Dana Blankenhorn

An Opportunity Agenda

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 33 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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This is the point in any crisis Presidency when the ghouls come out.

The problems haven't been solved. The President seems to be moving too slowly. He's trapped between his need to be the old AntiThesis (Clinton the Triangulator in this case) and the old fading Thesis (Bushism) still practiced in the Capitol. His own troops are dejected. Change is hard.

What turned things around for all past crisis leaders was, simply, an agenda. Setting a course against the true enemy, in defiance of political assumptions, is the test of leadership.

In the current case, that agenda is simple.

The War Against Oil.

As I've said before, a climate bill isn't really a climate bill. It's really a jobs bill. It's also, right now, the hardest bill to get through the Congress. Republicans won't touch it, and many Democrats are wary as well.

The argument is over stimulus. The question should not be how much, but what the stimulus does. A stimulus that doesn't take us in a useful direction is mindless spending. Whether that's in the form of government aid or tax cuts, it's equally mindless.

We need a stimulus that creates stuff.

The last depression was ended by World War II. Republicans love to say that. They don't like to admit that the war was fought at a deficit, although it was. But we don't have to build bombs to win this war. We can win it with plowshares.

But we first have to declare it.

Opportunity Lives Here

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 32 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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More than 15 years after the Web was spun it is still filled with opportunity.

What marks many of today's opportunities is that they're not about machine work. Machine work is the low-hanging fruit of the Web. Machine work has an immense profit margin, and incredibly low costs.

Google does machine work. Its success proved that, when machines face man online, machines are going to win. Yahoo was, originally, a directory, and invested heavily in sites like Geocities and Broadcast.com which required human work to fill them with stuff. Google, meanwhile, invested in machines, in software to parse the Web in various ways, and proved that's the way to the greatest profit.

This does not mean people have no place. It just means profit margins aren't quite as fat.

I have written many times here about the opportunities in my own field, journalism. Many of them still remain. The way to approach them, as always, is from the business side, defining an under-served market, place or lifestyle for which you have passion (and about which you have some knowledge), then organizing that market, and finally offering sellers the chance to meet buyers through entertaining editorial.

This is CNN's real problem. It has nothing to do with what the yahoos who argue about "journalism's failures" think. The channel never really defined its audience, its target market. Fox did. MSNBC (finally) did. So did dozens of other cable success stories. CNN never did -- they said they were a news station, and above all that. Bullshit. No one is above all that.

Let their failure be your guide in your journalism endeavors. And now with no further ado, some new niches for you to profitably explore:

Sheikhs of America

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 31 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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What may appear to journalists, or even historians, to be an ideological war usually turns out, in America, to be a choice between economic interests.

In our time the choice is on the title of this blog. It's a choice between energy defined by resources, which come out of the ground, or by devices that harness the energy all around us.

A new Thesis is born when the crisis leader turns definitively toward the new economy, explicitly rejecting the old. And it's brought on by the old economy seizing political power in an attempt to hang on against the new.

In other words the fight of our time is not between left and right, liberal and conservative, Democratic or Republican. It's between devices (the alternative energy of windmills, solar cells, tidal energy, and geothermal) and resources (coal, oil, natural gas). The former should define wealth, not the latter. And it's the climate bill that matters, nothing else. 

The current situation can be seen in the graph above from the Environmental Law Institute. We're subsidizing resources. We're choosing oil, coal and gas over other forms of energy, through the instrument of government. This is what the President must change if he is to seize the crisis of our time and put our economy on a sustainable path.

Toward the Cloud

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 29 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Over the years I have had nearly as many desktop PCs as cats.

We counted last night.

Kaleidocat (below, in 1979), Nuisance, HeyCat, Lo Meow, McDummy, FurPur, Salem and Rosanna, Indy, Missy, and the incumbents, Midget and Foxy Roxy.

My first PC was a Kaypro, shown on the right in 1983.

I thought it was sweet. CP/M, two floppy drives, an 8-inch green screen, and a case that, while it claimed to be "luggable," was really more like the tube-and-parts cases my dad's TV repair shop had in the 1960s. It weighed 26 pounds. 

Then came my IBM PC, bought for a project that became Harbinger EDI. I upgraded it with a hard drive, and then bought a no-brand AT. There was another no-brand (built from parts) bought for Windows 3.1, another (a Gateway I think) bought for Windows 95, and I seem to remember buying another for '98. Then there was the current box, another no-name built from parts, bought in 2004.

So that's 12 cats and 8 PCs. Of course I'm not counting the laptops I've owned, at least a half-dozen in all, or the four PCs I've bought for the kids.

The desktop era ended this week with my latest purchase, an MSI A6200 laptop I had first seen in the hands of a model at last year's CompuTex show. It's more powerful than any desktop I've owned, and today's "docking stations" are just boxes that sit to the side and let you connect anything else you want with USB ports. That means I can replicate my old desktop environment, with an extra monitor, a fancy keyboard, an external mouse, nice speakers.

It's a turning point. Where once I always needed two machines -- one for here and one for the road -- now I get it all with one. The new laptop cost less than half what my old Kaypro did, $700 against $1,800. And the software cost is also lower than ever. Windows is (unfortunately) bundled and everything else is downloaded, free.

Anyone involved in this business in any way needs to understand why this is so. Moore's Law is the flip and easy answer.

It's also misleading.

A Solution to Your Imaging Problems

I caused big problems, for myself and my employer, back in April when I used an image, with credit, but without permission on one of my employer's blogs.

I have always been more interested in solving problems than causing them, however. Despite my poking at critics, I knew both I and Chris Buzelli are in the copyright business, and believed technology could create some common ground.

The good news, I've found, is that a Web permission engine exists. The folks at Picscout called to tell me they've been in this business for almost a year, and best of all they have a competitor, LicenseScout, which has been in the business a while longer. (Competition is always good. It helps a market grow.) LicenseScout sees its mission broadly -- including all kinds of content -- while PicScout is focused on images. 

The difference between PicScout and a regular photo agency is that everything's automated, and can be integrated with browsers and search engines. For image owners, it integrates with a service called PhotoShelter, aimed at increasing sales of images for re-use. (The picture above leads to this sales page.)

Amy Love, PicScout's  vice president of marketing since September, was kind enough to lead me through it.  The heart of the offer is ImageIRC, which indexes images through digital fingerprints, maintains a metadata registry on the images, and offers an API through which buyers and sellers can connect.

The result is a suite of software-driven services:

• ImageExchange, which identifies images with metadata and throws up pricing information, then handles transactions. (There are currently versions for Firefox and Explorer.)
• ImageTracker, which lets owners of images see who has accessed them, again by following the metadata, and
• ImageQualification, which helps site owners know the status of their images as soon as they are posted. 

What has me most excited is PicApp, a spin-off that not only allows access to license-free thumbnails, but includes meta data aimed at helping sites hosting the images get more traffic. They're pitching it as a free Search Engine Optimization (SEO) service for sites and a tracking system for image owners. There's a plug-in for Wordpress and a Firefox plug-in.

Most of what I have described is a service for owners and users of stock photography, and in fact big rights owners like Corbis and Getty Images are already playing. But Amy said any artist can register to have their art catalogued, free, because once art goes online it becomes an image by default. Artists can either do this directly or through the agents they prefer to use.

There's money here for someone. Reuters signed up with PicApp last month and traffic has been growing smartly as word has gotten around that friction in this market can be reduced.

I like a happy ending, don't you?

The Blitz of the Gulf and the War Against Oil

What has happened in the Gulf, what continues to happen, is not Barack Obama's Katrina. Nor is it anyone else's. It's not Pearl Harbor, nor is it 9-11.

What it's most comparable to, in terms of American history, is the London Blitz.

(I don't like using AP or even linking to them, but the picture on this page, by the APs Charles Riedel, is becoming the Iwa Jima Flag-on-Mount-Sirabachi moment in this disaster, so I've thumbnailed it. Historians know that an earlier group's arrival on that mountain, with a smaller flag, was the real deal to the men fighting there, and the second flag was put up for show. Yet it's that one we remember. As we'll remember Riedel's Laughing Gull. I entirely agree with AOL's Matt Mendolson on that.)

For most Americans the Gulf is distant. This can be hard to believe but it's true. Even here in Atlanta, where I live, the impacts for now are slight. My neighbor won't be heading to Destin any time soon. Beyond that life remains normal.

This is how America was during the Blitz. It was something happening elsewhere and to other people. What most today have forgotten is that, for many Americans of that time, this was highly desirable. War was highly controversial.

What President Roosevelt did, what Barack Obama needs to do, was to mold public opinion, slowly, toward a war footing. The movies which appeared and were green-lighted in 1940 were not all propaganda pieces, as they would become in the succeeding years. But many did take the gathering darkness as their subtext. And in that era, movies were the dominant medium.

Today the Internet is the dominant medium. It is a medium that is very difficult to dominate. Anything with the taint of propaganda is taken with a grain of salt. Yet, as we see time-and-time again in the Middle East, propaganda gets through.

It gets through when the target is clear and the aim is simple. The Administration's problem lies in its targeting.

The oil is not the enemy. Even BP is not the enemy. The enemy is the system that makes this eternal search for oil necessary, and that makes it the path of least resistance for BP's profit.

I'm not naive enough to think that we can flip a switch and create a world of bullet trains and windmills.  But I'm unwilling to accept the inevitability of oil, and all the bloodshed and destruction that entails.

What has people down right now is just this, the idea that we have no choice but to drill and fight, fight and drill, in order to continue our way of life. That's why the President's approval ratings are down so far, I believe, because his sights are set too low.

Raising those sights means creating a political environment in which an energy bill that moves incentives decisively from carbon to renewables is seen as patriotic, as a jobs bill, and as simple common sense, so that any opposition is seen as unpatriotic. In the face of Big Oil the President has been acting as Chamberlain at Munich, pushing back slowly hoping for "peace in our time."

He needs to become Churchill, not against BP but against the system that made this disaster inevitable. 

The Lesson of Van Gogh's Ear

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 23 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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It is said that Vincent Van Gogh cut off his ear because he couldn't sell  his stuff. And that he never did. (Image from Wikipedia.)

The great artists of the 20th century learned this lesson well. Picasso, Dali and Andy Warhol were all relentless self-promoters. They knew that art which isn't seen does not exist, and that an artist's personal style is what he sells during his lifetime.

Somehow, we've gone backward in the era of the Web.

The lesson of my run-in with Chris Buzelli and his friends is clear. No Web site can use a thumbnail of someone else's art without the artist's express permission. This is what artists say they want.

It's self-destructive.

Technically, this position even prevents links. If I write a piece of HTML code linking to a graphic image, and give the a href command properly, my browser will go to the location of that image and copy it, in the size I specify, onto the page I'm writing.

That's the way HTML works.

But to self-important artists if I write such a link I'm a thief. I'm a double thief, because I have not only stolen  art but bandwidth  to display it on my Web page. Thus you don't even link to art without permission.

What galls me is that artists believe they don't have to watermark, they don't have to use robots.txt, they can post their stuff completely in the clear. Ghanaians know to protect their images (try downloading an image from this page) but American artists can depend on webmobs.

The default with images is, don't touch, don't link. So we don't. I won't.

My purpose in writing today is not to litigate the question of legal right. Nor even the moral right to link. I won't link to anyone's copyrighted image henceforth, without a Creative Commons license or a Wikimedia address. Neither will anyone at CBS Inc., nor, I gather, any other media outlet.

Instead I'm arguing that forbidding links, or thumbnails, is counter-productive. It's as dumb as Nikkei forbidding links to its home page or the London Times charging for access.

It's as stupid as Van Gogh cutting off his ear.

Ich bin ein Blogger

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 18 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Recently one of the publishers I work for called with good news. I was being named a contributing editor. I was no longer "just" a blogger.

Well, thanks but no thanks.

I have been using blogging software since 2003, when the folks at Corante gave me a free store front. In late 2004 they introduced me to ZDNet, and I'm now doing pretty well, especially since their parent company (CNet) was bought by CBS Interactive.

But that's not the point.

The point is that journalism companies hire bloggers and later claim they are "promoting" them to journalists. They're not. It's not a promotion.

Defending an Atlantan

Having lived in Atlanta for nearly 30 years, I have been witness many times to the degrading attitude my original hometown of New York takes to this place.

Of course, it's the same attitude New York takes to every other place in America. It looks down at us. It assumes a right to define us, to buy and sell us, to treat us as its economic and cultural subjects.

New York does not know best. You have only to look at the fate of Turner Broadcasting in the hands of Time Warner to know that. CNN is crap. The company disinvested in The Cartoon Network, which had been successful, for short term gain. It's sad, and I know Ted Turner would agree.

Usually Atlanta falls meekly under the gaze of the Big Apple. At least white Atlanta does. Black Atlanta -- that's something else. You don't see black rap or R&B artists kowtowing to their New York counterparts. They have succeeded in bringing a little power down here, and that's actually good for everyone, white and black.

Something similar has finally happened in TV thanks to Tyler Perry. He came here less than 20 years ago from his birthplace of New Orleans, penniless. Now he's worth a great deal of money. He has built his own production studio on property formerly owned by Delta Airlines in southwest Atlanta.

A Web Permission Engine

It is insane that it is easier to use someone's text, or a video, than a thumbnail of art on a blog post.

(Artist Chris Buzelli, in the center of this thumbnail, taken when he was judging an art competition in Houston, launched a jihad against me last week, calling me a thief. His friends did as well. They very nearly got me fired, although admittedly I did not handle myself well.)

Artists' bleating aside, I am no thief. Crediting and linking to the source of a thumbnail is just what Google does. It's legal. The "whole art" is not being "taken." A thumbnail is being displayed and linked-to. The artist is being credited. (I usually like to find a place where the art is being sold before using a thumbnail.)

Still, if an artist doesn't want their work to be circulated, if they don't really want to be part of the Web yet have a Web site at the same time, that should be their right.

I just want to know beforehand. I have a right to this. To say, "assume the answer is no" is not good enough. Because that not only censors writers regarding popular art, but art that wants to be publicized as well.

My biggest problem is this nonsense of requiring human interaction before another site owner can know what the deal is. The result is that known artists prevent the work of unknown artists from seeing the light of day, and determinations of artistic merit are made by agents, by elites, not by the people. In the end even good artists are victims in this system.

So how can we tell the status of a thumbnail, in such a way that those who think their thumbnails are art can "protect" them, while those who want their work publicized have a way to reach the market?

A Web permission engine is my modest proposal.