Second Thoughts

Blue Moon

Look out, Lindens, here it comes. One in a blue moon, a virtual world comes along that might really challenge Second Life -- and now it's here, Blue Mars. Sign up for the beta here that is reportedly opening in June -- but only if you are a developer who wants a preview of how your content made on professional software like Maya will look in this world. It's not ready for the proles  yet.

If you thought that the name of this virtual world meant that it is some kind of wild science fiction outerspace game, like Eve or something, you'd be wrong. Perhaps the top zoom of this planet is a blue mars, but the world itself looks as normal as pie with roads, malls, golf courses. I saw the demos at Engage! Expo and was quite impressed, and spent some time talking to the devolopers. The company is made up of Asians and Americans with vast game dev experience, and is located in Hawaii.

The graphics are breath-taking, and make Second Life feel almost a bit like the Sims Online when contrasted with the crispness. World of Warcraft has "better graphics" too (well, what wouldn't, with no user-generated content to lag it down) but it has these soft, LOTR-like edges, a kind of fantasy world that all seems "drawn".

Blue Mars has a high-fidelity look that makes the avatars seem very real. A key feature of their "realness" is their hair -- it's absolutely kick-ass 2die4 prim hair that moves realistically. Er, wait. Not prim hair. But, um, you know, what they use on this platform. A guy explained it to me in great depth -- he talked about how the people who made the artwork for Final Fantasy were involved (it looks like FF or Fable) and explained something about the skin making too -- but it was lost on me. It has to do with meshes, I guess. The graphics look good just because it has a Cry2 engine. That's what makes it look like a lot of top-quality games.

Oh, you say, but this world can't possibly be "for everybody" given the intensive graphic-card needs it will have -- say, like Second Life, you know? I spent a year in the mud in SL without more than a 64 m2 view when they moved to Windlight, and it's only now after buying a better machine that I got to "see the world". Turns out that the very same graphic cards now on spec for SL can play Blue Mars. The very machines I saw it playing on had those very cards, the NVidia and ATI Radeon (check the website).

But, meh, looks aren't everything, right? They take you a long way, but what's really up? Oh, and isn't Blue Mars "vapour ware"? It keeps saying it will open and delaying. Well, I think that's over now, and they really will open beta in June. They're taking sign-ups now. And here's how they'll win: a content creators' partnership system AND a real estate partnership system, both of which protect value even as they heavily restrict entry to a virtual world economy. In fact, I'm not certain such an economy will work, and I feel a great sense of dismay contemplating all this, because while the Blue Mars variant will be "better" and some creators will "flock" to it, it may not be free and flexible and accessible. The best thing would be if it competed with Second Life by making a different kind of controlled economy that we can see play out as to its viability, but not destroy the Second Life economy, which is more free, in the process. If the two can co-exist, not surviving on "socialism in one country", that would be best for the Metaverse in terms of choice and robust growth.

The Cloud of Knowing

Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience

Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing said to me:

'Pipe a song about a Lamb!'
So I piped with merry cheer.
'Piper, pipe that song again.'
So I piped:  he wept to hear.

'Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe;
Sing thy songs of happy cheer!'
So I sung the same again,
While he wept with joy to hear.

'Piper, sit thee down and write
In a book, that all may read.'
So he vanished from my sight;
And I plucked a hollow reed,

And I made a rural pen,
And I stained the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear.

I was hoping to wait to post on this topic until I could read more about cloud computing and understand it, but it's way past time to speak out about the concerns around it.

Cloud computing is basically the way a lot -- or all? -- computing will be done in the future, and is being done now. As I understand it, and you're welcome to add to the understanding, basically, we will not be holding servers in our homes and offices so much anymore, but access through networks virtual servers, themselves in turn ultimately hooking up to giant server farms held by others (sort of like 365 Main, the server facility used to hold the 32,000 sims making up the virtual world of Second Life-- although that is *grid computing* and not "the cloud" -- yet.). Instead of downloading and running software on your own computer, you will access the software service on the web running on computers elsewhere.

Apparently once you have fast enough networks and broadband and other thingies, you can ship all kinds of functions outside of computers or servers per se to virtual computers projected off actual servers that do all the work faster or cheaper. Of course, if you've ever marvelled at being able to email someone back and forth even if they are in Kyrgyzstan, or chat in real time with somebody in Portugal on Yahoo, or even sit in Second Life with people from a dozen countries on one sim talking and showing objects at the same time, you realize that the networks are speedy and stuff is happening out on the networks. But rather than dwell on all that fabulousness, let's talk about the consequences, which, of course, tekkies seldom talk about because they are obsessed with making the technology itself work.

If you have an organization with computers and a network and your company email and staff files shared or private, you have a system that one IT guy or department of IT guys control. Of course, that has its pluses and minuses as I've pointed out, in terms of them blocking progress, making people queue up to send a newsletter or upload content to a webpage or deciding you can't have Facebook or SL on your computer at work. But by the same token, the email of your company with your dedicated servers and domain and such is something they keep in charge of. Of course, they can look in and see anybody's email or files at any time -- and do -- but there are checks and balances by the company or organization itself; if you were to publish this information wrongfully or detrimentally to the company purpose, or such as to harass any one staff person, you would be disciplined or even fired. You would operate in a context.

No so when all email and documents and communications and second lives are "out there" or "in the cloud", when people log on to use software elsewhere that your company had no control over. This cloud is not just a network of networks; they are like networks in which the outer hull has been broken off, like on a sugar cane, and the syrup poured out into one big sticky mess. There is no outer skein to protect the data in any fashion (which of course, itself was arbitrary given hacking, but still, it worked well enough). So all the horrors that Andrew Keen in The Cult of the Amateur talks about with the retrieval and scraping and publishing and misuse of people's personal data (like his story of the woman's AOL searches) are only intensified in the "cloud" concept. Sure, at first the pipeline to the cloud will be controlled by the one writer or IT guy -- but in time, anybody will be able to access it from their handheld or laptop or home computer and everyone can read the happy songs written for everybody. Because you have to ask: who owns the cloud? The cloud is over international waters in cyberspace, as it were, in airspace that countries don't own, in a sense, in a place that doesn't necessarily track back to ownership of property, and therefore definitely doesn't track back to accountability.

Don't Frighten the Horses

Mechanics in the early 1990s.

I'm slightly adapting this from a post on the Linden blog in a debate about whether or not virtual worlds will work for business meetings because not everyone can see that without an account and I think there is a larger story here. It's also enough of a carob bar, I think, on the overall issue of Web 2.0 not to violate any Lenten fare : )

I would submit that the biggest obstacle Linden Lab and other virtual world developers face in the adoption of the concept of business meetings in virtual worlds is the IT department in every company, filled with Web 1.0 holdovers and Web 2.0 skeptics. They as a class often constitute the biggest hurdle you must cross in convincing already-enthusiastic executives to get on board to adopt new media and social media. I have seen organizations with board members, executives, staff, all enthusiastic about virtual worlds and other types of interactive online services and the only thing stopping them is the IT guy, who invokes security, but that isn't really the issue at all.

I wonder if the issue is really that he will no longer be needed when people can use these simple tools themselves (because in fact they *are* easy and usuable -- we're all here, right?). Virtual worlds and social media systems are deeply threatening to IT departments in many ways. Even those that are a bit hip on the Web 2.0 uptake can still be snarkily opposed to VWs. Putting in Drupal to make a community forums and wiki means constant feeding of a programmer on staff to keep it working, or expenditure on consulting for the "free" opensource software.  But putting in Second Life for the same task is a fraction of the cost. No one sees it in these terms becaues they want both, but in fact, I think we will see virtual worlds simply overtake the stage of endless tinkering with CMS software that isn't serving people, really. Why fuss with endless modules for people to talk to each other if they can do this live in 3-D, save the texts to their hard drive and post photos to their blog? To be sure, there are kinks and problems to work out in virtual worlds, but they are getting better and better, and seeing them through the new Live feature on your home computer might make adaptation move faster.

I puzzled over this grim resistance to virtual worlds and social media from IT departments -- of all places! -- for a long time until I began to see how Web 2.0 skepticism is a self-perpetuating loop. Being in SL or on Twitter or Facebook, you are exposed to numerous ideas and inventions coming in at you at an enormous velocity. Even if you are not a tekkie, just following Scoble on Twitter or Friendfeed gives you an enormous wealth of field data and a short course in the latest technology. Become friends with someone like Fleep Tuque, an educator in SL, and you are exposed to the Moodle or the massive online course. Go to a Linden office hour and hear Babbage Linden about "the Internet of things" or "Havoc". Just owning land, you become exposed to all kinds of concepts like FPS or servers or particles. In short, you are getting educated even as a lay person in ways that a person sitting in a company's IT department and refusing to turn these services on to his office is *not* getting educated. You are getting educated in the round, in 3-D, in ways that help you learn easily and retain knowledge and accelerate together with other people with whom you collaborate.

I visited my regular computer guru recently for repairs, and as usual had the bantering discussion about Second Life where he ranted about insecurity and "no lives". I finally just turned it on for him there in his workshop and began working the controls and waiting on my customers, pulling up menus, parceling land, etc. etc. looking at the stats and contacting customer service about a collision problem -- all the normal things you do in SL. I looked on his face and saw *shock*. *I was doing what he does without understanding one one hundredth of the technology behind it.* He finally just said quietly, "I think it's great that you have this business and make money doing this, it's cool."

 

Who is to Blame for the Recession?

Walt Kelly's Pogo.

Who is to blame for the Recession? (Or are we ready to call it World Depression II yet? The way the Great War or World War I came first, then World War II). I really have no idea because, like a lot of people, I'm living in times where there is not only too much history to consume coherently, there's too much news. Even if I were a financial expert, I'd likely have trouble comprehending the magnitude of what is going on. If it *were* comprehensible, obviously the people in charge of these things would have figured out how to prevent the disaster. Maybe they thought they'd be exempt when they took for themselves out of the seemingly endless supply of wealth.

It's funny how you can't get a handle on the situation intellectually even after reading loads of magazine articles about derivatives, but little things explain it better. Like a postman friend telling me that he thinks commerce is grinding to a halt because he isn't delivering any spring catalogues. You know, all those glossy, shiny catalogues from Land's End or LL Bean? Except, somebody on Twitter pipes up that they in fact got their Land's End. Maybe the catalogues are only going to those who ordered? Maybe the mailings are late because printing costs were prohibitive? Or maybe only some areas of the country are still delivering? But the frozen moment that my friend described was disturbing because it was like one of those moments when the birds stop singing in the forest and you know something is changing in the weather. The catalogues always went out. Didn't they? They are going to keep going out. Aren't they? And no fair saying that ordering has gone online -- because we all know that isn't replacing the revenue that companies used to get from catalogues. I'd like to think that nobody needs hard-copy catalogues anymore, and they visit a web page and order from the pictures there, but I'm not sure the public is so easily retrained. It's a situation that is complex and needs more study like everything else in the modern Depression and there's no time.

Time Magazine tried to assign blame across 25 people, artfully chosen so as to make it seem as if it were all kinds of people, black, white, Christian, Jewish, American, Asian, whatever. In fact, you could even vote on them. Somebody else could make a different list. I found I had never heard of most of the people, had you? I had no idea whether they really are to blame. Something felt contrived about the whole thing.

Of course, all over the place, people are blaming "the Jews" and "World Zionists" and then politically correct types like Patchy on Twitter are saying, but I'm not seeing that in fact and that's not true. I was surprised that New York magazine published a picture of Madoff in a kind of evil Joker face and called him a monster, and a number of papers that in fact are often called by the conspiracists part of the World Zionist propaganda machine blah blah are calling Madoff a great evil. You would almost not notice that people aren't reporting on those who got paid already by Madoff, or that some of his ill-gotten gains are being recovered. This time, anger against a Jew is ok to direct, goes this press reasoning, because above all, he harmed *other Jews*, most notably Elie Wiesel's foundation and many other Jewish philanthropies which were notable for supporting various liberal, human rights, cultural and humantiarian causes.

Matt Taibi has one of his long rants on Rolling Stone (yes, I'm going to make the obligatory joke about how surely nobody under 50 reads Rolling Stone anymore?) in which I think he blames...capitalism. Or usury. Not finished reading yet. I  used to like Matt's writings a lot better when he published the eXile in Moscow. I find him just too extreme and shrill on American politics. I guess it was only by contrast to the rants of Shenin or Limonov or Zhirinovsky that Taibi always sound like an urbane and witty voice of reason. I just couldn't get through Matt's article although *gasp* I might buy the actual old-fashioned hard-copy of Rolling Stone just to be able to take his piece with me on a subway ride or something to get it finished.

But in the comments, just like everywhere in chat groups and DMs and such now you can hear people saying but wait, it's not evil America that is responsible. Why, did you know that it is this Chinese guy? This guy who made this mathematical formula?

As the RS commenter puts it, "Why in the world would you leave David X. Li out of your article, the Chinese mathematician who created the Copola Gaussian Model without which CDOs and other forms of derivatives could never have been sliced, diced repackaged, sold, etc.? Mr. Li went to the best university in China, studied at Lavelle University, worked for Canada Imperiale Bank, Citigroup, Barclays, and now resides in China. His model is part of the insidious opportunistic and parasitic pathology at the heart of the egregious Geitner, Paulson etc. coup."

Now Wired has a long expose of David X. Li in case you want to dwell on this particular angle of blame for the recession. It strikes me as fitting that the tekkie-wiki gang would blame something technical and scientific, rather than just organic human nature for this Recession Depression Collapse. They also seem to be subconsciously turning on the Chinese, whom they've celebrated, both in the form of labour for all big IT, and in the form of the country China, Inc. which provides cheap real estate and financing for their widget factories. People even ask if in fact this was a conscious evil plot by the Chinese Communist Party to sabotage the West. Perhaps it was! Of course, it harms Asia, too. Pretty risky form of sabotage!

But wait -- that's not all! There's another group we can blame for the global downturn, in case you need more people to blame. African Americans, who got the mortgages in big numbers. But wait! You can't blame them, they were only legitimately gaining from belated affirmative action, even if it came in the form of NINJA loans. In fact, it is unscrupulous black mortgage brokers.

The Check's Not in the Mail: Nasty Practices of Banks

Banks are evil, yeah, we got all that, that's why the economy is collapsing and such. But...banks are necessary evils and if you think not, try living in a society that doesn't have them (the Soviet Union) or then has too many of them (Russia) to understand what a nightmare it is to do business. I happily accept the concept of banks taking money, holding money and letting it earn interest, and using money for investments to be able to pay that interest. What I think is missing, however, is service to the consumer in this high-speed online environment by making sure his money deposited is really in his hands sooner.

There is an enormous critique of banks now and their awful practices regarding NINJA loans or bundling debts up to Wall Street or whatever. But...what I marvel at, however, is that in this period of turmoil and "re-evaluation of values" that no one is criticizing standard -- and increasingly pernicious -- practices of banks on consumers that vacuum a lot of our savings and value away from us...to who knows where. I mean, I read the headlines about self-dealing and other bad practices like spending on jets, but nobody ever seems to protest these garden-variety, standard methods of sucking your bank account's balances away from you through heavy fees and too-long holds.

I recently suffered a "perfect storm" of a bank snafu that left me paying hundreds of dollars in fees, apparently most of which I can't get back, and which was entirely unnecessary and couldn't seem to be fixed normally and quickly in my branch, where it originally all began. The cascade started with the bank's error. They took a check I wrote for $500 and debited it for only $5.00 -- it was a simply data entry error on their part. (Yes, you still have to write checks in this day and age and not everything can be paid online). Worried that the school I was writing to wouldn't collect the full amount, I went in person to the bank to persuade them of their error and ask them what to do. It seemed to take way too long to persuade this bank that I was reporting *their* error that was likely going to screw them, not me, but finally, when they grasped it, they said, "Oh, that's our error. That will take a long time to fix." "Should I re-issue this check then to be on the safe side, and can you cancel that?" "Oh, yes, you better reissue it," they said, "because it's our error".

So off I go to deliver the new check in person right away, I explain the snafu...and I wait. About 10 days later, there is an acknowledgement of the error but...oops, a debit for the correct amount  -- on top of the second check. Damn! Annoyed that I was going to suffer now either a $35 bank charge for a returned item, or $35 for "insufficient funds" or both, I checked the balance, but thought, oh, no worries, I put in a deposit of a local check 3 days ago, everything should be fine, and I will go in and wrestle them if they debit it.

But oops, the check didn't clear for another few days even though it always did, every month, usually within 2 days. The $35 charge was debited, the second check was cleared but now the cascade went further. Some little check for $5.95 comes in, and that leads to a new $35 fee for "insufficient funds". Then, SL ads to the fun by double-billing a charge -- so that an unexpected second charge comes in now, on top of this original double-billing from the other transaction. It takes LL nearly a month to right that mess, while they take advantage of the float (do they do this often?) but meanwhile, I'm now savaged with a whole raft of $35 charges...and a $25 charge for "service".

I had had something like this happen last year where I wrangled with the bank and got them to reverse one of the fees because I was able to point out the dates on items. See, if there is $500 on an account, let's say, and another $500 deposit in the queue and a $9.95, $21.95, $79.95 and $495 charge all comes in on the same day, rather than saying "oh, there's enough to cover all those first three checks, and we'll bounce the $495 and charge that one for $35" a bank will *always* say "let's charge $35 on each and every one of these items, even though the person does have money on deposit.

Advertising Still Works, But Technocommies Want To Make it Work Differently

 

Interestingly, at a time when people are ranting about the death of newspapers and the move to online news, they are also simultaneously saying that advertising doesn't work. In fact, now we have a Wharton professor saying it doesn't work, so it must be true. What's fascinating about his piece is that he writes about Second Life very matter-of-factly, indicating that he perceives that SL both serves as  a destination where virtual sales occur and serves as a model for how content can be sold online in general. Through this article, I found an absolute gem that I had somehow missed at the time, Jaron Lanier's op-ed piece in which he says something that sums up the entire analogue hole problem and puts the entire Cory Doctorow or Cory Linden or Kevin Kelly or Lawrence Lessig copyleftism shtick into brilliant perspective:

How long must creative people wait for the Web’s new wealth to find a path to their doors? A decade is a long enough time that idealism and hope are no longer enough. If there’s one practice technologists ought to embrace, it is the evaluation of empirical results.

To help writers and artists earn a living online, software engineers and Internet evangelists need to exercise the power they hold as designers. Information is free on the Internet because we created the system to be that way.

Wow. Let's hear that again, shall we?

Information is free on the Internet because we created the system to be that way.

Exactly. And yeah, we get it that if you can see it you can copy it, no need to explain for the millionth time - but as your fellow tekkie Lanier does explain -- you can work at making this different. It's not impossible. Once you change your mind.  More and more, studying the origins of the Internet and the insistence by leftist or utopian tekkies at the time that everything be free, and hearing the absolute hysteria on this subject now, including from Doctorow my recent fight, I can see that these immature extremists are not only wrong about what they are doing, they are fighting for it with increasing ferocity and violence -- which is why I call them Bolsheviks. "We need to grow up," Lanier says about his class of tekkies -- and he couldn't be more right.

Prof. Eric Clemons manifesto is premised on the idea that in general advertising doesn't work, so it's easy for him then to show that it doesn't work online. His idea that "advertising doesn't work" is in part an unconscious expression of his culture and class mores, which amount to "I don't like advertising and I don't think it works on *me*"

I'm fascinated that among Clemons' 3-point plan for monetarizing the Internet, 2 of them are points involve Second Life (!) -- but, it's Lent. Go and read and think about it -- this and Lanier's nod back then in 2007 to the concept of legitimization of the sale of virtual goods in a virtual world means that the concept of virtual worlds is finally coming into its own, intellectually (and I could add, no thanks to Beyers Sellers).

Even so, I disagree with what Eric Clemons says precisely because it's extreme and stark -- there almost seems to be a contest these days for who can make the biggest and baddest pronouncement. Because I think people still a) pay attention to ads b) appreciate ads c) respond to ads of the old type and the current online type, even though you you do have to keep searching for new models for monetarization and try many things.

Declaring War on Cory Doctorow

Boris Kustodiyev's Bolshevik.

I'm declaring war on Cory Doctorow, Electric Frontier Foundation fellow, science fiction author, Boing Boing site author, and copyleftist extraordinaire for attempting to silence me on Twitter, and for his insidious ideas that are part of a movement to destroy culture and the economy. I'm doing this for the sake of freedom of speech on the Internet, and creating a free public commons where bullies and thugs around the powers that be cannot prevent you from speaking your mind and questioning those in power and those with influence, and debating ideas. I'm doing this in all seriousness, and I'm not doing this as somehow somehow who is "filled with bile" or "jealous" or "working for the RIAA" or "living in the fantasy world of SL who should get a life" or some other silly thing like that. Cory Doctorow must be stopped -- and I'm here to push back. I'm here to put my foot down and say, no, Cory, you can't get away with this crap, I won't stand for it. This story will take awhile to tell; you're welcome to skim or go away.

What, you say? You have something against this iconic science fiction nerd who is beloved by geeks everywhere? This adorable little nebbish who is a Web 2.0 rockstar? Who preaches the glories of opensource everywhere on the lecture circuit to thunderous applause? Well, yeah, because his ideology is wrong, destructive, and indefensible. Nobody ever questions it in our circles; nobody ever seems to think it through. And if they are left to have their way, nobody will be able to in the future.

What's especially reprehensible about Doctorow is that he threatened me and abuse reported me to Twitter for "harassment," trying to silence my legitimate public criticism of him. Judge for yourself how absurd the charges are. He did this in the most slimey way, trying to make it seem as if I'm some sort of liar and stalker, and even got his awful little posse, like tech-thug Charles Arthur of the Guardian, to Google witch-hunt me and make preposterous allegations. You would think that these, uh, evolved, hip, information-wants-to-be-free darlings of the social media set were...afraid.

It all started with Andrew Keen asking a straightforward question on Twitter, which is of course home of the "richly terse conversation" (which is one of my favourite quotes of his). Keen himself has me on ignore now, i.e. block-follow because I called him -- the horror! -- a geek like the other geeks (imagine! impertinent!), but no matter, I still attempt to talk to him, a year from now he'll get over his pique. He asks:

.@DonLinn #sxswbp curious about how @doctorow. makes his living. He is certainly very prominent & articulate apostle, but where's the money?

Well, good question! sez I. Indeed! How do you make money by GIVING AWAY books! Oh, yeah, we've heard this a million times, like it's the loaves and the fishes and walking on water and the Second Coming all rolled into one. Why, give everything away, and people will pay you anyway! Of course, this is one of those things where you have to add: "Don't try this at home, kids."

"He Sat All Day In Front of His Computer"

Very few people remarked on Twitter or Facebook or any of those other social-media watering holes still very much overpopulated with gamerz and geeks about a school-shooter in Germany who killed 15 of his fellow students before being wounded by police and turning the gun on himself. He played Counterstrike and watched YouTube and chatted on the Internet shortly before the killing, even announcing his intentions.

You are never, ever, in the land of MMORPGs, ever to suggest that there might be any connection, ever, between gaming, social media, the Internet, and shooting people to death. Ever. Of course, since Columbine, that connection is made by some mainstream newspapers even if the tech blogs and some online media deny it.

And yet, as these incidents pile up, it's very important to keep having the conversation about it, and to keep discussing it openly, without being railroaded into a "disconnect" by technologists and game publishers, and to keep asking if it is related, and how, and what the mechanism is, and how to mitigate or prevent the deadly connection if possible.

As I'm one of the few people I know who ever raises the connection between online games and crimes like murder, or social ills like addiction, I was startled to see that none other than Andrew Keen, in his new introduction to his book The Cult of the Amateur, describes just such a school-shooting incident, that time in Finland in 2007, commiserating with the Finns, apparently while on the lecture circuit for his book. A school-teacher thanked him after his talk, referencing the tragedy:

"Nobody can explain such a thing," she said quietly. "But I want to thank you for your book and for your speech today. I certainly don't agree with everything you say, but finally somebody is raising serious cultural and ethical questions about this YouTube generation. You are starting a really important conversation. We all need to talk about this before it's too late.

And while everybody else thinks its politically incorrect, Keen was not afraid to ask about the connections between the narcissism and dehumanization spawned by the Internet and games, and these types of horrible shootings. While conceding the complexity of the relationships, he wasn't afraid to say that the ability, via the Internet, to manifest such narcissism is a *facilitator* of such incidents. He makes even a bolder proclamation that I would:

"They Pay Me to Make Media"

Chris Brogan, paid by Pepsi to make media, with Twitter buddy Governor of Texas Rick Perry. Photo by Robert Scoble.

Every once in awhile, even though you are immersed in this incessant -- and incestuous -- tech conversation about itself and its impact on the world through Twitter or even the Linden blogs, and even though you "got it" already about the change to "the medium is the message" story a long time ago, still, it can come as a jolt when you sort of see it more starkly.

The other day I noticed this important and influential...guy (I had previously thought of him vaguely as a "podcaster" or something) named Chris Brogan, was tweeting out of South by Southwest, which, as Adri aptly described it, is kind of a spring break for geeks. Imagine, 10,000 of these people without jobs, many of them, but they are still able to pony up airfare and beer money to get to Austin!

So this guy, who I realized later is something more complicated than a "podcaster" -- he's basically a new-wave sole proprietor ad agency -- but I'm going to think of a better word in a minute -- kept tweeting that everyone should join him in the Pepsi tent. Doing that once or twice would be convincing as the sort of thing you might say when looking for somebody to join you at a readily-identifiable landmark, i.e. "Join me near the Pepsi sign at the train station". But when he's doing it 10 times, I then think to ask, "Hey, is Pepsi paying you to tweet that, dude?"

And here's what he says: no. But then he adds, helpfully, "They pay me to make media."

Just pause on that thought for a minute and let it burn in. "They pay me to make media".

"We Shall Not All Die, But We Shall All Be Changed"

The Assassination of President Lincoln, Currier & Ives

The old adage of the news room seems to fit the story of the "death of the newspaper" itself. It used to run like this, over a 7-day cycle:  "Lincoln Dead, Lincoln Still Dead, Lincoln Funeral, The Widow Weeps, Lincoln the Man, Lincoln the Age". To this, I used to add all the features that would come out in the style section and magazines the next week, "Booth's Unhappy Childhood: "I Never Saw Him Smile," Says First-Grade Teacher" and "Theaters Today: Are They Safe Today for the Public?" "Lincoln Still Alive, in Hiding; Body Double's Cousin Says He's Missing" and so on.

With the news of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer print edition going out of business, and the paper moving to an exclusively online format, I can't help thinking of the Biblical notion expressed in 1 Corinthians 15.52, "We shall not all die, but we shall all be changed." The newspaper didn't die -- not even all newspapers died yet by a long shot -- but they are all being changed. The fact that the death-knell ringers are primarily on the left and primarily happy about the death of competition to their little-read magazines and websites, means we aren't getting the full story yet. For one, we might learn more about experiments that are more mainstream, such as by Paul Steiger, formerly of the Wall Street Journal, who had the foresight some time ago to create this non-profit investigative news service, Propublica, which still conceives of the mission of "producing journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them." Their board and advisors like Pew Charitable Trusts or Fortune magazine or the Atlanta Journal-Constitution don't read like the usual line-up at the usual social-media conferences consisting of copyleftists who have spent their lives dropping out of college to find themselves in Nepal and writing science fiction novels they distribute for free in between playing WoW and working as "web designers". And no, Micah Sifry, the $10 million that this operation costs is replicable, can be done cheaper with less all-star casts, and is at least one answer to the problem that will be copied successfully.

It's useful to get away from the ranting blogosphere and the self-conscious professional punditosphere, and read what an actual journalist reports -- from the AP. The story reveals that another paper, the Seattle Times, possibly less liberal, will remain in a paper edition and keep coming out, although it clearly has its struggles. That fact is often overlooked in the hysterical-but-gleeful report on the blogging front. It may be just that America is learning what Russia learned in the 1990s after the Soviet Union fell and every town had an aspiration of having at least 3 dailies: that the market cannot support more than one daily, and that only one daily gets to live.

Says the AP, "The newspaper industry has seen ad revenue fall in recent years as advertisers migrate to the Internet, particularly to sites offering free or low-cost alternatives for classified ads. Starting last summer, the recession intensified the decline in advertising revenue in all categories."

Bingo. And that's why when Craig Newmark tells me on Twitter that "it's the web" that killed newspapers and not his free ad service, he's being more than disingenuous. His service *is* the web. That concept of "freeness" itself is what is killing the news business. And that's not necessarily a good thing for the futute, and nobody *has* to march to this future, and it *can* be stopped, in ways that Zittrain doesn't want to stop it, and it is "not inevitable" any  more than copyright theft in Second Life must become "inevitable". When Google finally stops subsidizing YouTube and other social media (it's staggering, too, you know) and people have to start paying more somewhere (at the ISP end or the web page access end), we'll hear more about this.

Andrew Keen, who is at least a critic of Shirky, in Free-Market Maoism leans more in the direction of capturing what's wrong with his much-linked analysis -- it is "praying for the unprayable". Shirky would love to see newspapers die because they represent a capitalist cultural and business model he essentially opposes with his technocommunist ideologies. BTW, increasinly I find with the Californians that you must never use the phrase "technocommunism" or they break out in hives, sensing a truth. But it's ok to use the phrase "digital Maoism" because...because...one of their own used it lol.