Month: March 2006

I finished Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcom Gladwell’s second expansion of an interesting magazine article, while on vacation last week. Not having read the original magazine article, I’d be interested to do so now. I’m interested in seeing what the proper length for a narrative is. Of course, it depends on the narrative.

Regardless, I think Gladwell’s clear writing and novel anecdotes illustrating his central theme do support book-length explorations.

Gladwell knows how to approach — and make approachable — academic subjects which enlighten us on ourselves. Human interactions are like the air around us, so slowing down to examine them is unexpectedly rewarding. I can only wish that more academics were so gifted with the written word, or perhaps that academia would reward clarity alongside precision, comprehensiveness, and verifiable results.

I preferred The Tipping Point, but I enjoyed Blink. Gladwell’s blog has been noted by many others before now, but as a reader who can’t imagine also subscribing to The New Yorker (as fine as it often is), I’m happy to have another option for reading Gladwell.

At Digital Hollywood Wednesday morning, on a panel with a long title (Branded Media Marketing – TV, Film, Broadband, Podcasting & Blogging, Mobile, Music and Games – Reinventing the Commerce & Media Model), a panelist, J. D. Heilprin, asked Maria Thomas, another panelist, from National Public Radio, if NPR was thinking of itself as a media company, not just a radio company.

The answer was yes, although it’s clear that’s an evolutionary step. (I’m paraphrasing.)

Which makes me wonder about the R in NPR.

How long before Steve Inskeep and others use only the acronym NPR to refer to their media company, rather than the bold, emphatic National Public Radio one still hears most of the time?

In a different forum, I once pointed out the danger of naming your publication after a time period.

The new corollary, I suppose, is to be wary about specifying your medium if you’re a media company.

But if I did have occasion to do my running indoors, I could only wish for a treadputer. Thanks to Steve Outing for calling my attention to Brad Feld’s set-up.

Today was a day of recovery, from a vacation! And a milestone.

I started clock three years ago today. I think my pace was greater the first year, and maybe the second year, too.

It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

(Keep repeating that!)

Jonathan Lethem’s Gun, with Occasional Music (Wikipedia page) read like a Philip K. Dick novel that wasn’t prepared to go all the way to the (crazed) edge. Similar first-person narrative, resonant mix of current culture with a future which has gone mildly awry with its reliance on central control (with a pervasive, encouraged use of drugs to aid the process). Beyond those similarities, this is a detective novel in the Chandler vein. I’m embarrassed that I haven’t read any Chandler, but noir was a theme that caught fire, so anyone can recognize it beyond its forefather.

I looked forward to diving in each night, so that’s a good sign. March 18, 2006

I’ll be in Los Angeles for three days at the end of March. First, on Tuesday, March 28, I’m a panelist at OMMA Expo in the afternoon, on a panel called “Does RSS = R$$? Feeding Publisher Profitability.” Then, on Thursday, March 30, I’m a panelist at Digital Hollywood’s Spring 2006 event, Alternative Media & Advertising: Personalized Consumer Broadband, RSS Feeds, Blogging and Podcasting. In between, I’ll see what I can learn at Digital Hollywood.

I picked up a slim paperback by Roald Dahl called Over to You a few months ago. This collection of short stories was initially published in 1945, pulled together from their initial appearances in various magazines of the time. All the tales spring from Dahl’s experience as an R.A.F. fighter pilot in the first years of the war, before he was injured. These are bleak and sparse stories. Only one, “Beware of Dog,” showed a hint of the edge and dust-dry bitter humor which makes many of Dahl’s later short stories such a vicious pleasure to read.

Since the volume was published 61 years ago, I’ll point to Wikipedia for this list of Roald Dahl short stories. And the full page shows an interesting life lived broadly. I have a couple of later collections on the shelf… may have to dip into them once again, just for that keen edge.

Dahl wrote various wonderful stories, but the one which I got to first, long ago, was Danny, the Champion of the World. I expect a re-read would spoil it somewhat, as it was written for a younger audience, but probably not as jarring as the Narnia re-read.

This March 13, 2006 article from the NYTimes will disappear behind the paywall shortly, but I’ll link to it all the same, for two reasons.

1. To point out how a multi-brand property gets boiled down to a single audience
2. To bewail style guides, although I love them dearly in other contexts

The article: “Hungry Media Companies Find a Meager Menu of Web Sites to Buy“

Perhaps the site most discussed and analyzed as a potential major takeover is Cnet Networks, the operator of News.com, a site focusing on business and technology news. The price tag for Cnet, which is publicly traded, with a market value of around $2 billion, would be $2.5 billion to $3 billion, said Mark May, an analyst for Needham & Company who covers Internet services and digital media.

Cnet is “too expensive” to be a ready takeover candidate, Mr. May said.

Other analysts said that Cnet had prompted much debate among major media companies, which had been unable to determine how lucrative the Cnet audience could become.

These rumors have been published before. Whatever.

My first point is that CNET Networks operates more than CNET News.com, but a reporter is most likely to know one of our news sites.

My second point is that seeing “Cnet” bugs me terribly. Years of insisting that it’s CNET (all caps) cannot fight style guides at publications, which (understandably) make it a policy not to capitalize names which are not abbreviations. (It’s more nuanced than that, but I’m not a copyeditor, to everyone’s relief.)

It must grate on Yahoo! that every publication drops the exclamation point from their company name. But it’s less egregious, visually, than “Cnet” versus CNET.

Note to self: when naming anything, consider not only the URL (my first instinct these days), but check the AP Style Guide, too. Maybe Chicago while I’m at it. 😉

i found How the Web Was Born, by James Gillies and Robert Cailliau, on the shelves at work. It’s a scholarly, but not too dry, history of the World Wide Web, and the precedents which set the stage for its emanation from CERN in the early 1990s.

The book was written in 2000, and one of the authors (Cailliau) played a leading role in the birth of the web, although I’ll freely admit I had never heard his name before. I’ve been online since 1991, erratically at first, but almost every day since mid-1993. I recognized several of the names, and there is a very useful 10 page list of “The Cast” as an index.

Tim Berners-Lee gets lead credit for the web, but the book gives a much broader picture of the historical precedents and the individuals who over decades contributed ideas and technology to set the stage for TBL. I knew about Minitel, for instance, but have you ever heard of Cyclades, another network from France in 1972? I had not, but it’s clear that European support for X.25 (a competing network standard from telcos) killed the enthusiasm (and funding) for this early packet-switched network. I think the human factors of technology adoption — which include political and organizational structures — are almost as interesting as the technical leaps. Maybe that’s because the human element slows the rate of change down to where it can be recognized while it’s in progress.

The final pages of the book, about the political/organizational reasons why Tim Berners-Lee followed the center of internet gravity to the United States when founding the W3C, came as a striking coincidence to my reading “The Big Picture,” from Mahashunyam over at Bubble Generation this weekend. Timing is a total coincidence, but six years on, the European management of innovation is still troubled.

This makes me think that Europe, on the whole, appears to be unprepared for the age of the Knowledge Worker who is a co-creator of wealth although there are a few pockets of innovation in certain industries such as mobile communications and software. But, the model is very different : it’s either dumb and risk-averse Big Government money or it’s led by R&D labs in large corporations such as Nokia. On the whole, Europe seems to be less capable of creating innovation clusters in new industries by grass-roots entrepreneurship and a whole lot of energetic start-ups.

Other notes

Even Tim Berners-Lee thought about “tags,” it seems. Another useful reminder that folksonomies are not new. In 1980, during TBL’s first stint at CERN, he wrote a program called Enquire which encouraged individual arbitrary assignments of topics.

‘Enquire,’ said the help file significantly, ‘allows information to be structured in any arbitrary way. It does not have to be forced into a tree structure or set of tables.’ That feature made Enquire good at describing random associations. … Enquire’s lack of heirarchical structure, Tim believed, could lead a use ‘to information which he did not realize he needed to know’. [p. 170]

The main problem Tim had with heirarchical information systems was that they placed restraints on the information itself. ‘This is why a “web” of notes with links between them is far more useful than a fixed heirarchical system,’ he claimed. [p. 182]

‘The usual problem with keywords,’ Tim pointed out, ‘is that two people never choose the same keywords.’ And while people may recognize similarities in meaning between words, computers do not. A person wishing to buy a yellow car in Massachusetts, for example, would recognize that a primrose Ford in Boston matched his needs, but a computer would not equate primrose with yellow or Boston with Massachusetts.

Digital already had a solution to the keyword problem for its VAX NOTES system. That required keywords to be registered so that there would only be a restricted list to choose from. That was fine as far as it went, but a little impractical for a widely distributed system such as Tim envisioned. His conceptual solution was to define ‘circles’ as keywords and point them to any other documents to which they were relevant. The difficulties of implementing this idea in practice were still troubling Web developers a decade later. [p.183]

For a more modern take, check the notes on a tagging panel at SXSW 2006.

Separately, the unwieldy “dub-dub-dub” abbreviation was recognized as a problem even by its namers.

‘World Wide Web,’ said Tim. ‘We can’t call it that,’ replied Robert [Cailliau], ‘because the abbreviation WWW sounds longer than the full name!’ [p. 199]

But they pressed on. And I know I’m willing to cut them some slack on this one. I’ll bet you are, too.

It’s hard to see a movie after it’s reached the level of hype and acclaim that comes with being named Best Picture. Crash couldn’t (and didn’t) match up to such expectations. Some vignettes stand out, but the weaving of different lives into a single message (race is still an issue in America, with no easy answers) left me erraticly impressed.

I’ve now seen three of the five 2005 Best Picture nominees. I’d like to see Capote, but I think I’ll read In Cold Blood first. Munich, by contrast, doesn’t interest me very much. I never heard a single person talk about it. How can a film of such assumed brilliance not even make a single ripple in my network? I’m not strongly dialed in on entertainment, of course, but all the others warranted at least a comment from a colleague or friend. Spielberg + serious topic = nomination?

Crash’s Metacritic score of 69 is lower than I would expect for a Best Picture winner. You need an 82 to reach the top 200 ever, which is (to my eye) a mixed list. (Face/Off at #199?) Million Dollar Baby (2004 Best Picture) earned an 86, and Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003 Best Picture) notched a 94, tied for third in that top 200 list.