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The Whole Earth Blogalog

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 13:07:50 -0800

Three recent books (From Counterculture to Cyberculture, What the Doormouse Said and Counterculture Green) plus a slew of newspaper articles have examined the influence of the Whole Earth Catalogs and periodicals upon on our culture. I am not the first to notice that the style of the Whole Earth Catalogs can be seen in the style of blogs and fan web sites. An article billed as the "oral history" of Whole Earth Catalogs just appeared in Plenty magazine. It says:

How did a publication with just a four-year run help shape a community so prolific that it went on to inspire Google, Craigslist, and the blogosphere; save six American rivers; and shape sustainable business practices as we know them today? Forty years after the first issue of the Whole Earth Catalog, this oral history of the publication, as told by those who made it and those who read it, tracks the long-lasting impact of a short-lived journal that altered the course of the world.

As the former editor-in-chief at Whole Earth, I spoke at length with the author. A few comments survived:

Kevin Kelly: For this new countercultural movement, information was a precious commodity. In the ’60s, there was no Internet; no 500 cable channels. Bookstores were usually small and bad; libraries, worse. The WEC not only gave you permission to invent your life, it gave you the reasoning and the tools to do just that. And you believed you could do it, because on every page of the catalog were other people doing it. This was a great example of user-generated content, without advertising, before the Internet. Basically, Brand invented the blogosphere long before there was any such thing as a blog.

I really mean that. This past week I had occasion to dip into the Updated Last Whole Earth Catalog. In my opinion, this was the apogee of all the many Whole Earth Catalogs. (And it was not the last one by a long shot.)

Geodesic Domes, in the Updated Last Whole Earth Catalog, 1975

As I read the dense, long reviews and letters explaining the merits of this or that tool, it all seemed comfortably familiar. Then I realized why. These missives in the Catalog were blog postings. Except rather than being published individually on home pages, they were handwritten and mailed into the merry band of Whole Earth editors who would typeset them with almost no editing (just the binary editing of print or not-print) and quickly "post" them on cheap newsprint to the millions of readers who tuned in to the Catalog's publishing stream. No topic was too esoteric, no degree of enthusiasm too ardent, no amateur expertise too uncertified to be included. The opportunity of the catalog's 400 pages of how-to-do it information attracted not only millions of readers but thousands of Makers of the world, the proto-alpha geeks, the true fans, the nerds, the DIYers, the avid know-it-alls, and the tens of thousands wannabe bloggers who had no where else to inform the world of their passions and knowledge. So they wrote Whole Earth in that intense conversational style, looking the reader right in the eye and holding nothing back: "Here's the straight dope, kid." New York was not publishing this stuff. The Catalog editors (like myself) would sort through this surplus of enthusiasm, try to index it, and make it useful without the benefit of hyperlinks or tags. Using analog personal publishing technology as close to the instant power of InDesign and html as one could get in the 1970s and 80s (IBM Selectric, Polaroids, Lettraset) we slapped the postings down on the wide screens of newsprint, and hit the publish button.

This I am sure about: it is no coincidence that the Whole Earth Catalogs disappeared as soon as the web and blogs arrived. Everything the Whole Earth Catalogs did, the web does better.

But by the same equation, much of what the web is doing now, Whole Earth was doing then. Those folks who subscribed to the "feed" of CoEvolution Quarterly, the Whole Earth Review, and the WELL, got the blogosphere and user-created content 30 years early.

Living on the web decades before the internet was born; now that was a strange trip.

Pranksters 2.0

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 02:03:15 -0800

A clear emerging trend is nicely named and featured in the WSJ article, New Pranksters.

Pranks have gone from legendary spoofs in college fraternaties in the 1950s, to subversive happenings by political activists in the 60s and 70s, to conceptual art pieces by maniacal artists into the 90s. Now they are errupting online as a social media web 2.0 event.

Examples of the new pranksterism can be found in the wonderful pranks by Improv Everywhere. (And they do seem everywhere; you can sign up for your local Improv Everywhere chapter, and you'll get email or Facebook notices when a prank in your neighborhood is about to hatch.)

My favorite IE happening is the Food Court Musical.

The Human Mirror -- a dozen sets of twins mirror each other on the subway -- is short but good, too.

The new pranksters are new in this way:

1) New pranks are entertainment. Rather than being politically subversive, they aim for a wow!
2) New pranks are social. Rather than relying on a lone jokester, or even small band, these may involve hundreds or more instigators. The more the merrier.
3) New pranks are broadcasted. The audience is not primarily those who are present but those who are not.

The WSJ article does a swell job of rounding up some great examples and even showcases a few prank groups that are in the inevitable process of becoming commercialized. Including being filmed for commercials -- a sure sign of their mainstreaming.

Hi-Tech Ocean Row Boats

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 04:12:09 -0800

I didn't know anything about fancy trans-ocean row boats. Apparently a lot of people row across oceans. There is even an Association of Ocean Rowers. The typical ocean row boat has two humps, with sealable hatches, so the whole thing is a floating bubble. They are crammed with navigational gear, as well as the usual marine necessities: cooking, sleeping, working tools. They also are loaded with batteries, solar panels, wind generators, and so on. Used ones go for about $50,000.

Roz Savage (pictured above) rowed one of these hi-tech row boats across the Atlantic and is now rowing across the Pacific -- San Francisco to Australia -- solo. Her floating shack is stuffed with expensive gear.

"I will be taking about $80,000 of electronic equipment with me on the Brocade, so that I can send back video blogs, podcasts, data, photos and text blogs to my website." The complete list of her electronic gear is here.

With all this sea-hardened equipment she is blogging and podcasting from a row boat in the middle of the Pacific, which is pretty cool.

Heinlein's Fan Mail Solution

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 01:00:00 -0800

I found this letter in a folder of old correspondence from my days when I was editing at the Whole Earth Catalog. It is from the science fiction master Robert Heinlein.

Heinlein engineered his own nerdy solution to a problem common to famous authors: how to deal with fan mail. In the days before the internet, Heinlein's solution was fabulous. He created a one page FAQ answer sheet -- minus the questions. Then he, or rather his wife Ginny, checked off the appropriate answer and mailed it back. While getting a form letter back might be thought rude, it was much better than being ignored, and besides, the other questions you did not ask were also answered! Indeed, it is both remarkable and heartwarming that Heinlein replied at all to most mail. Can you imagine other great authors doing the same -- even with a form letter? Heinlein's form is very entertaining to read because you are forced to reconstruct the missing requests.

Click on the image to see enlarged version.

But progress marches on, even in science fiction author's households. Ginny Heinlein said that by 1984, "with the advent of computerization in our household, we no long use the form letter to answer fan mail. I find that it is possible now, with the computer, to write individual letters in reply to fan mail faster than I could check off the answer on the form."

Truman Show Delusion

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 00:58:37 -0800

This caught my eye: In a NYT piece on the rise of patients pleading that they are stuck inside a very sophisticated reality-TV show -- no, really -- and they want to get out, just like Jim Carrey did in the Truman Show.

Another patient traveled to New York Cit and showed up at a federal building in downtown Manhattan seeking asylum so he could get off his reality show, Dr. Gold said. The patient reported that he also came to New York to see if the Twin Towers were still standing, because he believed that seeing their destruction on Sept. 11 on television was part of his reality show. If they were still standing, he said, then he would know that the terrorist attack was all part of the script.

I like the falsifiability of his ground-truthing test. Ground-truthing, that is examining a reported fact (yes, videos can be faked) yourself in first person, is not a bad practice.

Wanting to get out of, or "off your own reality show" makes total sense to me. I can see it becoming common.

The Wisdom of Public Prediction Markets

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 03:56:35 -0800

Prediction markets continue to proliferate. These communities use money to bet on outcomes in the future. If a prediction comes true, the winners reap the money from the losing betters. The price of a bet, or share, fluctuates over time -- and thus can be used as a signal for the community's opinion. In theory a prediction market taps into the "wisdom of crowds," but can also be viewed as conventional wisdom. However the results of prediction markets have been proven to be reliable conventional wisdom. (See my previous post on the subject.)

There are two kinds of prediction markets: ones where you bet real money, and ones where you bet funny money. Since betting real money keeps people honest (to reduce their loses), markets with real money are considered a much better indicator of opinion than a mere poll -- which has no "penalty" for being less than honest. But real money prediction markets are (stupidly) illegal in the US. So token markets like Long Bets and Bet2Give are devised to innovate around the law.

For instance, Hubdub trades token dollars. You are given $1,000 hubdubs at the start, and $20 each day you log on. You win or loose these token dollars on various predictions. There is a leaderboard which displays the highest ranked traders, showing how much they have gained in the last quarter. One fellow gained $1 million hubdubs, and now has a net worth of $3 million. Hubdub dollars are only good for bragging rights.

One clarification of how the price of a bet works (from Hubdub's FAQ):

If a prediction has a yes value of 43%, does that mean that 43% of people have voted yes?
No, not really. The forecast is dependent on both the number of people who have selected this outcome and the amount they have risked on it. Very roughly, 43% means that 43% of the money risked by users is riding on that outcome.

I was curious how closely the two formats (real and token money) might match each other so I hunted for a bet that I thought most prediction markets might share: the outcome of the US presidential election. From my brief survey, betting real dollars and token dollars give similar results. More so, there is a pretty close convergence of price among all the prediction markets:

Roughly, the day after Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin gave her rousing nomination speech, all six different prediction markets price Obama winning at about 60%.

Betfair, based in England, trades real money to make bets. It is the biggest prediction market in the world in terms of numbers of bettors and dollars bet. It's bread and butter are sports events, including the Olympics, and card games, but it also runs bets on almost anything else including politics.

The day after VP candidate Sarah Palin's nomination speach, Betfair bookies put the odds for Obama winning at 1.6 and give worse odds for McCain winning at 2.72.

Intrade also bets real money, also mostly on sports, but also on many other wagers. On this same day, Intrade money is on Obama winning at 59%.

On this same day Hubdub market rates on Obama win at 63%.

On this same day the Iowa Electronic Markets, which I've written about previously, and is the only prediction market in the US to legally use real dollars, has Obama winning at 59%.

On this same day, Bet2Give also pegs Obama winning at 63 cents or 63%.

Bet2Give is run on Newsfuture software and is sort of a non-profit demo for Newsfutures, which sells software for customized enterprise-strength prediction markets. They promise that a company can "harness the wisdom of your crowds." In Bet2Give you bet with real dollars but your winnings are given to charities, so technically you are not gambling.

Newsfutures itself runs a prediction market using token dollars. On this same day it shows a 60% chance of an Obama win.

PPX is another token market. Run by Popular Science magazine, it is their Prediction Exchange. It does not do political predictions, so there's no chart or price for a new US president. Instead it focuses on tech and commercial predictions. Such as: Will Netflix top 10 million subscribers by end of 2008? (You need to register to see the wagers).

My conclusion is that token money prediction markets carry the same validity as real money prediction markets, and that they are fairly consistent across markets. In that sense they are probably reliable indicators of what people believe at this moment (not be confused with reliable predictions).

Other Isomorphic Keyboards

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 08:10:57 -0800

Naturally, the odd geometric keyboard I posted a few days ago was not a new idea. In fact keyboards of this nature were first invented in 1875. Four or five similar 2-D note arrangements with slightly varied arrays have been conjured up in the century since then. These designs are called isomorphic keyboards. Each pattern has their own claims to uniqueness and utility.

What is new these days is that one can produce a new controller -- based on these old key arrangements -- to drive all kinds of sounds. The keyboard becomes a portable interface that can be changed or "hooked up" to different instruments.

I would not mention them again, except an inventor of a new controller (the Thummer, above) wrote to me about his up-coming commercial product and made a few interesting remarks. Jim Plamondon, Thummer's inventor from Austin Texas says:

On the one hand, novel musical controllers and notations seem…kinda crackpot. On the other hand, Guitar Hero’s novel controller and notation have doubled America’s instrumental music-makers in just two years.

He's right. Any sane person would have argued against the novel musical controller in Guitar Hero from every succeeding. It was too simple, too dumb, redundant, etc. Guitars have been working fine for thousands of years.

Wrong. The millions of Guitar Hero guitars sold mean that obviously there is room for new music input devices.

Plamondon is missionary about the alternative keyboard as a way to make music creation easier. His video on how it is played:

The End of Video as Evidence of Anything

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 15:49:37 -0800

Twenty three years ago, Stewart Brand, Jay Kinney and I wrote a cover story for the July 1985 issue of Whole Earth magazine called "The End of Photography as Evidence of Anything." We noticed that high-end graphic computers were able to alter photos in such a way that they could convey any fantasy. At that time retouching on these machines was expensive (you paid a trained operator to do the retouching), so most of this fancy photo altering was done quietly for fashion, or magazine covers. No one was admitting to it, or talking about it. The alterations were stealth jobs, and therefore news to most people. Generally, photo alterations of this realistic type was so expensive, it was a big deal. It required a special dedicated main-frame computer, such as a $400,000 Scitex, to perform these tasks.

Our thesis -- that with personal computers you could remake photography so realistically that it would not serve as evidence of reality -- was based on the hunch that this rarified technology would someday soon be ubiquitous. At the time we were using command-line Kapro computers, and the Macintosh had just been released the year before. Photoshop was still very far away.

We fast-talked our way into getting some free time on a Scitex machine and had the technician "photoshop" some slides we had taken. We watched enthralled as he compiled a very convincing depiction of UFOs over San Francisco. This became the cover image for our essay on how photography was becoming unreliable. We argued that much like text, the only way to believe an image was to trust its source, rather than its content.

Of course nowadays, any kid could a better job retouching (just check out Worth 1000). But that was our point. Anyone would be able to photoshop. That's what happened. Still-photography became unreliable. A still image now is no proof of anything.

Instead, in recent decades moving images -- video -- became the defacto evidence of truth. While a still image is suspect, a video of an event is usually granted credibility. "Don't show us the photo, let's see the video of Big Foot!" The more shaky, zoomy, nonchalant the video is, the more believable. In part because it is hard to retouch a shaky image. We are all aware of Hollywood special effects, which are completely seamless and realistic, but that is high-end expensive digital studio work. The cult movie Cloverfield, which mimicked the documentary style of an amateur camcorder but was crammed with wild cinematic fantasies, demonstrated once and for all that big money could fake video. In short, cinema got its Scitex machine.

The obvious next step is amateurs hacking the moving image with their lap tops. Once that becomes common place video is no longer evidence of anything.

I think we have crossed that threshold. In a very cool short video made by an aspiring filmmaker we can see the end, and the beginning of amateur cinematic fantasy. Ironically, the subject for this hack is Death Star over san Francisco. The still images don't convey the visceral effect; watch the video.

The tools for this job were standard off-the-shelf items. From an interview on StarWarsBlog of the filmmaker Michael Horn:

I shot everything on my junkie DV camera, did motion-tracking and comping in After Effects, and basic sound design in Final Cut.

Neal Stephenson and the 10,000-Year Clock

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 18:00:00 -0800

In 1998 Danny Hillis asked some friends to make sketches of what they imagined a 10,000-year clock should look like. Science fiction author Neal Stephenson, among others, provided several sketches. One of them outlines a clock contained in concentric circles of walls, which opens to outsiders at specific preordained intervals.

Stephenson's handwritten notes on this sketch say:

Multiple shells of several closely-spaced cylinders w/ broad spaces between -- perhaps arranged on terraced amphitheater w/ nest sphere in the center.

Outermost shell's apertures open once an hour to admit & discharge tourists, school field trips, etc. -- these can circulate around periphery, view the sphere, & depart. Moving inwards the intervals between openings get longer -- perhaps these are inhabited by "clock monk" who devote lives to contemplation & to help maintain the clock & supporting institution.

In the ten years since then, Hillis and crew have developed engineering designs for the Long Now 10,000-year Clock. Currently the plan is to build the Clock inside a mountain at the end of a long vertical tunnel entrance. Some details of Neal's ideas may yet be implimented, but the vast circular compound of gates and inner walls won't be part of the initial Clock.

However, this wonderful Clock idea lives on and is rendered in much greater detail in Neal's new novel "Anathem". Like other Stephenson novels, the book is long and epic. The story is complicated and even confusing at first. The plot explores the friction between the scientific ("mathic") monks inside the sanctuary of the Clock and the "saecular" superstitious folks living outside the walls in the "extramuros." The clockers have a different sense of time and responsibility, trying to safegaurd civilization's knowledge. But the two worlds come clashing together in cataclismic event.

At Long Now Foundation we've always resisted the idea of turning the institution into a religion -- even though religions may have the best track record for long-term endurance. But the comparison to monks devoting their lives to maintain a remote and long-lived clock is hard to avoid, especially if you show up at a momentous clock event in a hooded robe.

Work on a prototype 10,000-year clock was completed in time for the millennial celebrations in 2000 (or 02000 as Long Now likes to write it). We installed the clock temporarily in Building 116 in the Presidio, San Francisco, where the Long Now offices were. Long Now was subletting office space from the Internet Archive, where the entire internet was backed up. So in a wonderful parallel to Neal's later story, the clock was resting in a room only a dozen feet away from the modern universal library of our time.

Stewart Brand, co-founder of the Long Now Foundation, had just returned from a vacation in Morocco the day before so he was wearing a djellaba.

I took this snapshot of Stewart contemplating the completed Clock just a few minutes before midnight on the New Year's Eve of Y2K. The Clock had just been finished in the last few days. The attractive idea is that the clock would bong once for a new century, and bong twice for a new millennia. We were gathered around the prototype clock when it was due to strike twice -- once for the century, and once for the Y2K millennium.

It was a very strange scene. Because of hysteria about Y2K, the Presidio was blockaded with a police checkpoint. No one else was around the usually busy park. It was a like a secret society meeting. A very few people, maybe a dozen in total, gathered at the clock as it struck the new year/century/millennia. Stewart looked like a monk overseeing the clock's big moment. At the countdown there was a total hush because we had no idea if the chimes would really work. Then at midnight, the gears started clicking, whirring. One gong! Silence. Then another gong!

Then a collective sigh because we realized it would not happen again for another 1,000 years.

Neal was not present (and had never seen this photo), but when a second version of the Clock's orrery was unveiled in the Marin county machine shop where it was assembled, Neal traveled from Seattle to inspect it. I took a few quick snapshots of the encounter.

Neal is a tinkerer. His dad was an engineer. He writes for a half a day and then works in a shop for the other half. He tinkered with hardware experiments for Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin rocket project, and now he is working at a lab for Nathan Myhrvold's patent factory. He here is at Chris Rand's machine shop, where the parts for the Clock were assembled.

A fuller profile of Neal Stephenson by Steven Levy appears in the September 2008 of Wired.

Neal's book Anathem will launch in San Francisco on Tuesday, September 9th at the Regency building on Van Ness. Because of the overlap in interests, the debut party will be co-hosted by Long Now. Neal will read from his book about the Arbre Clock, Danny and Stewart will talk about the Long Now Clock, there'll be a martial art demo (an art based on the story), and there will be a performance of unique music.

The Anathem has also spawned a CD of music recorded in the same manner of the music described in Neal's book. This is mathic music, mathematically generated chants, created especially for Anathem by composer David Stutz. The designs for the chimes of the Long Now Clock are also mathic generative; a prototype of the chime generator is on view in the Long Now museum in Fort Mason. For another example of "mathic" music for a long clock, see Brian Eno's CD of computational Long Now chimes (titled January 07003). David Stutz's CD will be available at the event.

Tickets for this celebration of long-term thinking -- and launch party for a highly anticipated science fiction novel-- are available here. They cost $11 for admission, and $45 for admission plus signed book. If you are a Long Now member, your ticket alone is free (but you have to RSVP. To become a member, join).

You can hear Neal read a bit of the beginning of his book on this Amazon video clip. He's a better conversationalist than reader. It should be quite an evening. We'll be filming the event as we do all Long Now Seminar talks; the video will be streamed LIVE by Fora.tv that evening at 7pm PST.

Looking For the Mouse

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 04:58:14 -0800

Clay Shirky is my favorite tech evangelist these days. I resonate with what he says and especially how he says it. A video of a talk he did recently reverberated through the net. This week Edge transcribed it. The following snippet is the best summation of social media that I've heard:

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for.

It's also become my motto, when people ask me what we're doing— from now on, that's what I'm going to tell them: We're looking for the mouse.

We're going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, "If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?" And I'm betting the answer is yes.

The video is here:

New Geometric Keyboard

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 03:06:57 -0800

Rather than confine itself to one long string of keys, this novel keyboard interface uses hexagonal keys in a honeycomb pattern to arrange notes ordered according to a harmonic table. Called the Axis, this innovative MIDI controller is in commercial production.

This is not a alternative tuning system, but an alternative keyboard. All twelve notes of the traditional Western scale fit into onto a 2-dimensional surface with a visible logical pattern.

Their web site says:

Starting from any note, the next note up-to-the-left is a minor third above the starting note. The next note directly above is a fifth above the starting note, and the next note up-to-the-right is a major third above the starting note.

Semitones are in horizontal lines, like the semitone between Minor and Major 3rd.

In this arrangement, a minor triad (three note chord) has the shape of a left-facing triangle, and a major triad has the shape of a right-facing triangle.

The Harmonic Table pattern can be extended in all directions, and all intervals, chords and scales have the same shape in any key. See some chord shapes.

The best explanation is simply to see it at work. Here is rock musician Jordan Rudess playing it after a few months practice:

Will anyone use it? If you play more than one instrument you already use more than one fingering system. Some folks will think of this as a new instrument. New instruments have a tough uphill challenge in becoming accepted, but often win a small following of dedicated fans. The long-tail of instruments. For some types of music, this keyboard may be perfect. (Thanks John La Grou)

Me-to-We Opening Ceremonies

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 08:48:15 -0800

Since we are a TV-less household, I may be the last person on earth to see the Opening Ceremonies of the Chinese 2008 Olympics. I just watched them on the Internet Tubes. They struck me, as many others have noted, as remarkable. But I also believe there are seminal. Something not only memorable, but significant.

* The 2008 Opening Ceremonies were a spectacle. Spectacles are becoming more important in our culture. As mediated experiences overtake most of our waking hours, the power of a huge mass experience in real life rises in meaning. The grand scale of the Opening experience was a large part of its appeal. Where we would have ordinarily been content with 12 tai-chi experts, we got instead 2008 of them. Or a sphere big enough to have its own gravity so that scores of dancers could orbit it upside down. It was very important -- even to those of use watching it on TV or the internet -- that this performance was live. With people who could trip or make mistakes. That is why the minor breaches of this assumption -- the lip syncing girl and digitally painted footprints -- were decried. They diminished this remarkable feat of physical achievement.

* This was a new media. It had very strong cinematic and filmic elements -- the movie projections on the rim, but also the narrative thread throughout. The spectacle was co-designed by filmmaker Zhang Yimou. He's a world-class artist who directed many Chinese films, notably Hero and House of Flying Daggers. Both of these films are epic, visually extravagant feats of spectacle themselves, so it is no surprise to see similar elements in this new kind of film: the opening. The other element was the choreography by the People's Army officer in charge of communist parades and grand musical showcases for moral uplift. There was also the key digital effects like he LED scroll and blinking drums. There was a lot of broadway and a lot of rock concert. Put all these together and it feels like an entirely new thing. Part rock, part opera, part film, part parade, part circus, part video game. A new medium. Apparently the Bird's Nest stadium was designed specifically to showcase this spectacle, as no other venue could have possibly staged it. I wonder if it might stage another spectacle like it?

* It was both deeply alien and comforting at the same time. Both old and new. The message was successful -- of presenting China's pride of its history and its rising modern power. Not only will this be a landmark in contemporary China's cultural psyche, but I think it will also resonate in the memory of the rest of the world. Something happened that night.

*The most alien, shocking and awesome portion of the Opening were the mass routines. Part of this is cultural. The Koreans are good at these mass effects, and the Japanese too. It's somewhat an East Asian thing. Historically these mass dances are designed to resemble machines. The wave rippler in the Opening Ceremonies appeared to be a cool mechanical effect until the disguised boys inside them were revealed. The mass fou drummers beat so rapidly and in synchrony that when their lights started blinking it seemed as if we were watching a computer chip, or the innards of a drum machine. See the pic above. We are a machine! Machine are us! That is our first reaction but I think it goes further than that. The 2008 fou drummers represent the We -- the power of the collective. The West and particularly Americans have traditionally emphasized the Me -- the individual. China is a culture more comfortable with the We than the Me, and here they were showing both the power of the We and its modern face -- blinking LED drums. We once thought computers were about individuation, but these days we see they are about socialization as well. More importantly, the social aspects of web 2.0 have shifted the center of gravity from Me to We. Witness books like Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody. Here come 2008 Chinese drummers. The great uncertainty in the coming years is how far China will shift to the Me and how far the west will shift to the We. What the Opening Ceremonies opened up was the arrival of the We. What I heard in the pounding pulse of the drummers was not "Here come the Chinese," but "Here comes everybody."

Long after the winners of the gold metals are forgotten, these Olympic Opening Ceremonies will be bookmarked as the Opening Ceremonies for China itself.

(I watched the longer version of the Opening Ceremonies on the NBC Olympic site. It sucks. You need to download the current version a non-standard Flash wannabe called Silverlight. That version only works on new Intel chipped versions of Macs, leaving our Mac G5 useless. Hello?)

Where Quotes Come From

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 02:36:41 -0800

The collective memory we call the wikipedia never ceases to amaze me.

I just noticed that Stewart Brand's famous quote that "information wants to be free" has its own wikipedia page. It earns a page in part because the quote is only half of what he said, as the wikipedia properly explains. The tribute is a nice trophy.

Strangely, Wikiquote, a site collecting quotes which is published by Wikimedia Foundation, does not serve up very deep background on its quotes. As an example it has a rather enimic page for the same Brand quote It does however point to an even better page with a more thorough history of "information wants to be free."

I now realize that every adage should have an encyclopedia page explaining its actual genesis, history of antecedents, counter claims and context. Like any portriat, the story behind the quote is usually more interesting than the quote.

Here's a few random adages that have a wikipedia page:

Never assume malice when stupidity will suffice.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

“Ninety percent of everything is crap”

“[Something] too cheap to meter”

"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow"

Currently wiithout a page (just attribution);

The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed.

Friendability

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 12:24:28 -0800

Are you my friend? Should I friend you? Or you me? I have a very large backlog of inquiries on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and all the rest.

Deciding friendability has become a new and necessary social skill. Here is a hierarchy that works for me:

Friend -- Most of the people that Facebook calls "friends" I call Acquaintances.
Actual Friend -- Someone whom I've had a meal with, or has visited my home.
Real Friend -- Someone who would drive me to the airport at 6 am.
True Friend -- Someone who would get me out of jail.

We all have lots of friends, a few real friends and -- if we are lucky -- one or two true friends.

I am delighted to know so many acquaintances. But I only call friends Actual Friends, Real Friends, and True Friends.

Some folks think this approach is too serious and not in the spirit of the social game of Web 2.0. But I think in the long run, making distinctions in friendability will make our social webs stronger.

Outstanding in the Field

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 12:23:42 -0800

Santa Cruz artist and foodie Jim Denevan sets up a long table in an outdoor environment and hosts a dinner party. Usually the long table is set in the fields of the farm where much of the food being served has been grown.

The intent of the gathering is to reinforce the connection between food and place. There is also an element of conceptual art; the stretched table often mirroring Denevan's beach art. His organization Outstanding in the Field hosts about two dozen of these dinners per year. More photos on his Flickr stream.