verified through their college e-mail addresses. TheFacebook had steamrolled first through Harvard, beginning in February of 2004. Here is Zuck's first statement as the proprietor of The Facebook, which he gave to the Harvard Crimson's Alan Tabak, now a lawyer at the high-powered firm, Davis Polk:

"Everyone's been talking a lot about a universal face book within Harvard," Zuckerberg said. "I think it's kind of silly that it would take the University a couple of years to get around to it. I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week."
As of yesterday afternoon, Zuckerberg said over 650 students had registered use thefacebook.com. He said that he anticipated that 900 students would have joined the site by this morning.

After conquering the Crimson, Zuckerberg expanded the operation to a group of Ivy League schools, and then on to the rest of the country's colleges. It was clear big things lay on the horizon for the company, but I'm not sure anyone could have seen quite how big.

It was that spring that 'TheFacebook, Inc' made its first filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The paperwork details a $6,840 investment from a time when only Mark Zuckerberg, Sean Parker, and Dustin Moskovitz had to be listed on the startup-friendly Rule 506 Form D. Zuckerberg appears to have used is personal phone number for the filing, a New York 914 number rather than the Palo Alto landline used after August of 2005. The legal fees associated with the filing were a mere $50. And it's signed by the very hand of Zuckerberg.

In the next filing (dated a week later) things get really interesting. We see the $12.7 million investment that came in from Accel Partners. Peter Thiel's name also shows up on the SEC filing as a director and beneficial owner of the company. Still, I find the first filing the most compelling. If Facebook is now the 800-pound gorilla of the social space, this is that monster's birth certificate.

Image: Reuters. Mark Zuckerberg in 2007. (How young does he look?!)

QR Codes Are the Roller-Skating Horses of Advertising

2012-01-27T13:36:56-05:00

QR codes are an intermediate technology at best, a novelty at worst.

This is a picture of a roller-skating horse named Jimmy. I think he is a great analogy to explain why QR codes, those little black-and-white squares in magazines that you're supposed to use as a paper hyperlink, continue to proliferate. Let me explain.

First, the facts. A QR code is a two-dimensional link. They look like this:

In theory, you stumble across this code on a billboard on a magazine page and you point your smartphone at it. Feeding the picture into a special decoding application transforms the image into a URL to which you are directed. Maybe a movie plays or there is more product information. Conceptually, this is neat. People who are looking at paper but connected to the Internet via their phones can combine the two in one seamless experience.

And so advertisers, mostly rationally, are putting more of these codes into their advertisements. An exhaustive survey of QR code use in the top 100 national magazines found a clear upward trend:

But all this really tells us is that advertisers would love to gather data about people who click QR codes. It tells us precisely nothing about whether anyone is actually clicking -- err, photographing -- them. Comscore released data indicating that "14 million people, or 6.2% of mobile users, scanned QR codes in the month of June." Forrester says that about 5 percent of Americans use QR codes. And there is widespread confusion about how precisely these things are supposed to work, despite years of marketers telling us about them, even among tech-friendly groups like college students.

These low adoption rates might be explained by the user-interaction problems that eCommerce-consultant Roman Zenner highlighted in a blog post earlier this week:

If you come across such a harbinger of modern mobility, you grab your smartphone, fire up one of the numerous Apps that are meant to decipher this code, hold your camera in the direction of the code like you were actually taking a picture, wait for the autofocus of your mobile camera to get a clear image and if all works well you are being redirected to some website.

If you really wanted to know about a product that you saw in an ad, wouldn't you rather type its name into Google on your phone and see what comes up? Is it really faster and better to use a QR code that will direct you to part of a marketing campaign rather than getting a broader sweep of information by simply using the browser that you already use all the time on your phone? In the instant cost-benefit analysis I do every time I see a QR code, it has yet to make sense for me to fire up the decoder app I have installed on my phone.

QR codes strike me like they strike Zenner, as a bridge or intermediate technology that will ultimately be swamped by a better technological system down the line. Zenner again:

Rather than being the next big thing, QR codes are nothing more than a bridge technology such as the German BTX or the French Minitel in the eighties - before the Internet as we know it today arrived. They are just a means to an end and one of the few peculiarities our children and grandchildren will wonder about: "Grandpa, you must be joking - people took pictures of paper billboards - WTF?"

What will the full-fledged technology look like? Well, there are several possibilities. One is that paper magazines go away, replaced by fully digital magazines. But even if we assume paper magazines live long into the future, image recognition technologies are going to blow by QR codes. Think Google Image Search on steroids. You'll see an ad for the new Mazda, take a photo of the Mazda in the ad, and that will connect you with information about the car. No code reader necessary. Your phone will act as a general-purpose connector between the real and digital worlds, just like it does now with geolocation.

For now, though, we've got QR codes. And it appears we'll continue to have them. Don't be fooled, though: this is a novelty more than anything else. I think print magazine ads work and I think digital campaigns work. But when I look at a QR code, I don't see the future, I see a roller-skating horse. Advertisers deploying QR codes are like people in 1900 wanting transportation to be faster, saying to themselves, "Well, we've got horses and we've got roller skates -- I think we're on to something! It seems gimmicky, but we're innovating." Meanwhile, inventors in garages were building the first janky, bug-ridden automobiles, the Model T just a few years away.

Image: LIFE Magazine. This horse's name really was Jimmy, as Ruth Lester's editor's note details. The photo was taken in Fort Worth and printed May 19, 1952, and "caused no particular sensation."

A Hard Look at What Open Government Means for the Department of Energy

2012-01-27T11:31:36-05:00

Every government agency got on the Internet in a different way. Often times, individuals decided that they'd take their little corner of the world online. Hundreds of different ways of presenting government information to the public sprang up. Sometimes these websites were terrible, but other times, they were wonderful, or at least happened to contain vital documents that could be found nowhere else.

Now, though, government agencies know that they *have* to be online, which means they need A Policy. Not only that, they need a plan to deal with the wild legacy infrastructure that preceded the era of The Policy. Dawn Stover, an energy and environmental journalist, dives into what's happened at the Department of Energy, an agency that's tried to consolidate its many websites into the singular Energy.gov.

In short, documents that were once available online are now locked away. She details how the theoretical efficiency and transparency of the open government initiatives has actually worked against the freedom of information in some key cases. References to Yucca Mountain, the Hanford nuclear site, and the new AP1000 reactor design are all very limited. These are not small issues! We're talking about the still-with-us history of nuclear power as well as its possible future. Here's Stover's take:

The Energy Department's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, which once posted Yucca Mountain project documents on its website, closed in September 2010. All of its documents were transferred to the Office of Legacy Management, where I'm told they can be requested using the Freedom of Information Act process, which usually works something like this: Send a letter, wait a few months, and maybe you'll get a response. Maybe. Not only is that inconvenient, but it's also expensive. Instead of a simple download, I practically have to start a letter-writing campaign in order to get assistance from a paid federal employee. Never mind the fiscal drain on my own time. And all of this, remember, is for a document so rare and precious that it was online in full for years.

The Office of Legacy Management (known as LM) oversees a huge records-management facility in West Virginia that opened in December 2009 and boasts a "state of the art electronic record keeping system." LM even requested a $3 million increase PDF in its 2012 budget just to manage the Yucca Mountain records and information systems. But like Energy.gov, the LM website has no section for Yucca Mountain, and its search engine spits out links to a random assortment of PDFs -- with no summaries or index to provide guidance. Apparently that "state of the art electronic record keeping system" doesn't include any provisions for accessing documents online.

The General Accountability Office warned of these problems last May in a report commissioned by House Republicans, which cautioned that Yucca Mountain documents would no longer be electronically accessible to the public or to scientists after the project shut down. And it's not just Yucca Mountain. Search Energy.gov for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, and you get only 33 results. For Hanford, only 20 results. For the AP1000 reactor, a grand total of six. Documents of all sorts have simply disappeared from public view as a result of website consolidation and reorganization, and this has repercussions not just for the general public and independent researchers but also for federal employees and contractors who use the Energy Department website and are no longer able to refer to historic documents -- such as loan guarantees for nuclear power plants or Environmental Impact Statements for energy projects.

Stover contrasts the DOE's approach with that of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which she says "has comprehensive collections of documents, organized by topic area as well as by facility location." I might suggest that part of the problem with the DOE's open government policy is in the nature of the DOE itself. Unlike the NRC, which has one single purpose, the DOE is a sprawling agency with its hands in everything from nuclear weapons stockpiles to solar cell development and a whole lot of other things in between. It's hard to make one size (or site) fit all that. Almost inevitably, some corners are going to be left unswept.

Of course, there are more cynical readings of the agency's moves, and it seems like frustration has led Stover to one of them. She sees the DOE abandoning real transparency for a false, but socia-media friendly kind of transparency.

Every federal agency brags about its commitment to the Obama administration's goal of open government. Unfortunately, each agency charts its own path toward this goal, with different ideas about what should be made available and how it should be structured. For some departments, "open government" means a serious effort to make information easier to find. For others, it simply means summer interns scanning documents into PDFs with poorly worded tags, posting newsy articles with attractive photos, and opening Twitter and Facebook accounts. Unfortunately, the latter is where many federal energy documents seem to be headed.

Investors Aren't Sure They Know What Google's Doing Either

2012-01-26T14:43:47-05:00

One way to look at several of Google's recent moves, from the standardization of its data privacy policies to the inclusion of social intelligence in its search results, is to chalk them up to the relentless pursuit of profit. This story would suggest that Google is trying to improve its bottom line despite (some) user opposition to its new strategies.

So, one would expect that Wall Street would look at such behavior and say, "Bully to you, Google!" But that's not what's happening. Reuters' Alexei Oreskovic has a nice story out about how investors are as confused as the rest of us about what Google is trying to do.

Some are wondering if Google has a clear strategy for generating revenue and growth out of a plethora of fledgling initiatives, from Android to its Facebook wannabe, Google+, especially since Page and management refuse to offer guidance.
"Right now people are skeptical about those bets paying off," said Walter Price, a portfolio manager at RCM Capital Management, referring to Google's efforts outside its flagship search business.
Google's managers "get on a conference call and they're super enthusiastic about their future, and yet you look at the (stock's) multiple and the way the stock is treated, and people don't share that enthusiasm," said Price, whose firm owns Google shares.

What's interesting is that Google CEO Larry Page has been shutting down a lot of Google's goodwill-generating but revenueless products. "More wood behind fewer arrows," is actually the term they use to describe this process. However, the new strategy hasn't generated better arrow flight. (Is that the right way to extend the metaphor? Or does putting more wood behind fewer arrows generate even more wood rather than longer distance?)

In any case, let's also be real here: Google is sitting on a $45 billion pile of cash thanks to its cash-printing search display ad business. If the company's data collection and social stuff just don't destroy that core business, the company is going to be fine. Because, minor media outcry aside, there are no real signs that people have stopped Googling when they Google something.

The New York Public Library's Animated GIF Maker

2012-01-26T14:03:37-05:00

The animated GIF has been a mainstay of the Internet since web pages could only have gray backgrounds and Creed was a popular band. The way they work is simple: two or more images are superimposed on each other and they switch back and forth on a timed loop. This gives the impression of sputtering animation. For some reason, in those early days, torches like this were very popular:

In any case, the practice of GIF making has changed a lot over the years. Now people like to capture celebrities doing weird things. These loops somehow make almost anything funny, even Cameron Diaz feeding Alex Rodriguez popcorn.

But, a few highbrow exceptions aside, animated GIFs have been part of popular culture, bawdy, funny, grotesque. Now, the New York Public Library has created an animated GIF maker that lets users convert 19th-century stereographs into animated GIFs. This marries a very old form of popular culture with a new form of popular culture to great effect.

Stereographs presented two very similar images side-by-side. You looked at them through a special apparatus (the stereoscope) and it gave you a kind of 3D view of what you were looking at. They were so popular that Oliver Wendell Holmes (the more-famous Supreme Court justice's father) held in this very magazine that they -- not flat, 2D photographs -- were the true future of capturing images.

A stereoscope is an instrument which makes surfaces look solid. All pictures in which perspective and light and shade are properly managed, have more or less of the effect of solidity; but by this instrument that effect is so heightened as to produce an appearance of reality which cheats the senses with its seeming truth.

Because they appeared more solid, they were, therefore, more true.

The other thing you can do with these two side-by-side images is stack them atop one another and flip back and forth between them as in the classic animated GIF. And that is precisely what the new (still beta!) NYPL tool allows you to do.

I will warn you, though. There is something about the way stereographs animate that makes me a little sick to my stomach if I look at them for too long. For that reason, I'm not embedding any here, but you can take a look at a bunch of them at the NYPL site. And then you can try your hand at making one, perhaps of this "famous trotting ostrich," which has been hitched up for a jog around town.

And, of course, this is yet another very cool digital project form the NYPL, which we profiled last year for its innovative efforts online.

Images: 1. The Internet. 2. The Internet. 3. The New York Public Library.

5 Fascinating Comments by Chinese Readers About Apple and Foxconn

2012-01-26T12:56:12-05:00

Chinese observers see the manufacturing labor landscape pretty much the way American businesspeople do, which is to say, cynically.

The New York Times investigative series into Apple's manufacturing practices in China are being published in Chinese as well. In a smart move, the Times decided to translate Chinese reader comments for the consumption of its English-speaking audience. You can read a couple dozen of them here. And here's a selection that I found fascinating:

There are two stories about Apple: one is about its brilliant business performance, and the other is about the blood and sweat behind Apple miracles. I strongly recommend that all Apple fans read this. Corporations should bear social responsibilities, and customers should also understand and be responsible to the society. -- 花甲小猪
Without Apple, Chinese workers will be worse off. I hope China can some day soon have dozens of its own companies like Apple, who (only) work on high-end research and development and send manufacturing lines to Africa. -- Anonymous
Working conditions in smaller factories are even worse (than Foxconn). They have even longer work hours. The major reason is that suppliers are not at the top of the value chain and major brands can easily replace them. Also, workers in China do not have labor unions, and the Chinese government always protects the large companies. -- 自由泳来了
If Foxconn were to abide by the labor law, which is supposed to protect workers and keep them basically to 8 hours a day and 5 days a week, their wages will be lower. If workers establish a formal labor union, lots of workers will be disappointed and return home to rural areas. The production cost of Chinese manufacturers will increase, and those Chinese factories will lose their competitive advantage. Who would be happy if that really happened? -- 野也果酱,
If people saw what kind of life workers lived before they found a job at Foxconn, they would come to an opposite conclusion of this story: that Apple is such a philanthropist. -- Zhengchu1982

What sticks out to me is the openness of the debate over the conflicted relationship between labor and corporate profits. No one thinks that Apple is going to do anything out of a sense of corporate conscience (err, responsibility). At least from the comments that the Times translated, there is no sense that regulations would help anything. Apple's profit margins, here and among (at least some in) China, are seen as sacrosanct, while the health and safety of workers is up for discussion.

Image: Reuters. A protest in Hong Kong during 2011.

Neologism Watch: From Hashtag to Bashtag

2012-01-24T14:50:59-05:00

I think Forbes' excellent privacy blogger, Kashmir Hill, may have coined (or popularized) a new social media term: bashtag. A bashtag is what happens when a company (McDonald's) tries to start a promotional hashtag (#McDStories) and users use it to hate on said company.

I can't quite believe it, but I think this is a first reference for this neologism. That is to say, I can't find anyone using bashtag in quite this way, although that may be more of a failure of Twitter's search functionality than the creativity of the Internet.

In any case, expect to see #bashtag appearing soon in slide decks on social media across the land. It is a very simple way to describe what advertisers don't want to happen.

RIM's New CEO Is a Little Too Excited About His Job

2012-01-24T14:03:13-05:00

Turning around the troubled phone maker won't be easy, but the company's CEO doesn't seem to want us to know that.

RIM, the maker of the Blackberry, has a new CEO. His name is Thorsten Heins and he was the company's COO. Heins replaces co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, who led the company for two decades. The two outgoing executives have come under heavy criticism as the company's share price has fallen almost 90 percent since its 2008 peak. As the smartphone market has exploded over the last few years with the success of Apple's iOS and various phones running Google's Android, RIM has been left in the dust. It has been, after all, almost five years since Apple released the iPhone, and RIM may finally put out a competitive operating system later this year.

So, it was with considerable shock that we watched the video above. Despite that record, Heins fawns over the outgoing CEOs and basically describes RIM as too innovative. We understand that as the new CEO he has to carry some corporate weight, but the level of pandering to the previous administration might be why investors reacted so negatively to Heins' appointment. This video -- and script -- make Heins look plain bad. "Think prom video meets un-coachable corporate droid," as Paul Kedrosky put it.

Here's a transcript of what Heins said in the first couple minutes of the video, but you should really watch for yourself.

I'm absolutely excited. I mean, this is so fantastic and phenomenal to become the CEO, being trusted by Jim, Mike and the board to follow Mike and Jim's *big* footsteps.

I joined this company four years ago and it was growing but comparably it was small in the wireless arena, as a player. We have taken this to total new heights and that journey isn't over yet, right? If we continue doing well what we're doing, I see no problems with us being in the top three players worldwide in the next years in wireless.

At the very core of RIM, at its DNA how I always describe it, is the innovation. We always think ahead. We always think forward. We sometimes think the unthinkable. And that is fantastic. That is the core of every high technology company. We've learned to execute. Yes, we have to get better at execution, but we've learned a lot going from when I joined them in 2007. Never lose this innovation spirit, but once we say a product is defined, we move decisively into execution mode and get the product done in good quality, on time, and also at good cost.

More internally, from a process perspective, we need to get a bit more disciplined in our own processes. We are a great innovative company but sometimes we innovate too much while we are building a product. I want to spend more time prototyping, exploring, and research and development while we are building product on a separate stream.

How Good Are Those Google Plus Numbers Again?

2012-01-23T18:32:51-05:00

The longer tech industry watchers chew over the numbers that Google CEO Larry Page gave on last week's earnings conference call, the worse the aftertaste seems to get. Rocky Agrawal calls attention to the key Page quote about the site's supposed 90 million users:

"Over 60 percent of Google+ users use Google products on a daily basis. Over 80 percent of Google+ users use Google products every week."

Unless we're misinterpeting what 'Google product' is, these numbers are very strange. Remember that Google's products include Google Search, Gmail, and YouTube, so one has to wonder about the 40 percent of Google+ users who don't use a single Google product in a day. One might even conclude that the 20 percent of Google+ users who don't use a Google product in a week are not really "on" the Internet in a way that most users would recognize.

Worse, if these are the numbers that Page chose to use to *bolster* his case that Google+ was succeeding, imagine what the other numbers look like?

The Big Solar Storm Headed Our Way Is Only a Preview of Worse to Come

2012-01-23T15:43:27-05:00

We're getting to that part of the solar cycle during which we should expect to be hit by many solar storms that could endanger our electrical infrastructure.

The biggest solar storm since 2005 is headed our way, according to skywatchers who saw our star let off an M9 flare, just a hair away from the most powerful kind of solar flare. The charged particles hurtling towards Earth are known as a coronal mass ejection, or CME, and we haven't had one this severe since the peak of the last 11-year solar cycle.

The amount of solar activity that can result in big solar storms follows a fairly (but not perfectly) consistent path through time, rising and falling according to mechanisms we don't quite understand. We're just now coming back to the time of peak solar activity, so we could see many more solar storms before we return to the quiet of the trough of the cycle in a few years. If you want to keep track of this stuff, tune in to Spaceweather.com, which obsessively tracks the sun's doings.

To be clear, this storm, while it may cause problems for some satellites and will make for prettier aurorae in the arctic regions near the Earth's magnetic poles, the solar storm only ranks as an S3 on a scale that runs from S1 to S5.

What might happen when we get hit by a much bigger storm? A few years ago, I wrote about a very big storm in 1859 and found that there was so much current in the air that telegraphs could be run without their batteries. It'd be like if the air suddenly started charging your iPhone. Telegraph operators were (rightly) flabbergasted.

"We observed the influence upon the lines at the time of commencing business -- 8 o'clock -- and it continued so strong up to 9 1/2 as to prevent any business from being done, excepting by throwing off the batteries at each end of the line and working by the atmospheric current entirely!" the astonished telegraph operators of Boston wrote in a statement that appeared in The New York Times later that week.

The Boston operator told his Portland, Maine counterpart, "Mine is also disconnected, and we are working with the auroral current. How do you receive my writing?" Portland responded, "Better than with our batteries on," before finally concluding with Yankee pluck, "Very well. Shall I go ahead with business?"

But that was way back at the beginning of the buildout of communications and electrical infrastructure. The damage resulting from a storm like that now would be much, much worse. The National Academies of Science found that if a storm like the 1859 one hit again, it could cause $1 trillion (yes, trillion) in damage.

This month, Gregg Easterbrook dug into some even more exotic possibilities about what the sun could get up to over the coming decades. They range from pretty much nothing to the end of, well, everything.

At least the sun seems unlikely to explode anytime soon. Standard conjecture regarding the inner processes of stars holds that they emit cornucopian amounts of neutrinos, which are subatomic particles. A generation ago, when the first neutrino-detectors were built, they didn't find anything close to the expected number of neutrinos from the sun. This led the late science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who is credited with the concept of the telecommunications satellite, to speculate that Sol was about to explode, and the human experiment to reach an untimely end.

Today, researchers believe that prior assumptions about solar neutrinos were in error. The sun seems fine. It's not about to explode. Probably. We think.

How Climate Change Could Reshape the Internet Ecosystem, Too

2012-01-23T15:25:15-05:00

Melting icecaps may make it possible for cables to run directly from Asia to Europe, bypassing North America.

Normally, when we talk about the new routes through the Arctic that global warming may enable, we're talking about cargo shipping lanes, but a new article in Network World claims that a warming Earth may open up new undersea telecom routes, too. The new undersea cables aren't being driven by a need for more capacity, but rather to reduce latency in the network.

There is also discussion that unprecedented, previously unfeasible, Arctic routes now may be possible, because of melting Arctic icecap. These would allow traffic to flow from Asia directly to Europe, bypassing North American networks completely.

This is yet another way that our climate impacts the landscapes of our world, even the ones that you don't think of, like the geography of Internet traffic.

Via Evgeny Morozov

Image: atlantic-cable.com.

What Apollo 11 Astronauts Did Right Before Neil Armstrong Set Foot on the Moon

2012-01-22T17:23:32-05:00

I've been plowing through some old Apollo materials looking for references to the earth stations that were receiving the satellite transmissions from the crew on the moon. In so doing, I came across this long version of the lead-up to Armstrong's famous quote as he stepped onto the lunar surface. The transcript and video of the moments right before one of the most widely replayed film snippets in history records Buzz Aldrin setting up the shot. He asks NASA for the correct f-stop for the camera while Armstrong tests the lunar regolith. This is the behind-the-scenes footage of one of the more glorious achievements in human history.

Aldrin: You've got a good picture, huh?
Houston: There's a great deal of contrast in it, and currently, it's upside-down on our monitor, but we can make out a fair amount of detail.
Aldrin: Will you verify the position - the opening I ought to have on the camera?
Houston: Stand by.
[Armstrong begins to descend.]
Houston: We can see you coming down the ladder now.
Armstrong: Okay, I just checked getting back up to that first step, Buzz. It's -- not even collapsed too far, but it's adequate to get back up... It takes a pretty good little jump.
Houston: Buzz, this is Houston. F/2 - 1/160th second for shadow photography on the sequence camera.
Aldrin: Okay.
Armstrong: I'm at the foot of the ladder. The [Lunar Module] footpads are only depressed in the surface about 1 or 2 inches, although the surface appears to be very fine grained as you get close to it. It's almost like a powder. Down there, it's very fine. I'm going to step off the [Lunar Module] now. THAT'S ONE SMALL STEP FOR MAN, ONE GIANT LEAP FOR MANKIND.

All that transmission flew through space to two tracking stations in Australia, Honeysuckle Creek and Parkes, as well as Goldstone in the Mojave Desert.* It's a bit complicated, but the broadcast appears to have begun with the feed from Goldstone, switched to Honeysuckle Creek right before Armstrong set foot on the moon, and then drew on Parkes after a few minutes. The Australian site at Honeysuckle Creek rebroadcast the feed up to an Intelsat III satellite perched over the Pacific, which relayed it down to a newly constructed earth station in the tiny town of Jamesburg in the hills of Monterey, California, which sent it on to mission control in Houston and the rest of the world.

* I originally listed Goldstone as being in the Australian desert. It is not. It's in California.

The Startup That Could Turn Twitter Into Your Newspaper

2012-01-19T18:57:50-05:00

Twitter purchased the small Vancouver startup Summify today, but it could be a big step for the company's value as a news source.

Summify created a service that would send you the "top news" from your social networks based on a proprietary algorithm that combined your interests with the most popular links among the people you follow on Twitter, say. It took some of the anxiety out of knowing that you could never possibly read every tweet from a large network.

To appreciate why it matters that Twitter acquired Summify, you should try linking your Twitter account to Flipboard. Flipboard takes the links that my Twitter connections post and turns them into a magazine-style digest. Every morning, when I want to see what's happening, I don't fire up Twitter itself and cruise through hundreds of tweets. Instead, I fire up Flipboard and see right through the 140-character tweets to the vast sea of information on which they rest. This is an immensely useful way of dealing with large amounts of tweets.

An even more impressive service is Nieman Journalism Lab's "Fuego," which ranks the links that people who are interested in the future of journalism are tweeting. (Right at this moment, the top two stories are about Twitter's acquisition of Summify. Meta!)

If I think about what Twitter might do with Summify, it's pretty simple: Flipboard + Fuego. Basically, it's a personal "trending topics" generator. Take the hottest links from your feed drawing on Twitter's rich data, combine them with your personal preferences, and present them in some nice format. Perhaps this format could be a (very monetizable) daily newsletter filled with news and information that's relevant to you. If we were anachronistic, we might even call this bundle of content a "newspaper" that just happens to be curated by your Twitter network.

Twitter has always had a front-end problem. We're talking about a product that, for years, most users accessed through third-party clients. No matter, though. The networks that the basic idea allows people to build are what is valuable. And now, the company is trying to find the right way to expose all the value lying in those networks. One way is all the change you've seen at Twitter.com. The next? Well, that's Summify.

The SOPA Blackout Created a Big Problem

2012-01-18T13:10:13-05:00

My connections in the technology world are nearly universally opposed to SOPA. They (i.e. we) see it as a threat to the open Internet. Hollywood and the music companies say there is nothing to fear from this legislation. Yet most independent analysts and the organizations that would have to comply with the law say that it creates serious problems.

To protest SOPA, many Internet companies -- as you no doubt have seen or heard by now -- have blacked out their websites. I've seen Internet watchers go back and forth about the usefulness of the current blackout protest. Two tweets stand-in for a whole lot of others:

"Going dark is cute, but, the only way SOPA dies is if the tech industry starts lobbying just as hard as the entertainment industry," Gizmodo's Mat Honan wrote. And Gawker Media's Joel Johnson tweeted, "Is it possible to appreciate protest blackouts and also think that they're mostly preaching to the choir?"

Combined, the two tweets suggest support for anti-SOPA ideas, but a fear that the protests are basically useless because the target audience (Congress) won't be swayed by the blackouts. It's a sentiment that I've seen (re)tweeted in various guises over the last few days.

In thinking about this critique, I recalled talking to a long-time organizer during the heat of the Occupy protests late last year. "Protests don't solve things," she told me. "Protests create problems that policymakers then have to solve."

To be clear, by "create a problem," I mean to frame some set of facts and events in the world in such a way that they become a coherent bad, separate from the general messiness of the world. For web nerds, it's like dropping a shadow on text: suddenly, something is foregrounded. Much of that foregrounding isn't accomplished by the protests themselves, but by the media that spins out of such protests.

Remember all those pieces after the occupations that asked, "What are protesters so upset about? Whoa! It turns out there's something to this 1% stuff!" The number of media mentions of income inequality skyrocketed and the number of people who believed income inequality has grown and the government should do something about it grew along with them. You saw the rhetoric of politicians change and policy wonks offer Washington-ready ideas. Occupy created the problem (in the narrow meaning presented above) of inequality in the United States. They gave meaning to the growth of income and wealth gaps in this country.

Back to SOPA. It looked like SOPA was going to sail through Congress. Remember that in May, its sister bill PIPA passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee in just two weeks and with almost no opposition. But then the Internet -- its for-profit companies and non-profit allies -- woke up. Wired.com and BoingBoing and Ars Technica started to cover the story in greater depth. Redditors were suddenly very interested in these bills. The tech community became aware of this problem. The efforts of protesters over the last eight months convinced most in Silicon Valley that they had to do something about these bills' progress.

But The SOPA Problem remained largely within the tech world, within the choir. How to push those ideas into society more broadly? One might think, "Let's create a 'news event' with a digital protest." Would that work?

Last night, the Wikipedia blackout was the top story on the BBC. This morning, the New York Times homepage looks like this:

People across the country are hitting Wikipedia and Google homepages. They are being confronted with a protest that says, "This is a problem!" And the problem has the specific feature, the sites' rhetoric holds, of restricting the free flow of information on the Internet. Then citizens are going to the New York Times or listening to the radio and hearing about the web protest. Or they are seeing hashtags emerge on Twitter about Wikipedia and SOPA. The blacked-out websites successfully created a news event today in all media, old and new. Millions more Americans will have at least a passing knowledge of what Internet companies think the problem with SOPA is.

Will the anti-SOPA effort be as successful as Occupy in changing the way that people think about online piracy and legislation to clamp down on it? Probably not. On the other hand, it doesn't have to be. This is a narrow protest against two bills. And to solve this particular problem, Congress merely has to do what it does best: nothing.