Category: Uncategorized

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OK…much like the last time I tried this, I have a lot going on. But what the heck…I’m going to give NaNoWriMo a try again this year, and see if I can finish a 50,000 word novel in November! Wish me luck!

I’ll put a progress widget in the sidebar in a day or two, but it’s Day 1, and the site appears to be over capacity right now…it would just show up as a broken link today. I’ll be sure to keep folks informed, though!

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I like reading and thinking about the future of news. I’m a news and journalism junkie, as well as a long-time Net user, so the topic is near and dear to my heart. I follow people online like Jay Rosen and Dan Conover, who provide pretty much a continuous flow of links to thoughtful postings regarding the evolution of news and journalism in modern Web era. Great, thought-provoking stuff. One of the more recent topics of discussion has been the recent “bring back the paywalls” meme, which could result in several of the large news organizations restricting their articles from the public Net. The NYT is talking about it, as is the Fox News group (see Murdock’s comments on the topic), as is Steve Brill, who has founded Journalism Online as a “digital publishing services company”.

When I read the arguments for these efforts, I just can’t wrap my head around it. Not that I think that making money is inherently evil or anything; not at all. It’s the I’m only going to let people SEE my stories that have paid me directly thing, like the Internet is akin to some sort of members-only club selling tickets at the door.

This model goes against the very nature and strength of the Web; the hyperlinking that allows sites of all sizes to relate useful topics, subjects, and references together. Breaking this ability breaks part of what makes tools like Google so useful; search sites USE those links to help determine which sites are authoritative on a given topic.

This is well-tilled ground, of course; newspapers have been in and out of the paywall game since news came to the Web. But 2009 is a year or crisis for papers, and news in general; the recession is affecting ad revenues, and the combination of that, the effect of sites like Craigslist on classified revenues (revenues which have supported news gathering at papers for generations), and burgeoning online content providers seems to have finally knocked the final supports out from under some papers. They’re starting to fall, and it’s starting to get ugly.

The latest iteration provides food for thought…I really like to try and understand where these folks are coming from. Are they visionary, or desperate to maintain the status quo? In a recent discussion with Steve Brill, Zachary Seward asks about how the news ecosystem of the web might react to Brill’s new endeavor (quote follows, but I encourage you to read the entire piece. It’s excellent):

Seward: There’s certainly a working theory out there that the minute any of those big-city papers start charging, they’re going to encourage competition that they don’t currently have. That the free blogs that are much derided now for not providing reporting will, in fact, you know, begin to put up much, much more competition—

Brill: Why? Why will they be able to? How are they going to pay for it?

Seward: Perhaps by starting with a model that is, you know, that isn’t a 150-person newsroom, and so even if the end product is not as good, it’s free, and that’s sort of the hardest thing to compete with.

Brill: But again, if what you’re striving for is to get the 5 or 10 percent of your most committed readers to pay, then you can afford to have that happen. And you can’t afford not to do it.

Wow. Again, the entire thing is well worth reading to get a better handle, but I can’t help but visualize a very confused dinosaur in a tar pit…

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I just finished watching the Health Care town hall meeting in Reston, VA yesterday that was disrupted by protest. I support anyone and everyone’s right to discuss and debate, even (and especially) those with whom I disagree. But I strongly oppose ANYONE (including people whose philosophies I agree with) using some of the tactics that were used yesterday:

Howard Dean & Rep. Moran Health Care Town Hall in Reston, VA

The people (even who disagreed with Dean and Moran) who actually were willing to ask questions and discuss things had a good opportunity to do so. Other folks…were asshats.

I’m very glad I watched this, and I want to make sure that I watch more, and include debates where people that I agree with are allegedly disruptive. We have to debate, folks. We have to discuss. That doesn’t mean we’re going to agree; I find it exceedingly unlikely that you’ll convince me that torture is ever a good idea, for example. But having a dialogue is important…disrupting a dialogue is never productive.

And btw…I don’t mean that protest is never appropriate. It can be, and I’ve done it myself. But disruptive protest in the middle of an open discussion about any issue has a pretty high standard to meet in order to be appropriate.

Long story short: that meeting video is excellent; give it a view.

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Symposium for the Future » It is easy to fall in love with technology… (by danah boyd). – danah boyd is an absolutely fantastic researcher and teacher in the realm of technology and social interaction. She deeply studies this stuff…well, well worth following. Her personal blog is a must-read for anyone who follows social interaction on the Web…or who has a teenager. *grin*

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So it’s been a week or so since the friendfeed-facebook news, and lots of folks have been chewing on it. Including me. I’ve spent a lot of time and effort commenting, liking, and interacting on Friendfeed since Twitter went sour for me; where will that be reflected if FF’s feeds go dark at some point? When a service you don’t control is where you spend your social time and effort, what does that mean?

For me, it means take back my voice. Like some other folks, I’m making the decision to locate my voice back here. (here, being relative to their one’s own domain space; kenzoid.com for me.) This doesn’t mean that I’m not going to post at Facebook, Friendfeed, etc. at all…but I am going to reset the focus.

Of course, there are issues no matter how you slice this. Even if I was popular enough to have an entire site of loyal fans, they would have the same issue if I ever lost interest and dropped my domain. Ideally, this stuff is distributed, decentralized, federated, and never disappears…but that’s hard. In the meantime, WordPress has a lot of plugins and tools that let me post the same sorts of things directly to my blog that I would to Friendfeed. Not as many people may see them directly (though they still show up at FF eventually), but that’s ok.

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Wow. In a quick 48 hours or so, the Interwebs have dealt a double whammy. First, the closure of the url shortener tr.im has highlighted the danger of the url proxy…without some carefully built safeguards, the loss of a shortening site means the loss of lots and lots of lookups. And with Friendfeed purchased by Facebook out of the blue, I expect an aggressive attempt to merge my two accounts and social networks coming…an attempt that I will absolutely rebuff. If necessary, I’ll remove or freeze my friendfeed account; I simply have very little overlap in the two networks, and I don’t WANT them merged. As I’ve said before, the constant online push to merge every type of friendship, acquaintance, co-worker, and family member into one or two buckets is completely unacceptable to me. When faced with no way to avoid it other than account deletion, I’ll delete the account. (I certainly hope it won’t come to that in this instance, and I expect that we’ll be able to leave legacy FF accounts around for some time. *fingers crossed*)

What have we learned? *sigh* Well…as sources as diverse as Dave Winer and autonomo.us have declared, we need decentralized services that allow personal control over our data. We need the ability to pick up and move our network information, our saved preferences, and our corpus of shared status, comments, and conversations. There may be disagreements on the exact best way to accomplish this (community-owned sites, Free and Open Network Services, or even a plain ol’ market-based service ala Jon Udell’s hosted lifebits concept), but there’s growing agreement that it’s a good idea. It’s our data.

I like the idea of ‘Free Services’ (as is usual with me, that’s free as in speech, not [necessarily] free as in beer). Although I’m not going to limit myself to GNU Affero GPL choices while I’m exploring, but I hope to be able to settle on a open tool in the end. In addition, I dig federation…the ability to avoid a centralized authority, yet allow separate instances of a service (or related services sharing an API) to communicate, authenticate, and pass information back and forth.

For purposes of Friendfeed replacement, I’m currently interested in identi.ca (where I already have an account), as well as laconi.ca (the F/OSS software behind identi.ca, which can be set up and used in a federated microblogging network), Google Friend Connect, Ning, the DiSo Project, and perhaps some WordPress plugins. At a minimum. We’ll see what shakes out once I start playing around.

URL shortening is a little trickier…it’s a dangerous proposition however you do it. If the service goes down, you’re pretty much out of luck. The best safeguard I’ve seen is that used by ur1.ca (a service by the same company that runs identi.ca…see a pattern here?). ur1.ca provides a safeguard by enabling a download of the entire shortened database of links directly from the site at any time. This is a powerful backup, allowing the data to be safeguarded in multiple places, and the links to be rehydrated by almost anyone, if need be. Great idea!

Even though I’m open during this experimentation phase, it’s notable that two of the most promising tools I’m looking at (identi.ca and ur1.ca) are both services of a company (Control Yourself) that espouses the concept of Open Network Services – sites that use Open Source software to create and distribute Open Content. That resonates with me.

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The story about Amazon deleting George Orwell’s ‘1984’ off of Kindles due to (apparently) a licensing issue is all the rage today. It’s an interesting issue…I don’t agree with everyone’s take on it (“stolen property” questions vs. copyright licensing issues, etc.), but I do think that having the discussion is good. If it takes this sort of event to enliven debate over the issues with intellectual property sales, the public domain, licensing vs. renting, etc., then so be it. (and the irony of ‘1984’ being the subject of the deletion is certainly giving the story legs!)

But the heartbreaking portion of the story to me was a quote from the NYT article:

Justin Gawronski, a 17-year-old from the Detroit area, was reading “1984” on his Kindle for a summer assignment and lost all his notes and annotations when the file vanished. “They didn’t just take a book back, they stole my work,” he said.

Losing notes, especially for an assignment…well, it sucks. I certainly hope Justin was able to save his work. If he wasn’t, and he’s still looking for help, please forward this along if you happen to know him. Regardless, I decided to type up some info on this for anyone else caught in this situation.

There’s no way to know for sure, but there’s a pretty good chance (IMO) that the notes are still available. And even (tragically) if they aren’t, there are some simple steps one can take to ensure that they ARE kept safe.

1) Backup the “My Clippings.txt” file offline, on your computer. This is the file where all your highlights and notes are stored on the Kindle as you make them. It’s a basic text file, and as near as I can tell, it’s just appended to…no deletions. So hopefully, Justin’s notes are still in this file, on his Kindle, and available once he copies the file off. And if they aren’t, then at least for future assignments, the process for taking a backup will be known.

(note: I only have a Kindle 2, so any differences between it and the Kindle 1 I wouldn’t be aware of. IIRC, the Kindle 1 has a card reader, though, so it should be a similar process. I’m guessing the clippings file is on the card.)

To copy the file off, connect your Kindle to a computer (PC, Mac, Linux…shouldn’t matter) with the provided power/USB cable. The power plug end of the power cable comes off, and allows to connect the Kindle to a computer via USB (it will charge from this connection as well). Once it’s connected to the computer, a drive or device should show up representing the Kindle (this depends on what operating system you’re using, but in all cases it should work).

Open that drive/device, and you should see the “root directory” of the Kindle, which for me only has three directories: “Audible”, “music”, and “documents”. Select the “documents” directory. You’ll see all your books and periodicals (which you can also backup, and I’d encourage you to do so), plus a few other files, one of which is called “My Clippings.txt”. This is it. Your highlights, notes, and bookmarks are kept in this file in this format:

The Iron Heel (Jack, 1876-1916 London)
– Highlight Loc. 1230 | Added on Friday, April 03, 2009, 08:38 AM

You are piggish and acquisitive, but the magic of your phrases leads you to believe that you are patriotic.
==========
The Iron Heel (Jack, 1876-1916 London)
– Note Loc. 1637 | Added on Friday, April 03, 2009, 05:45 PM

Followup
==========
The Iron Heel (Jack, 1876-1916 London)
– Bookmark Loc. 1674 | Added on Friday, April 03, 2009, 05:50 PM

It’s just a text file, and the Kindle appears to only append to it. I suppose it’s possible that the removal process for ‘1984’ removed all references to the book from this file as well (hello, Winston Smith!), but I’d be surprised if that were the case. Hopefully, Justin will find his notes and highlights here. Drag this file to somewhere on your local machine (I have a “kindlebackup” directory), and you should be back in book report business! I try to do this every couple of weeks, just to be on the safe side.

I tested a similar scenario by downloading a new book, making some notes and highlights, and then deleting the book…at least in that standard case, my notes remain. It’s possible that Amazon’s uber-delete powers go further and edit the clippings file, but I can’t really test that.

2) There’s actually another place to try, though I’d say of the two, this one’s more likely to have been adjusted by Amazon, since it’s in their cloud. Your notes and highlights are actually also backed up and available online if you keep WhisperNet on (even occasionally). Open a browser, go to http://kindle.amazon.com, and login. You’ll be presented with a Reading List from the Kindle that includes links to your notes and highlights. I wish the formatting here was a little more capable (you could d/l the info directly, or there was a private RSS feed or something), but still, the info is at least available.

Hopefully, between these two methods, people who have issues with notes and highlight loss can mitigate the effects. There are lots of reasons beyond Amazon reaching down from the sky that could cause an issue: Kindles can break, be stolen, get lost, etc. Knowing how to backup the personal annotations that you’ve made to your library is always a good idea, IMO. As I get more and more into using the Kindle, I find I annotate a LOT more than I do in physical books and periodicals…I think comes from the don’t write in the book mom-voice in my head. I like knowing that I can make notes w/o marking up the work, and I can also backup my notes in multiple ways. Hopefully this post can help someone else as well!

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So, I may have smoked my last clove cigarette, and not even known it? How did THAT happen?

Honestly, that’s not completely true…but the clock is at three months and ticking, thanks to the recently passed Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act:

“Beginning 3 months after the date of enactment of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, a cigarette or any of its component parts (including the tobacco, filter, or paper) shall not contain, as a constituent (including a smoke constituent) or additive, an artificial or natural flavor (other than tobacco or menthol) or an herb or spice, including strawberry, grape, orange, clove, cinnamon, pineapple, vanilla, coconut, licorice, cocoa, chocolate, cherry, or coffee, that is a characterizing flavor of the tobacco product or tobacco smoke.”

Nice job, Philip Morris. Note a couple of things here. 1) I kept a certain level of attention on this legislation, and I was aware that packaging rules were being severely changed, the FDA was being given new powers, etc.

But I had NO clue that clove (and most other flavored cigarettes) were being permanently banned. There doesn’t seem to be much (domestic – more on this later) news talking about this; the focus is on the other aspects of the bill. Admittedly, I’m not a big clove smoker by any means…on the order of a handful a month, at most. But I checked around, and people I thought would be aware, aren’t. This may not have been stealth legislation, but it certainly wasn’t highlighted.

And 2)…note the exemption. Menthol. The flavoring ban is “for the children”, of course…but exempting menthol is a pretty big hole in that, unless you’re simply trying to get Philip Morris to drop their objections. Which Congress was, and Philip Morris did. Gak.

While the flavoring ban has flown under our radar, Indonesia, OTOH, is more than a little pissed. Cloves are a fairly niche product in the US, but there are a lot of fans, both native-borne and immigrants (these cigarettes, known generally as kreteks, are of Indonesian origin). Jakarta is threatening WTO action based on the menthol exemption (favoring a domestic product over an import).

That could be a monkey wrench for the ban, but who knows how far that will go. The only thing more confusing and uglier under the covers than domestic law-making is international legal action.

I could just stop being naive, and accept that this is the way the world works (which is, to a certain extent, absolutely true). But in the spirit of Shaw’s unreasonable man quote, you have to stand up at times for progress to occur. This is one of those times. This law, as passed, is really just execrable.

We’ve banned flavored cigarettes, arguably (one might say) as a first step to banning them all. Except we’ve exempted the largest domestic flavoring, and there’s not even a hint of banning tobacco PRODUCTION. But why would we continue to grow a crop we can’t sell?? Because we’re selling it abroad. A crop too dangerous to sell here is returning to it’s former status as a premier cash crop for export. That’s low. That’s truly low.

For more background on the bill (and the previous one in 2004, which seems to have been “Part 1”), this article is well worth reading: “Lost In The Weed“.

What do we do? The damn thing’s already passed, so I don’t know. But we certainly don’t have to be quiet about it, and maybe, just maybe, a little sunlight can still make a difference.