Posts tagged “2” from longer posts

• Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Pursue, Don't Harass
• Women! Congressional "Catfighting"
• The House's First Hours

• Connecting Dem Offices and Outside Progressives from the Get-Go
• Copyleft and the 110th
• News Roundup

Heck yeah, I went over to the Save the Childen Yak Shack, bought me a rideable yak, and then promptly knitted a lovely jumper from his yak wool.

You ever have it where all you're trying to do is put on a pair of virtual glasses and you end up detaching your hair from your own head? Man.

Blue Jersey is asking garden staters to "Think Equal," in an ad campaign whipped together in a couple of weeks for a few thousand scraped-together bucks.

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I was surprised to find at this weekend's RootsCamp DC that Second Life was a hot topic of conversation. RootsCamp is a meeting of progressive activists based on the "un-conference" model made popular in the tech world, first by the invite-only FooCamp and then by the open-to-the-riff-raff BarCamps. At a unconference, if you're moved to hosted a session on a particular topic, you just slap a notice with a time and place up on the planning wall. We had a somewhat intimate RootsCamp two weeks ago here in New York at Brooklyn PolyTech and then another rather larger one at the NEA building in DC this weekend.

I somewhat stumbled into a Sunday session on the political applications of Second Life after Adam Conner said to me, "hey, shouldn't you be there?" (Together with the rest of Forward Together PAC, I helped shepard Governor Mark Warner into Second Life as the first American political leader with a presence in that virtual world. Also, I have a sexy white midriff-baring virtual pant suit and pink "kitten heels" outfit combo that I like to wax on about wherever it's halfway relevant. If you know me offline, go ahead and laugh.) It was a fascinating session hosted by Ruby Sinreich and Andrew Hoppin, who have used Second Life to organize RootsCamp sessions in-world, the next of which is coming up on Wednesday, 4PM EST. A testament to the stickiness of SL -- after hearing Ruby and Andrew talk for a few minutes and seeing a handle of in-world screen captures, more than one participant (at least two!) who walked into the the session never having heard of SL told me that they now expected to waste several first-life hours in Second Life in the next week alone.

The response to SL was so strong that we held a lunch-time demonstration on my laptop to show people how to get started navigating around the space and pick out their own pretty outfits. Aldon's got video.

Speaking of pretty outfits, there's a fantastic event coming up in Second Life to which I have nothing appropriate to wear. The blogging judge Richard Posner, of Project Posner fame (as well as the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals), will in interviewed by Hamlet Au in-world on Thursday at 9PM EST on his subtly-titled new book Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency. The problem is that Jane wants to attend to the event too and has asked to borrow the pant suit. Now I got nothing to wear but my new RootsCamp t-shirt pictured above, and that just seems to casual.

(I spent way too long this afternoon poking around the really lovely Reuters Second Life bureau. That's what you see above. The photographs are the work of the news service's staffers, hanging gallery-style around the space. Now imagine explaining to the kid who's the subject of the photo in the top image what's going on that picture.)

Right as I set out to cover the Pennsylvania races for the AFL-CIO, I begged the readers of MyDD for suggestions on books that might help a progressive like me get a better handle on the history of labor in the U.S. I second Ezra Klein when he objects to "progressivism's strange indifference towards labor issues." Building a sustainable movement, I think, requires that we understand our labor past and present at least as well as we do the history of the civil rights struggle. The readers of MyDD came through beautifully, suggesting a range of books that not only delve into labor and the union movement but get at the roots of American populism:

Strike! -- Jeremy Brecher (suggested by nathanhj and kofu)
"Since its original publication in 1972, no book has done as much as Jeremy Brecher's Strike! to bring American labor history to a wide audience. Strike! narrates the dramatic story of repeated, massive, and often violent revolts by ordinary working people in America."

Three Strikes: Labor's Heartland Losses and What They Mean for Working Americans -- Stephen Franklin (nathanhj)
"Chicago Tribune labor writer Franklin vividly describes the impact of three strikes on union workers in Decatur, IL. Union members who had worked their entire lives for Caterpillar, Staley, or Bridgestone/Firestone were forced out on strike, threatened with permanent replacement, and, if lucky, called back to work under a company-imposed contract full of concessions. Franklin tells the story from the viewpoint of production workers caught between aggressive corporations and an aging union bureaucracy."

Ravenswood: The Steelworkers' Victory and the Revival of American Labor -- Tom Juravich and Kate Bronfenbrenner (nathanhj)
"Over the past two decades, Americans have seen their workplaces downsized and streamlined, their jobs out-sourced, sped up, and, all too often, eliminated. Unions have seemed powerless to defend their members, with big defeats in the strikes at PATCO, Eastern Airlines, International Paper, and Hormel. Ravenswood recounts how the United Steelworkers of America, in a battle waged over an aluminum plant in West Virginia, proved that organized labor can still win--even against a company controlled by one of the world's richest and most powerful men."

From the Ashes of the Old: From the Ashes of the Old: American Labor and America's Future -- Stanley Aronowitz (nathanhj)
"In the last few years, histories have squeezed the most minute details out of the rise and fall of the 20th-century labor movement. Aronowitz (The Death and Rebirth of American Radicalism) takes the tack that "the future of American labor is directly tied to America's future" and, after extensive exposition of union diversity and interaction, he finds future union potential in the millions of white-collar workers and professionals and among production and service workers in the South."

Poor Workers' Unions -- Vanessa Tait (nathanhj)
"Finally, the book we've all been waiting for! With gripping tales of grassroots experiments in social justice unionism from the 1960s to the present, Vanessa Tait cracks wide open our concept of what a labor movement looks like, and shows how it can be part and parcel of movements for racial and gender justice."

Homestead: The Glory and Tragedy of an American Steel Town -- William Serrin (phillydem)
"A profoundly moving elegy on the death of a legendary Pennsylvania steel town--and, by extension, the end of a century of Smokestack America--from Serrin (Journalism/NYU), a former labor correspondent for The New York Times. The Homestead Steel Works was the site of the epic 1892 strike and lockout that saw steel chieftains Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick use the Pinkertons to crush the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers and set back the cause of unionism several decades."

Wobblies!: A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World -- Paul Buhle (Editor), Nicole Schulman (Texas Nate)
"The Wobblies, as members of the Industrial Workers of the World were known, were influential in the labor movement at the dawn of the 20th century. A grassroots organization that fought for equality and safe working conditions, the Wobblies also had ties to women's rights and socialism. This book attempts to encapsulate the rich history of the movement through comics (and connective essays) by such contributors as Peter Kuper, Harvey Pekar and Seth Tobocman."

Joe Hill: The IWW & The Making Of A Revolutionary Working Class Counterculture -- Franklin Rosemont (Texas Nate)
"A monumental work, expansive in scope, and not only the life, times, and culture of that most famous of the Wobblies (songwriter, poet, hobo, thinker, humorist, martyr), but crucially - and in great detail - the issues that he raised then - capitalism, white supremacy, gender, religion, wilderness, law, prison, industrial unionism - and their enduring relevance, and impact in the century since his death."

Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist -- Nick Salvatore (Texas Nate)
"Eugene Victor Debs was one of the most prominent labor activists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was, perhaps, the most admired openly radical public figure in America's history, running for president on the Socialist ticket in five separate elections, including a 1920 campaign conducted from prison."

The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America -- Lawrence Goodwyn (Texas Nate)
"He was the largest landholder...in one county and Justice of the Peace in the next and election commissioner in both, and hence the fountainhead if not of law at least of advise and suggestion. ...He was a farmer, a usurer, a veterinarian; Judge Benbow of Jefferson once said of him that a milder mannered man never bled a mule or stuffed a ballot box."

Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America -- James Green (Texas Nate)
"As Green thoroughly documents, the bloody Haymarket riot of May 4, 1886, changed the history of American labor and created a panic among Americans about (often foreign-born) "radicals and reformers" and union activists. The Haymarket demonstration, to protest police brutality during labor unrest in Chicago, remained peaceful until police moved in, whereupon a bomb was thrown by an individual never positively identified, killing seven policemen and wounding 60 others."

Which Side Are You On? Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back -- Thomas Geoghagen (Nathan Newman via eRobin)
"Based on his experiences as a Chicago labor lawyer, Geoghegan contends persuasively that post-industrial Reaganomics have caused a widening rift between the working and professional middle classes. In related episodes, he demonstrates how the combined effects of steel mill closings, leveraged buyouts and Third World competitive labor have contributed to the decline of American organized labor."

Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor -- Steve Fraser (Nathan Newman via eRobin)
"Onetime radical revolutionary from a Lithuanian village, Sidney Hillman (1887-1946) eked out a living as a cutter in Chicago's garment trade, then rose to become an influential labor leader and a member of FDR's inner circle. Due to his efforts, the Democratic Party of the mid-1930s came close to becoming the recognized party of organized labor."

Reds or Rackets: The Making of Radical and Conservative Unions on the Waterfront -- Howard Kimeldorf (Nathan Newman via eRobin)
"Kimeldorf's historical narrative manages to capture the tragedy and romance of dock labor on our two principal coasts at the same time as it provides an impressive analysis of the events. . . . An excellent contribution to our literature on labor history."

The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor --Nelson Lichtenstein (Nathan Newman via eRobin)
"Onetime Ford Motor die-maker Walter Reuther launched a sit-down strike in 1937 that forced General Motors to bargain with a multiplant union. Another key strike against GM, led by the indefatigable, self-confident United Automobile Workers (UAW) president from Wheeling, W.Va., ended in 1946 in a Pyrrhic victory for labor, setting off a wage-price upward spiral and marking the onset of the fragmentation of union power. Liberal, ex-socialist Reuther (1907-1970), who, as Congress of Industrial Organizations president, helped engineer that group's merger with the American Federation of Labor in 1955, was a magnetic figure to the noncommunist left."

Working Class New York -- Joshua B. Freeman (Nathan Newman via eRobin)
"In this absorbing and beautifully detailed history, Freeman charts the postwar rise and eventual fall of Manhattan working-class life and culture: "a story of massive movements of population and industry, tenacious struggle for rights and equality and ongoing discrimination and inequity." In 1946, 2.6 million men and women (out of 3.3 million employed) were working-class or blue-collar workers, many belonging to strong unions."

The Copper Crucible: : How the Arizona Miners' Strike of 1983 Recast Labor-Management Relations in America (Nathan Newman via eRobin)
"The 1981 firing and replacing of striking air traffic controllers by President Ronald Reagan is considered the start of labor's current decline. Legal protection of employees' right to join unions is now often ineffective and the strike, once labor's most potent weapon, has been defanged by employers who use permanent replacements for striking workers. In his first book, lawyer and journalist Rosenblum argues convincingly that the crucial struggle over permanent replacements came not with PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization) but in the lesser-known 1983-1986 strike by the United Steelworkers of America against the Phelps Dodge copper company in Arizona and Texas."

Teamster Rebellion -- Farrell Dobs (MikeB)
"The 1934 strikes that built the industrial union movement in Minneapolis and helped pave the way for the CIO, recounted by a central leader of that battle. The first in a four-volume series on the class-struggle leadership of the strikes and organizing drives that transformed the Teamsters union in much of the Midwest into a fighting social movement and pointed the road toward independent labor political action."

The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs -- Ray Ginger (MikeB)
"This moving biography presents the definitive story of the life and legacy of the most eloquent spokesperson and leader of the US labor and socialist movements."

Them and Us: Struggles of a Rank-and-File Union -- James Matles (MikeB)
no description given

John L. Lewis: An Anauthorized Biography -- Saul David Alinsky (MikeB)
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A long list, indeed. I'm gonna start with Geoghagen's Which Side are You On, on the recommendation of both Ezra and Nathan Newman.

"In breaking with our past... we need to fight and resist all forms of discrimination and prejudice, including homophobia."

It's so very hard not to abuse my front-page posting privileges on MyDD (that are only mine until Jerome realizes I still have front-page access and takes it away) and to instead post a diary that will quickly get lost in the ever-growing pile of content over there. Still, that's just what I've done.

The idea is pretty simple. After Tuesday, Democrats are in position to become the party that stands up for representative democracy, by fighting for the idea that every vote should count. But election reform is hard work. Democrats can get an easy win on the board by letting the people of the District of Columbia vote for a member of Congress to represent them and their neighbors on Capitol Hill.

Was the role of technology in politics different in 2006 than in 2004? How did new technology most affect Election 2006, and do you see any lessons for 2008?

I think the subtle difference in 2006 is that we've reached a critical mass of people who are fluent in using technology to communicate, and not just young people or the super tech-savvy. There's a growing sense that all of the many things we now do using our tools and gadgets (blogging, IMing, text messaging, recording videos, building communities, posting photos, and on and on) are just different means to the same end. Some people are finding remarkably creative and poetic ways to do it -- my current favorite is friends who are using the tiny "status box" on Google Talk or Facebook to communicate in haiku-like form -- but I'd argue that in November 2006 some degree of fluency is almost part of the shared American experience. There are political implications. So many of us are discovering and polishing our voices that I don't even think it's crazy to suggest that one of the factors behind the sweeping change we saw on Tuesday is that there are just more of us now who are comfortable expressing who we are and want our leaders to be.

One of the losers (and yay! that it might be so) on Tuesday night was the idea that it's some measure of personal refinement to disdain the culture of communicating online. At this point, it takes willful ignorance to not see that there are some bloggers who add value to politics or that journalists with the some of the brightest futures are those willing to blog or otherwise engage their readers online.

As for 2008 -- while we're getting pretty good today at putting that fluency to work to shape electoral politics, I'm cautiously optimistic that by then we'll have started to figure out how to use it to better effect in movement politics.

When former Virginia governor Mark Warner showed up this year in the online virtual world "Second Life" to talk to voters before he abandoned a presidential bid, the event was overlooked by everybody but geek blog BoingBoing.net. Too bad. Places like "Second Life," with its 1 million "residents," and World of Warcraft, a massive online role-playing game, are regularly outdrawing networks such as CNN and Fox. In time, virtual campaigning will be an essential part of any successful campaign, and "gaming outreach coordinators" may be a hot commodity for the 2008 candidates.

Even if you're a New Yorker settled on casting a ballot for Spitzer or Clinton come Tuesday, you still have a choice to make -- whether you're gonna vote for them as Democrats. As the result of an interesting quirk of Empire State politics known as "fusion voting," candidates can appear on the ballot as a candidate from more than one party. Spitzer and Clinton are also running on the Working Families Party line.

Votes for them as candidates of either party count towards their final tallies, so there's no danger that of squandering your vote. In fact, since both Spitzer and Clinton are coasting towards victory, mindfully choosing which through which to vote for them is one meaningful voting-booth chance that progressives have to voice an opinion this election.

Though not so much on the blog, in person I tend to regularly bag on the goings-on on Capitol Hill. It's the lack of care that goes into the legislative process, the willful and rewarded ignorance of some members of Congress, the "expertists" who get ever bigger jobs by repeating the same tripe never validated by facts, or reality, or the outside world. While I'm actively trying to rid myself of that sort of cynicism, this sort of thing simply does not help. The national security editor of Congressional Quarterly regularly ends interviews by asking the subject -- legislator, national security-type, what have you -- if they can explain in broad strokes the difference between Shiite and Sunni. Here is a typical response:

Representative Jo Ann Davis, a Virginia Republican who heads a House intelligence subcommittee charged with overseeing the C.I.A.'s performance in recruiting Islamic spies and analyzing information, was...dumbfounded when I asked her if she knew the difference between Sunnis and Shiites.

"Do I?" she asked me. A look of concentration came over her face. "You know, I should." She took a stab at it: "It's a difference in their fundamental religious beliefs. The Sunni are more radical than the Shia. Or vice versa. But I think it's the Sunnis who're more radical than the Shia."

Did she know which branch Al Qaeda's leaders follow?

"Al Qaeda is the one that's most radical, so I think they're Sunni,” she replied. "I may be wrong, but I think that's right."

I've returned to the East Coast from taking the Governor out to San Francisco to meet with about a dozen people working in what can broadly be called "emerging tech." It was two hours of what I thought was a challenging and engaging discussion, centered around why and how to get technology-minded folks involved in the political process. Jon Lebkowsky has pictures, and I have two myself.

Our first morning in the Bay Area, the cover of the Chronicle featured Reuters' decision to open up a bureau in Second Life, with a nice mention of the Governor's efforts there. Oh, what could have been. Okay, done with the moaning. The virtual reporter Adam Reuters has already broken such stories as the Joint Economic Committee's rumblings on how taxation might work in virtual worlds. Both stories -- and especially the congressional interest -- were yet two more reminders that Second Life really has taken some small hold in the public consciousness since the Gov's appearance back in August. If you're interested in making your way in that virtual world space, Wired this month has a nice guide to getting around. In other SL news, this month's Washingtonian (offline) has story on Second Life that calls me "a slim sexy brunette." Okay, so they're talking bout my avatar, but I'll take it. (UPDATE: Pablo, a.k.a. "a series of tubes," has a picture.)

Latest in the series of "why'd he do it?" is Ryan Lizza's New Republic piece. I'm going to ruin the ending for you:

Every governor or senator thinks about running for president. Most do so because they are ambitious and see the presidency as the next rung on America's political ladder. The big question they often ask is strategic. How can I make it through the process and get elected? In the end, that's not the question Warner asked. His advisers swear that the nuances of the primaries and the details of how to topple Hillary Clinton never came up in his final deliberations. Warner asked not whether he could be president, but whether he should be president. The irony of Warner's answer is that the kind of person who dwells on that question is the kind of person you want to be president.

Don't look to me to say much right now about Governor Warner's announcement today of his decision not run for the presidency in 2008, but I will say this -- from my perspective and in my experience, he handled this whole process and his final decision with dignity and a great deal of respect for those around him. So, god bless him.

Pastor [Rick "A Purpose Driven Life"] Warren argued that the tax break is essential to poorly paid clergy members who serve society.

The tax break is not available to the staff at secular nonprofit organizations whose scale and charitable aims compare to those of religious ministries like Pastor Warren's church, or to poorly paid inner-city teachers and day care workers who also serve their communities.

I'm a bit mired in work but I think that you really might enjoy the short film that won the LGBT rights award at the most recent Media that Matters Film Festival. (courtesy of David Alpert)

Among the "quite serious" uses of Second Life, according to this week's Economist: (1) Peter Yellowlees, a psychiatry professor at UC Davis, immersing his students into how how a schizophrenic experiences the world and (2) a certain former Governor's recent entree into the virtual space. The Economist considers Second Life's economy -- broadly speaking -- as a self-sustaining system and on its implications for the offline world. Great piece and a bit difficult to summarize.

(An article like this is a reminder of how refreshing it is to find something well-researched and well-written in the popular media. To read something timely and actually learn from it, glorious! The Economist has no bylines; their motto is "what is written is more important than who writes it." From an old interview with editor Bill Emmott:

We're no different from other journalists: we don't lose that urge for a byline just because we join The Economist. We give bylines on our supplements, and we encourage our journalists to write outside the magazine to give them a chance to develop their own names. But if a journalist is really turned on by international affairs, then The Economist is a unique place to work where they will gain a lot of access to companies and governments and experts. They gain a lot for what they give up.

Maybe when your ego's no longer in the picture, you sit down and write hard for the thrill and pleasure of the craft. [Though, I admit -- if I wrote for them, I'd probably hate it. But then again I've got a pretty healthy sense of self and I like the way my name looks.])

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has a new report out, The Future of the Internet II. The report is the sequel to a 2003 report of the same name, which itself was inspired by Ithiel de Sola Pool's 1983 Forecasting the Telephone: A Retrospective Technology Assessment, a look back at what the experts of the time made of the telephone in its early days.

The Pew researchers asked a group of somewhat self-selected technology-savvy respondents to react to seven different scenarios, from whether a global network will even exist in 2020 to whether by that time we'll have "lost" people all together into virtual-realty spaces. The responses include fears of a growth in multiple personalities that will give rise to "cyberpsychiatry," that privacy will soon be nothing more than an illusion, yadda yadda. There's even the hope (I think) that there might come a day when every newborn baby is seeded with an RFID chip.

I skimmed the report because it was kinda boring and too science-fictiony for my tastes. But from what I saw, one thought.

What I see as the most likely turn of events isn't mentioned in the report -- that by 2020 we'll have evolved into ever more hardened and extremist sorts of human beings. It's, of course, a complicated and yet not all too original thought and I'll admit that I'm only going to scratch the surface of it in this post. The one mention I see in the report of the broad idea is this:

These technologies allow us to find cohorts that eventually serve to decrease mass shared values and experiences. More than cultural fragmentation, it will aid a fragmentation of deeper levels of shared reality.
- Denzil Meyers, Widgetwonder

But then again it's not so much shared cultural experiences that I'm interested in here. The days of everyone watching I Love Lucy or whatever it might have been are probably over and done with. It's rather that the Internet medium seems to reward most and just be better-greased for promoting the organization of people and ideas around similar, highly-structured, and particularly dogmatic world views. I'm thinking poltical bloggers, yes, but also establishment political reporting done online and even modern social networking sites like Facebook. Real life is fluid and squishy and shades of gray -- that's one of the things I like best about it -- but I don't know how well that's going to survive on the Internet.

Take the aforementioned Facebook. The ask made of college freshmen is to define their likes and dislikes, political leanings, favorite books and movies, relationships and even who your friends are for all the world to see. It might be too much, I think. Too rigid for an 18 year-old. It would have been too much for 18 year-old me, for sure -- at a time where I was just working to sort myself out, poke and prod myself to see what the future Scola might be, to then make the evolving me public to my entire social context. (Even if that context is just limited to my university -- in fact, maybe especially if it's just limited to that narrow little social field.) And to do it in the language and categories and drop lists pre-selected for me! Those were liminal times, baby, as they should be. But I don't know if there's room for people be liminal or evolving any more, at least on the Internet. I don't think that's a small deal. In fact, I think it's a very big deal indeed.

I'm too US-centric in my thinking on this, I know. And too influenced by my exposure to electoral politics done online, most likely.

Dr. Luisa Guerrero, a physician with Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières, led our tour today of the Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City now in Prospect Park. Columbian-born, she's just back from six months of HIV work at a camp in Guatemala. I've got to run because we've got plans for a dinner with some friends that involves me eating a big bucket of vegetarian fried chicken, but all in all the refugee camp recreation is a brilliant means by which to expose folks to the feel and realities of what refugees and IDPs (internally displaced peoples -- those who flee fighting but stay within their own countries borders) experience in the camps they end up in. Made me think of what other similar exhibits might make sense. One more photo below of a typical camp vaccination tent, and a few more here.

Outside our garden apartment here in Park Slope is a guy pacing back and forth on the sidewalk. He's on his cell phone and just had this to say, "This area is nice, man. I like it a lot. Lot of trees and shit." Right on, but trees aren't the only thing we've got going on. This weekend, for example, there are two things of note right in our area, both experiments in creative interactive experience, though geared perhaps towards two distinctly different moods.

First, in Prospect Park about three blocks from our house is the Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières "Refugee Camp" Exhibit, the same one that has earlier been constructed in Central Park. I hope to go check it out soon but it's drizzling a bit at the moment. One prefers to imagine a refugee camp experience without also having to be cold and wet. Will the Refugee Camp Exhibit avoid some of what has plagued the Camp Darfur refugee camp recreation in Second Life -- namely that sitting in front of your computer and wandering around in an empty virtual space doesn't inform you all that much about what it's like to be forced from your home under the threat of violence and starvation and subjected to a communcal living experience with no real end in sight? I think so, but we'll see.

And then over the river and through the tunnel in Manhattan is Eyebeam's Come Out and Play Festival 2006, complete with urban interactive games like MegaPutt -- a massively-multiplayer game of mini golf in the East Village, Spy School -- a text-message based espionage game, and Quoto -- a 30 minute challenge to photograph famous quotes "rebus-style" using the props provided by New York City. The last I had very much liked to participate in, but alas, all full.

Ask a Ninja explains podcasting in the open air of New York's Battery Park during the first annual One Web Day.

Happy One Web Day! This is the day that we celebrate all manners of web -- spider webs, Jim Webb, webbed feet. Alternatively, it's the one day a year when we sit and contemplate what it means that a global network connects humanity together in ways never before possible. You know, as someone who cares about social networks, social organization, and the potential for knowledge sharing to make the world just a darn better place, the rise and expanding reach of the Internet/web over the last many years has really been something to behold. Certainly worth celebrating for at least one day a year.

In New York City there will be an event today at noon at the Battery featuring Craig Newmark, Meet Up's Scott Heiferman, and others. But this is a holiday in the spirit of Festivus, a do-it-yourself celebration that you can make of what you want. Check the wiki for what other folks are doing around the world and honor the day in your own special way. The preeminence of the one true One Web Day anthem, however, shall not be questioned:

One, the Web that joins us
In rich complexity.
One, the mirror of many screens
One full diversity.

One, the world around us,
All humanity,
A world to shape by what we make
Through connectivity!

I have a great deal of faith in technologists -- and by "technologists" I mean anyone really who works in developing, understanding, or shaping technologies -- because I've seen time and again that what they're committed to most is problem solving. Gov. Warner (yes, I know it is a bit pathetic to actually reference the wisdom of the guy that I work for) says time and again that if business worked like politics, executives would go to their shareholders at the end of the year and say, "we didn't actually do anything this year, but we sure made the other guy look bad." It's instead the ethos in the modern technology world to try the damnedest to build something better, day in and day out. Part of the motivation for doing so is money, of course, but there's nothing wrong with that.

I went down to South by Southwest Interactive -- a four-day festival of geekery, from technology to digital design -- in Austin in March of last year exactly because I wanted to surround myself with technologists after five years on Capitol Hill and be inspired by their spirit. It worked, and so I'll be going back again next year. SXSW 2007 will be a bit different though because the panels as the conference will in large part be chosen through an panel picking process. Everyone is invited to participate, though the votes of past and future attendees will count for more.

So I've gone and submitted a panel for this next SXSW. I'll admit it to you and to you alone that the idea behind it is to see if we can go ahead and suck some of that can-do spirit into the political process:

The on-going fight over network neutrality showcased the rising political interest and might of tech-minded folk. But neutrality was just the beginning. From free culture to muni-connectivity, from BitTorrent to the wireless spectrum, we'll hash over the issues held dear by technologists. And we'll figure out how the community can problem-solve its way into political service.

Senator Barack Obama at a rally today in Old Town Alexandria, Viriginia, for Jim Webb, running for the U.S. Senate:

In Jim Webb, we have a candidate with the sophistication to write novels. That's a good thing. We want our warriors to be scholars and intellectuals, too.

Governor Warner went and had big old pig roast this past Saturday on his farm, Rappahannock Bend, in King George, Virginia.

As the global face to the Creative Commons, iCommons is the group responsible for spreading the ideas of Creative Commons -- "open content, access to knowledge, open access publishing and free culture" -- around the world and doing it as a united movement. How we create and handle content internationally is perhaps even more interesting an experiment than how we do it here in the U.S., and so I was very happy to get the chance today to contribute a post to the iCommons blog. While, as I should mention, I still wrote on something here in New York City, that's only because I don't know much about the international stuff yet.

A debate over the originality of the design of the Freedom Tower -- that's the memorial to be built in the site of the former World Trade Center -- reached the courts recently, an unusual turn of events because architecture is very much a "remix" art. Designers borrow ideas from each other all the time and are reluctant to take each other to before the law. Here's a snippet from my post:

Shine vs. SOM became the first major case of architectural copyright infringement in U.S. history, in large part because of its high profile - the design of the Freedom Tower was on the cover of New York papers for many months. But cases of architectural copyright don't often make it to the court for another reason. The field itself is built on the idea that new work is built on old work, new ideas remixed from old ones; and architects are reluctant to challenge that prevailing norm. But in this case, the court found that Childs appeared to have gone beyond permissible architectural borrowing. The design of the two proposed buildings were so similar - both featured a twisting diamond-shaped facade unusual in architecture - that the court ruled that the case could proceed to trial. (Judge for yourself.)

Of course I have to say this, but I do think it's an interesting issue. I for one don't think much the collaborative creative process behind how big buildings get built, not nearly as much as I might think how music is created. So it was great fun for me to dig more deeply into this idea of whether theres is an architectural "commons."

Anyway, hope you'll check it out. And thanks of course to iCommons for lending me a bit of their space.

I started the day this morning with the decision to try out Last FM. That's the social-networking radio station that allows you to pick out recording artists, stream a station created for you, see what the rest of the world -- including your friends -- are grooving on. With LastFM, you respond back to the radio, giving the songs it feeds up "love" or banning them altogether.

I was feeling a bit dopey and couldn't remember what music I actually do like listening to. Prepare to mock -- I inputted this: "Lauryn Hill, Ani di Franco, Eminem, Kelly Clarkson, Green Day, Queen Latifah." The first song keyed up in my new custom station was the Indigo Girls' "Power of Two." All right, must every woman of a certain age and proclivity like the Indigo Girls? Still, I enjoyed the song. Next up was Dar Williams' "Whispering Pines." A little slow but fine enough.

Then Eminem's "Amityville." I'd never heard it, as it's from his early Marshall Mathers LP that I don't own. But isn't playing an Eminem song when I the word "Eminem" in the station creator a bit of a weak move? The song was a tad graphic for work --"slit my mother's throat..." is, I think, more appropriate for after hours. I ban. Next up, 50 cent's "As Time Goes By." Banned. Erykah Badu's lovely "Orange Moon," and then Ashlee Simpson's "Shadow," which -- say what you will -- is the perfect sort of music by which to draft blog posts, emails, and the like.

But I'm scared to say I like it because Simpson is tagged as "Similiar to: Lindsay Lohan," who I stay away from on principle. Next up is the Game's "Hate it or Love it." Catchy. On to Lauryn Hill's "Jerusalem," then Linkin Park's "One Step Closer." Out of utter precariousness and a dislike of the yelling of the lead, um, screamer, I ban it. LastFM attempts to soothe me with Alcia Key's "Butterflyz."

Now we've got Raul De Souza's "Sweet Lucy." Finally, an artist I have completely never heard of. That's largely the point for me of using a social music tool like Last FM -- to find new music that I wouldn't be turned on to elsewhere. So I'm thrilled, even though it sounds a lot like the theme song from "What's Happening."

We're on to Britney Spears' "Thinkin' About You." (Really, can we not use our grown-up words with our band and song names? "Linkin" Park? "Butterflyz"? "Thinkin'" About You?) It's clear to me now that LastFM thinks I'm a 16 year old girl. Sweet Mary mother of God! LastFM spits in my face with Lindsay Lohan's "Disconnected." "I'm only not lonely when I'm lonely myself...I always backtrack forward...DISCONNECTED!"? I don't deserve this. Banned, Lindsay. So banned.

Some Green Day "Ha Ha You're Dead," Red Hot Chili Pepper's "Coffee Shop," and Fiona Apple's "I Know," all of which I enjoy. Washington Dead Cats' "Surf and Destroy" up next. Fun -- sort of Barenaked Ladies but actually weird. The Dead Cats are tagged as "Similar to: Queen Latifah," which seems a bit odd, but I imagine it to be the result of the algorithmic mojo magic that makes LastFM work. Next is Queen Latifah's "I Can't Understand." Why have I not heard this brilliance until now?!

But more Alicia Keys, more Erykah Badu, and I'm getting a bit bored with this musical selection. Same old, same old, for the most. Where are the undiscovered (to me) gems that I expected LastFM to dig up for me? Even though I have to think that I'm still drawing from the collective taste database of other users at the backend of Last FM, I imagine that the secret sauce is when you connect up with other users and pick and choose from their music streams. Alas, I don't yet know of anybody that I know that is on and actively using LastFM. So I'm stuck in my own, non-diverse, plain vanilla loop of music.

A new outfit called Schmap emailed to ask if they could use a use a photo of mine that I took while down in Miami. The Schmappers, it seems, troll Flickr for useable photos and ask the photographers to hand them over with full credit and without compensation. The photo they asked of me is a very seriously crappy one, but I still said okay. The way Schmap works is that travel info is overlaid on a live mapping app, and photos of some of the sights are flashed in the right side bar. The images link up to the original Flickr pages from whence the photos came. (For you licensing geeks, my photo was licensed by Flickr under a traditional "all rights reserved" copyright. I admit, with sheepishness, that it never occurred to how my Flickr photos are licensed. Turns out that Flickr does let you set Creative Commons on your work. That's fantastic, but I'd like to reserve the right for folks to have to ask permission, like the Schmap folks did, for how they use my photographs. I just do, and so I'm leaving traditional copyright intact until I see fit to do otherwise. Wow, this is quite a long parenthetical. But forge on with me for a moment. The Schmap terms of use I agreed to when I said, sure, use my photo were on a page that reloaded and disappeared after I clicked "Okay." From what I can scrape from the site, I gather that the Schmapped photo retains the same licensing terms as it did before, especially considering that what they use is really a thumbnail that links right through to Flickr.)

I could be troubled with the idea of not paying photographers for their work and then turning and building a business model on the idea. I like photography a good bit, and we should pay to support the arts we like. But come on, how good does a photo of a hotel have to be? What's wrong with me taking a few snapshots during my travels and sharing them with folks who are in turn going to offer them at no cost to others who might then use them to plan their own journeys? Maybe some travel guide photographer might be out of a gig or two, but then again she can save money by downloading free travel guides.

Here's a sign that your week is going to be a strange one. You send a note around your office saying, "on the virtual Mark Warner -- tie or no tie?" So, we introduced the governor into Second Life, an online virtual space, on Thursday. In the immediate, one neat part was seeing the wide range of coverage the launch got. Some of the folks in our office were most pleased to see it covered by CNN's Situation Room, Washington Post's the Fix and Washington Sketch, and The Hotline. (The title of this post comes from the Hotline: "This new venture might be mockable, but it's path-breakingly mockable.") Others were more thrilled to make Boing Boing (pre-event post here and post-event post here) and the G4 gaming network. It was ignored by most of the big political blogs, which we expected, and it was an education to see how it rippled through the rest of the online world. The quasi-official New World Notes blog has the deepest background and reporting, here and here and an interview with me here. It was also mentioned or covered by Instapundit, Ottowa Citizen, Ted Leonsis, Red Herring, 3pointD, Federal Computer Weekly, Rikomatic (who has video), 1UP.com, and Gamepolitics.com here and here. There's also photos of the Gov's avatar and him typing away at a computer and more coverage on the Forward Together PAC blog here, here, and here.

Everyone from our experienced political staff to cantankerous Washington reporters had a lot of fun customizing their avatars and flying around the Second Life space. For one blip in time, we brought a little bit of joy to the lives of some hard-working folks. Good enough.

I want to talk seriously about why we brought Gov. Warner to Second Life and what we think it means. But it was a long week and right now I'm going to sign off now and do some real-world lazing about.

And this is the last of the Katrina photos for the year. Remember, the full set lives here all the time.

You can see from the post-Katrina photos I picked out to show you these last couple of days that I was intrigued by this idea of things being destroyed below a certain level and still alive above it. Thus the water-level photos and this one of the bushes as well.

I know I'm going a bit crazy with the Katrina photos but I promise it's almost over. Notice how high the water level got in this one. Camera left was a school and playground.

As seen from a Blackhawk helicopter.

A downed street sign in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. I'll admit that I didn't know much about much of the specifics of the ancient city of Babylon and so I got a little bit of a kick out of the Webster's reference: "a city devoted to materialism and sensual pleasure."

Driving into Slidell, Lake Ponchatrain runs right into the land. Where the docks were there are now just pilings. I just talked to Ju (ed -- my mom, a Louisiana native) and asked her what Slidell looked like before. She said that it sort of was like Jackson where Aunt Joyce and Uncle Walt lived, a nice developed area. Her cousin's widow lived in Slidell and was evacuated. 80 years old and the water was up to the ceiling.

Drove by a house along the highway -- spray-painted along the side just says "Alive." Passed a piece of plywood nailed to a post, Highway 11, "Still No Water." Seems like a boating community, the sense of Pawleys Island (ed. -- in South Carolina). Immense piles of trash everywhere. And you get the sense that the lake is what did this to them... This is just what happened when the lake came over. And the wind came over...My thought here was "my god, I hope you had flood insurance." Or that you can say that this was hurricane damage and not flood damage...If they didn't have flood insurance...will this push them into poverty, bankruptcy at least? People that were doing all right.

All of the supermarkets are closed. All of the stores are closed...Where people are eating, shopping, getting what they need for their kids? A Shell station says "We're open. We have gas. Cash only." One thing you could hope is that you had cash on hand. Behind a Bank of Louisiana building there is just a sea of clothing -- thousands of pieces, piled up. One of the craziest things I've seen.

Next Tuesday is, as you probably know, the one-year anniversary of when Hurricane Katrina touched down in Louisiana. I had the fantastic opportunity to travel down to Baton Rouge and New Orleans just a few weeks after as a guest of the Louisiana NAACP and I took a whole bunch of photos of the incredible devastation I found there. They're not overly good -- it was during what I like to call the "point-and-click" phase of my photographic development -- but I still never get tired of looking at them. They still capture, for me, what it was like to be there -- just a whole lot of emptiness and destruction. So I'm planning on pulling out and posting some of them in this space over the next couple of days. Notice the water level across the windows and doors of these two cars -- that's how high the flooding got in this neighborhood and it stayed that way for quite a while.

Folks, this one is just for Janie. Janie, if you haven't checked out Ze Frank's The Show yet, you should. You will either (a) like it very much or (b) hate him your special way where you get really angry and offended at his very existence. And then I'll know just a little bit more about you.

I work with headphones on, listening to music so as to drown out the inane chatter of my officemates. I kid only because I love. But I hate having to always manuever my mouse over and check/uncheck the tiny mute box down in the task bar volume controls when I actually want to interact with them. So I searched for and found Global Audio Contol, a freeware shortcut app for all my system volume controls. The set-up interface is ugly as sin, but now that it's up and running I can hit control+Q without even really stopping my typing and jump right in to the conversation.

I'm really in no way anti-religion, but it still seems to me that hints at some sort of fundamental truth about the nature of religion in the U.S. Over at Savage Minds, the premiere anthropology blog, Kerim Friedman comments upon the case of Ota Benga, the "pygmy" kept in a cage at the Bronx Zoo's Monkey House in 1906 (and the subject of a fascinating recent New York Times piece). Ota Benga spent Saturday afternoons frolicking in a cage with an orangutan named Dohong. And writes Kerim:

The exhibit quickly sparked protests from the Colored Baptist Ministers' Conference who objected not only to the racism of the exhibit, but also to its Darwinism.

Priceless.

• Firefox
• Good ol' Microsoft Word (though I have started to use Writely for some tasks)
• Newsgator for reading RSS feeds
• Dreamweaver for HTML and such
• Fireworks for images
• Adobe Photoshop Album for organizing photos
• Flickr Uploader
• Real Rhapsody for music, with a monthly subscription
• Performancing, a blog editor for Firefox
• 37Signals' Ta-Da Lists for my to-dos
• Gmail for mail, with serious filtering and folders to keep it organized
• MSN Messenger (I tried Trillian, but it kept crashing on me)
• Groove Virtual Office for keeping some types of files handy
• The Invisibility Cloak extension for Firefox to keep me from Newsgator and Gmail first thing in the morning
• The BugMeNot extension for Firefox to bypass logins
• Synergy, to control both my laptop and desktop with one mouse and keyboard
• And, I admit, Outlook -- I'm a big fan task, notes, and the calendar


2, personal tech

August 12, 2006
Union Hall Cheese Balls


For all you cheese-loving Brooklynites, the fried Saga blue cheese balls coated in crushed apple cinnamon Cheerios and served with chestnut/pear brandy puree at the new Union Hall are to die for.


2, cheese, New York City

August 11, 2006
FYI, CDT and DOPA


Among the not-fans of the Deleting Online Predators Act recently passed by the House is the Center for Democracy and Technology. DOPA, again, requires that public libraries ban kids from accessing "social networking" sites. I like CDT a lot -- they're a great, thoughoutful go-to group on information policy. They've considered DOPA, and they seem a bit in shock over how egregiously it limits access to information. (Alas, that link goes to a pdf. The reason for why to release only pdf, I do not know.) What they found:

DOPA would block minors' minor's access (and burden adults' access) to a category of speech – mere conversation, including social, political, medical, and an unlimited range of topics – that no court has ever allowed the government to censor or regulate.

...

[T]he vast bulk of the speech blocked by DOPA – teens chatting with their friends, posting photos and linking to their favorite music – is perfectly healthy (or at least harmless), and is completely legal.

...

DOPA would flatly prohibit a library or school from ever allowing a minor to participate in, for example, an online conversation among teens discussing the latest movies (or any other topic deemed not to be "educational"). For libraries, the flat prohibition would be true even if a child's parent gave permission for such access.

...

Critically, for many users, the sites blocked by DOPA provide the users' only source and outlet for political information. Indeed, a range of political candidates have created campaign sites on the social networking services. Blocking access to, and the ability to express, this type of speech strikes at the core of the First Amendment.


Wes Clark, for example, has a MySpace page up ("Male, 61 years old, LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas") so that he can talk to the young people where they congregate. Indeed, the General's got 317 friends so far. Under DOPA, a 17 year-old student would be banned from walking into her local public library and pulling up Clark's profile. Of course, she could still do it at home, if she's lucky enough to have a computer at home. CDT's concerned about this too:

Raising both constitutional and important policy concerns, DOPA would also be a major step backwards in our nation's effort to close the gaping digital divide that exists between affluent families able to bring broadband into their home and those families whose children can only access the Internet at a school or library.


DOPA was an end run around the legislative process. It was never vetted by a congressional committee. It passed through the House under suspension of the rules. What that that all means is that there was no real debate, even though it will limit the ability of poorer kids to access a great deal of information, connect with their friends, expand their worlds. Course, it did pass one crucial test -- Congress's pedophilia rule. Even the crappiest bit of legislation that mentions the molestation of kids gets as free pass. This one had clear sailing the minute that they put "predators" in the title. Again, almost every single member of Congress gave a thumbs up to the bill -- the vote was 410-15.


2, Capitol Hill

August 8, 2006
13th Street life guard stand


13th Street life guard stand, originally uploaded by nancyscola.

Just one more photo from our Miami trip.


2, photography

August 8, 2006
Views from Miami


South Beach, originally uploaded by nancyscola.

From a scootering trip that Jane and I took along Biscayne Bay, through streets of Spanish-tiled homes.


2, photography

August 6, 2006
11th Street Life Guard Stand


11th Street life guard stand, originally uploaded by nancyscola.

Jane and I just got back from a great trip to South Beach, Miami. We took a whole bunch of pictures, including a special short series just on these colorful life guard stands.
2, photography

August 2, 2006
Your United States Congress at Work, the DOPA Edition
Last week the House passed DOPA, the Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006. ("Deleting," get it? That's something you do with a computer.) What DOPA does is to require that libraries that receive a certain kind of federal funding ban kids from social networking sites. The idea is to protect kids from the menace of MySpace, Friendster, and Facebook. But how does the bill define social networking sites? That's anything that:

(i) is offered by a commercial entity;
(ii) permits registered users to create an on-line profile that includes detailed personal information;
(iii) permits registered users to create an on-line journal and share such a journal with other users;
(iv) elicits highly-personalized information from users; and
(v) enables communication among users.

If you're thinking, "hey, that sounds like my personal pages on Amazon! Or the profile I have on a group blog! Is Congress blocking those sorts of things?" As I find myself often saying when talking about the United States Congress, you're thinking too much.

The point isn't to actually do any sort of constructive good, it's to pander. Pander pander pander. Pander your pants off and see if you can get reelected. This bill came out of polling done by the Republican party on how they can appeal to suburban voters. That's it. If you think that it matters to them at all whether one kid is protected by the "menace" of MySpace from this bill, again, thinking too much. If you think that they actually considered that this bill is going to disproportionately affect poor kids who can't afford their own home computers -- again, thinking too much.

Some folks are saying that DOPA was completely rewritten the day before it passed the House, and never was vetted by a House committee. Which would be shocking if we actually thought that anyone up there cared about the legislative process.

Think about this. At BlogHer this weekend, social networking researcher danah boyd mentioned somewhat off-handedly that teenaged kids are moving off of MySpace and onto smaller social networking sites. Seems that MySpace has lost some of its cool. This was confirmed for me by a smart young guy that I work with who is focusing on social networking and youth voters. He says that some young people are moving to things to Xanga and other sites that are more targeted. But social networking sites aren't like file-sharing, where you can hope to block them out by blocking specific ports. There's no technical calling card of social networking sites that the computer or network can pickup on and filter. So it's going to be someone's job to keep a up-to-date list of what's the new MySpace or Facebook these days. Yup, that's what I want my federal government and our nation's librarians doing with our time.

I know that this is a bit heated (for me), but this just burns me up. I've heard that there's not much prospect for this in the Senate. (Another saying I rely upon when talking about Congress -- thank God for the United States Senate. It certainly has its troubles, but when you compare it to Romper Room that is the House...) I've heard that Sen. Santorum isn't interested in having this go anywhere, though I can't seem to find any confirmation of that online.

Lest you think that this is a purely Republican problem, the roll call vote on this was 410-15. (Though voting against it were all Dems -- John Conyers, Raul Grijalva, Maurice Hinchey, Mike Honda, Dennis Kucinich, Barbara Lee, Zoe Lofgren, Donald Payne, Jan Schakowsky, Bobby Scott, Jose Serrano, Pete Stark, Diane Watson, and Lynn Woolsey.) This isn't a partisan problem. The problem is that we elect people either (a) without a brain or (b) afraid to use it. Enough.
2, Capitol Hill

July 31, 2006
The Nightmare Continues...


So, after slamming my combination Blackberry-cell phone in the car door, losing my digital camera (as described here), paying the hotel shuttle driver $20 to take me to the Thrifty office only to realize that I still had the camera after returning the rental Taurus, and getting slapped with a bill for $40 on two personal calls from my hotel room phone, I landed at National Airport yesterday afternoon determined to make a new start of it.

Nothing peps me up like cold coffee treats. So I saddled up to the Starbucks counter outside baggage claim and ordered a tall light coffee frappuccino. And at this point, the powers above decided that she just wasn't done having fun with me yet.

The "barista," and I use that term loosely, rang up my drink at $3.09, $3.37 with tax. I'm sorry, I said, but I ordered a coffee frappuccino. And the price for one of those is $2.69 plus tax.

"No, you ordered a mocha frappuccino! That is the price of a mocha frappuccino!"

I replied, calmy, "of course I didn't." I tried re