Christmas Flight

I'm hanging about the house this Christmas bitching about having a cold. Meanwhile, Cpt. Exnicios has been deployed to Afghanistan and arrived there early this morning (by way of Maine, Ireland and Kuwait).

Exnicios has an amazing blog where he's shared stories of what it's like to be recalled from civilian life as part of the Individual Ready Reserve program. I highly recommend it.

Argumentum ad Verecundiam

Knol is what will be referred to as Google's Wikipedia-killer. As usual, Anil has already written the really smart, thought-out critique that I was never gonna be able to produce in the first place. So go read that.

The screenshot that accompanied the announcement is a very telling illustration of Anil's central point. Specifically that "An awareness of the fact that Google has never displayed an ability to create the best tools for sharing knowledge would reveal that it is hubris for Google to think they should be a definitive source for hosting that knowledge."

Turns out Google's really good at hubris.

The screenshot shows something kinda like a Wikipedia article except it has ads by Google, peer reviews and prominent author attribution.

On the first point, a big reason this is happening is because of the amount of unmonetizable traffic Google sends to Wikipedia. Guess what the "I'm feeling Lucky" hit is for the title of this post. And Wikipedia won't accept advertising. Let's build Knol.

The further justification for Knol is "Who can trust all that crap on Wikipeda?" Google is fundamentally an academic institution and part of that ethos is that things aren't really "good" unless peer reviewed. The concept of peer review is central to how work is done inside Google and that basically works as far as it goes. Unfortunately, that ethos has extended to the way Google views content on the web. Sergey once asked the Blogger team how Blogger was going to compete with the New York Times. Even though our pageviews exceeded those of the NYT, the point I think he was making was "When are you gonna produce something authoritative that lots of people will accept as good." Blogger's answer was "Huh?" Knol's answer is peer review.

Well, part of the answer is peer review. The other part is "get the smart people to write the articles." The fact that the article in the released screenshot was authored by a Stanford University academic is basically all you need to know about how Google views content on the web. It doesn't count as knowledge until it's given to you by an expert. Preferably an expert who went to Stanford (who misspells 'United States' - zing!).

In conclusion of his post, Anil refers back to a post he made in 2003 titled Google's First Mistake. I didn't understand that older post at the time it was written, but it kinda made me mad. Today, the announcement of Knol reminds me that I'm still a little mad. But for different reasons.

Awkward

Slate tries to unpack the Wes Anderson / Owen Wilson interview. It's Wilson's first interview since his alleged suicide attempt.

Slate seems confused that Anderson would make a video filled with superficial, mildly absurd banter that masks an emotionally complicated and unresolved situation.

Apparently, they are not Wes Anderson fans.

The market has not solved

On Saturday, I went to a birthday party where we played a little PS2 Karaoke. I wowed the crowd with my rendition of Friday I'm in Love. And that song has been stuck in my head since Sunday morning.

At first, it was pleasant enough. But it's starting to get annoying. For me, the solution is usually just to listen to the song obsessively until my brain releases it from bondage. But, to my shame, I don't own Friday I'm in Love. In fact I don't own a single album by The Cure.

Now this requires some explanation. I like The Cure. Singing along to Just Like Heaven was as essential to high school as hanging out at Denny's. And I had a great time seeing them live at Radio City Music Hall in 1996.

But at some point I decided that I shouldn't own any of their albums. There's no good reason behind my stubbornness. I may have decided that this privation was necessary to show my loyalty to New Order. My adolescence had a number of overwrought pop culture-induced anxieties.

Anyway, I'm ready to make up for lost time. Crystal has the Best of album shared over iTunes here at Twitter HQ (and Blaine is sitting on the completely discography). But I'd really like to pick up my own DRM-free, high quality version of Kiss Me.

Yet, Internet fails me. I can't just go download that legally. The best I can do is pick up the lullaby version of The Cure from Audio Lunchbox.

Which I have now done.

I'm trying to give you my money, big media. But all I get for my efforts is the Fisher-Price Friday I'm in Love.

Cuties

Awhile back Ev gave me Andrew Keen's Cult of the Amateur as a gift. And by "gift" I mean it was part of the TED schwag and he gave it to me to try to drive me crazy.

Since then, I've tried a number of times to write about the book. But I always thought it was kinda dubious to write a blog post about a book which claims that blogs have caused a "flattening" of culture.

I mean, it's pretty much a surefire way to get attention for your book by antagonizing bloggers. The guy might not actually have that strong an opinion at all, but realized he could sell a lot of books by picking a fight with the Internet. So why feed the trolls?

Anyway, turns out this is all a moot point because Andrew Keen decided to do an interview with Rabbit Bites. A man who's written an entire book about how "the democratization of the digital world is assaulting our economy, our culture, and our values" did an webcast interview with two squeaky-voiced rabbits.

Dude. Just because you speak with an accent and sit in front of giant bookshelf, doesn't mean that we can't all see what a big whore you are.

Shock!

Congrats to the Blogger folks for launching draft.blogger.com. It's supercool that they've got their own place for trying out experimental features. And I love the blueprint-y look to it.

The first big feature is video upload. We'd been talking about doing this for so long I thought I had to capture my reaction at finally seeing it live.

Move the chains

The folks behind Battlestar Galactica have long been trying out some smart stuff in terms of engaging their audience via the web. For example, the director's commentary podcast for each episode (I listened to a bunch of them, but gave up at some point). Also, the pre-season three webisodes (great idea, turned out they weren't that compelling).

I'm pretty excited about their latest venture, the Videomaker Toolkit. They've released a whole bunch of digital assets (video clips, audio, graphics) and have encouraged folks to make 4 minute battlestar videos of their very own.

I love this. Television and movies have long been these monolithic forms of media that are only meant for the masses to receive, not participate in. Battlestar know which side its dorky bread is buttered on and is putting some of its IP in the hands of the fans. Hot.

My quick read of the TOS suggests they've got the right idea in that they stress that the fan-creators retain ownership over the videos they create ... altho' you grant SciFi the right to make money off of what you produce.

The only truly bonehead move is that they don't want you posting your video on YouTube. Given that you're obliged to include a promo clip at the end of your video (which seems reasonable to me) why wouldn't SciFi want these videos distributed as widely as possible. What benefit do they get by keeping them all on scifi.com where, I'm guessing, approximately 95% of visitors are already fans of their flagship show.

But still, progress. It's only a matter of time until Baltar starts blogging.

Open questions

I was having the sort of existential conversation you can only have at your 3rd bar stop of the evening and right before closing time.

The subject was, generally, does working on the web truly matter. Like, really in the grand scheme of things where we're all gonna die, be flooded by melted glaciers or ultimately blinked out in the heat death of the universe.

My answer is a strong Yes. I believe this because I believe that the Web is the most important human achievement of our lifetime. Not because of its ability to quickly deliver stock quotes, horoscopes and news, but because of what we can create with it. The web allows us to see the world from previously obscured vantage points, listen to voices that were previously too remote to hear.

In a nutshell, the web is important because it allows people to more easily answer the question "How do you feel?"

While I believe that more content and more viewpoints are good in and of themselves, they also point to a more transcendent purpose. As the web makes accessible this flood of perception, we are able to more fully realize that our own individual view of things is essentially arbitrary. By this I mean that while the particular way I see the world can never be challenged for its primacy in my understanding of things, I can grow to understand that it is a biological quick that causes me to experience things this way.

By realizing this we are able to more completely understand one another, regardless of location or background. And this sort of understanding is the most important factor that will allow us, as humans, to tackle global problems and achieve unimaginable goals.

And then I threw in some stuff about how I had an hallucination that suggested to me that human beings have evolved to be the sense organs of a planet-wide organism. Like I said, it was late.

In any case, I was rather satisfied with this oratory and it seemed to resonate with my fellow webgeek companions. I was so satisfied that I repeated it a few nights later to a different group of friends. The context was slightly different on this second, later occasion. On one hand, I was trying to explain why I was excited about my new job. And on the other, I was trying to find out why this second group of friends (while technologically-inclined) weren't really into the web at all as a medium of self-expression.

In my experience as a part-time blog evangelist, I've frequently run into the comment from non-bloggers that "Well, that all seems interesting but it's not for me. I just don't have anything to say." In the past, this response has both saddened and angered me. Saddened because I interpreted it, in part, as a lack of creativity. And angered because it was often voiced to me by co-workers who I figured would share my view of the transcendent power of the web (seeing as how they worked at Google and all).

But on this occasion I heard a new variant of this response from my friend Emily. She asked "Why is it so important that everyone participate in the web (as a creator)?" While not necessarily included in my overview, this is a fundamental part of my belief.

Eventually, I believe, everyone will be using the web as a medium of self-expression. Just as ~everyone has an email address, so too will ~everyone have a place on the web that they can point to as being theirs (even if it's not fully public or shared with everyone). Those that won't are those who will be prevented through some lamentable combination of lack of access or willful rejection of technology. But both from a philosophical and professional standpoint, I want to see as many as people as possible use the web to express themselves. Moreover, I want to build the tools that enable them to do so.

Emily wasn't buying it. She was happy that a good chunk of people would be writing blogs, making web pages, and so on. But there's no reason to go nuts here. We shouldn't expect or even hope for it to be everyone.

Clearly that should be the goal, I responded, for our understanding is increased as more experiences are shared. The network becomes more valuable as the number of nodes increases.

Then Emily told me about how, as a recruiter, she spends her time looking for people online. She uses advanced search engine hoodoo to find the right kind of people for the right job. And in this age when so many people can be found online, it's a real treat to find someone who has left no mark. The same with restaurants, she argued. If you can find somewhere that hasn't been reviewed a thousand times on yelp.com, it's like you're finding something special. Like a fresh snowfall before it gets all footprinted up. (OK - the snow metaphor is my own flowery nonsense, but I think it's in the spirit of her argument).

And I realized I didn't have a great response to that. It's possible that as more people have online presences, there will be a natural backlash from a subsequent generation of folks who don't want to share in that way. Maybe there will be folks who consider it a virtue to have as thin an online presence as possible, analogous to the pride some webgeeks feel when they manage to be completely unplugged for a week or weekend.

I hope this isn't the case. I hope we can create the right mix of technology that allows everyone to share parts of themselves online in a way that is natural. For those of us involved in creating social software, I feel it should be our goal. As a result of these two conversations, however, I feel both more driven to achieve it and less assured in the inevitability of our transcendental connectedness.

How do you feel?

Bovine

Nelson showed me his MOO MiniCards when I was in Paris and I thought they looked pretty sweet. I got my bundle today and I'm completely impressed.

The idea of making tangible artifacts of the web is an interesting one. In many ways, it's an idea that's easy to screw up. For example, I've not been very impressed by the various services for printing blogs (nor do I really see that type of physical web artifact as desirable).

But the smallness and quality of the MiniCards totally sells the artifact concept. I just wish there was a better societal norm for exchanging small cards that wasn't based on being introduced to people. For instance, I could see myself getting into a game where you were encouraged to collect cards from others.

For the love of the B

I'd been meaning to write about the recent release of the new version of Blogger. But fortunately Ev captured pretty much everything I wanted to point out, but didn't mention on Buzz. And then he ripped the face offa evhead.com ... which I'm gonna assume is unrelated.

This release of Blogger will also be the last I work on as I am leaving Google at the end of next week. I'd been planning on leaving for a while but really wanted to see this version in the wild before I went.

There are two questions you get asked when you leave a job: 1) why and 2) what next. I'll take the second part first.

What's next is nothing much. I'm going to travel some ... Vegas, London (yes, that London) and France are due up for the Fall. I'm going to play a bunch of poker (hopefully better than I have been) and a bunch of video games as well. The reading of books (comic or otherwise) will likely be involved, potentially in a beach-like setting. I'm definitely not going to look for or accept another job for several months altho' I anticipate working on the web again.

As to the Why, well, I've been working on Blogger for almost four years and I've been at Google for 3 1/2. I could have taken time off or switched to a different project, but I feel that after I'm finished doing the nothing I've got planned, I'm going to want to do something somewhere small. And, to be honest, I can't really imagine being at Google but not being involved in Blogger.

As Bryan Mason likes to recount, when I interviewed for the job at Pyra he asked me what I wanted to do next and I said "Anything but want I've been doing." Not the best interview answer, but fortuntely Bryan thought that would make me a good fit. Turns out, I couldn't have been luckier.

Early on when I was working on Blogger I realized that there were those who saw blogging as a Great Leap Forward in personal expression and those who saw it as largely self-indulgent nonsense. The thing that surprised me was that I was in the former group.

I struggle with excessive skepticism and in many ways would be a natural blog-hater were it not for the fact that, to me, it's undeniably awesome that people can so easily put their profound, profane, revolutionary and ridiculous thoughts online. To me, this is so obviously the fullest expression of why the web is the most important invention of our lives. To what better use could it be put?

To put it another way, I love facts. Love 'em! Especially about movies. So, when I first saw IMDB I thought I was looking into the mind of God. But I never actually wanted to work on the web until I learned about Blogger.

I feel amazingly privileged to have been able to work on a product that's used by millions of passionate users and to help that product grow to enable more voices to exist. In doing so, I've been able to work with some phenomenal people. I'd like to thank Jason Sutter who successfully campaigned for me to get interviewed at Pyra despite the fact that the requirements for the job were allegedly "Not a dude, and especially not a dude named Jason." I'm incredibly grateful to Evan Williams who hired me, brought me to Google, enabled me to become Blogger's product manager and entrusted me with his creation when he left.

And I thank all of the folks who've worked on Blogger - the folks who worked on it before I was around, the Pyra crew with whom I spent many a day cramped into offices in both San Francisco and Mountain View and the people who built Blogger into what it is today and what it will become.

Future

The cable package I had back in college included the NASA channel - a big favorite among my peers. What's not to like about around-the-clock, mostly silent footage of the Earth as seen from space.

It turns out that NASA has brought their ambient broadcast to the Internet. You can watch live coverage of the current space shuttle mission. Which is pretty amazing. Right now I'm listening to the evening briefing of the ISS crew. "Spanky says there are no sardines aboard ISS" ... I think that's code about aliens.

The point is, there's people talking to me live from space! Amazing.

One note

(Henceforth, I will only blog about the following three things: Ze Frank, Vegas/Poker and why the New York Times sucks. With the previous two posts, this one completes the combo trifecta.)

Ze Frank made the NYT yesterday with a piece by Warren St. John in the Sunday Styles (?) section. The article is about the Fabuloso Friday episode of Ze Frank's The Show in which viewers of the video blog collaborated using a wiki to write the script for June 9th's episode.

Ze Frank then faithfully executed the script (mostly gags making him do/say stupid things) about which he observed in the NYT, "The meta joke here is, 'See how hard you can shake the marionette.'"

While St. John's article contains background on both The Show and Ze Frank himself, the central question is "How well does audience generated content work?" The borscht-y headline reads "And You're So Funny? Write My Script" and the conclusion about the quality of the episode is "Mr. Frank's performance was true to the script, and if that is any guide, it is doubtful that any 'Saturday Night Live' writers will soon lose their jobs to the vast networks of volunteer comedy writers on the Web."

The last sentence truly irks. First off, while it's natural to ask "Was it funny?" (my answer: not as funny as a regular show) St. John's conclusion illustrates the flaw at the heart of so much of the NYT's reporting about online media. The NYT cannot help but see online content as a possible wholesale replacement of traditional media. Around every corner is a group of young cannibals agitating to eat the collective lunch and staff of the Fourth Estate.

This leads to reporting where folks who are doing stuff online have to be patronized in order to be discussed. For example, Warren St. John's piece has this line in the 3rd paragraph "Like a lot of young adults, Mr. Frank, 34, has a Web site." Doesn't 'young adult' usually refer to a literature targeted at teens? Perhaps this sentence just got recycled from one of the MySpace articles but isn't 34 solidly adult adult?

(The original sin in this category is Rebecca Mead's New Yorker piece from November 2000 which is frequently cited as the first big article on blogs but is really just a story about the relationship between Meg Hourihan and Jason Kottke. She's recently written a followup on how blogs have evolved ... the thesis: after some time apart, Jason and Meg got married!!)

I've never read McLuhan ... or rather I tried reading McLuhan but couldn't follow the meter of his prose-poetry. But I'm pretty sure he makes a point about how new media doesn't replace old. In any case, I wish the professionals in traditional one-to-many media would just understand this single idea: No one is coming for your lunch. The reason your business models are failing is not because there's no role for traditional journalism in contemporary life ... it's because, as of late, your product has sucked beyond the telling of it. And I'm looking at you broadcast TV/White House correspondents.

Getting back to Ze Frank, it's worth noting that Fabuloso Friday is only one of a number of things that Ze Frank has done to get his audience involved in the act of content creation. In fact, one of the central premises of the show is that folks can try to gain admission to the League of Awesomeness by submitting video of themselves performing a Power Move.

The fact that this is absurd is less interesting than the fact that it is generative. Online content allows a creator to directly inspire content creation from others. By comparison, despite the fact that the Daily Show is the most important social commentary of our time, it's ability to inspire new content creation is limited. Television doesn't do dialog well. Ze Frank, on the other hand, is doing more interesting, new stuff to get his audience participating than pretty much anyone else online today.

And that, I feel, should have been the thesis of St. John's piece about Fabuloso Friday, not how high it scored on the laugh-o-meter.

Context

Ze Frank is in Vegas and had the following smart thing to say about the old place:

Here, what you see is what you get and there's no reason to feel like you're missing anything. This New York [the casino] means the same to me as it does to everyone else. Everything is out of context and that means context allows for everything.

I completely agree.