Dana Blankenhorn

Toward the Cloud

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

---

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.

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.

---

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.

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.

Valuing Clicks

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 39 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

Let's go back to Internet Commerce a moment or two. That's what A-Clue.Com was created to cover in 1997.

A click's value is easy to state but very hard to calculate.

It's worth what you can get for it.

The corollary is also true.

It costs what it costs.

In absolute terms this means a page view is worth the advertising (or commerce revenue) you can generate from it, less the cost of getting the page view and serving the page.

V= A - C

These values vary tremendously by site, and ignorance of the underlying equation leads to ferocious misunderstanding wherever e-commerce is discussed.

The Edwards Obsession

I have made an important decision.

I hate The Huffington Post. And you should too.

It's this Edwards obsession that really did it to me.

OK. I get it. John Edwards had sex with a lady, not his wife, in 2006, before he relaunched his campaign. Maybe he fathered a kid.

Frankly, big whoop.

Who is John Edwards, right now? Is he a public official? Is he even a candidate for anything? No.

Yet the bloggers of the HuffPo go on-and-on, making stuff up out of ifs and whats. Tearing their hair, rending their garments. Doing all the Republicans' work for them. Even tearing down other liberal sites in the process, for the sin of not obsessing like they do. Then complaining that the Republicans are doing this to them, when in fact they're doing it to themselves.

Another type of spam victim

Every spam which goes out has millions of victims. (I hope those lovely people at Hormel, makers of this fine canned pork-and-ham product so beloved in Hawaii and Alaska, accept my apology for the picture or, if they wish to complain, do so to John Cleese.)

When sending out millions of spams to e-mail boxes, the spammer hopes this will become thousands of larger victims, those who respond positively to the spam. By including viruses and other malware in the spam, this "success rate" increases, as many people are infected just by downloading the spam. (I learned this after installing a new anti-viral which checks mail as it hits Mailwasher.)

But there's another type of victim, as anyone (like me) who has had the same e-mail address for some time (or worse, their own domain) will attest .

That's the from: victim.

The Buried Lede in the McCain-Lobbyist Story

I don't care if he shtupped her. I don't care if he saw her socially. I don't care about the why concerning anything he did. (Find the lobbyist on the page where this picture came from.)

This should not be about John McCain. It should not be about The New York Times.

This should be about us, all of us. Did John McCain serve us well, or serve us poorly?

The buried lede is John McCain's record, as chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, regarding telecommunications issues and media consolidation. The fact is he endorsed monopolization, every step of the way.

Why do you see no more local programming on your TeeVee? Why are all your radio stations canned and controlled in Corpus Christi? Why do you have, at most, two choices for Internet access? Why are your bills going up instead of down?

Media consolidation. And John McCain has endorsed it, enabled it, for a decade now. The why or how is really immaterial.

The Unstoppable Power of Communication

The most powerful force in the world is communication.

This medium brings more of it within reach of more people than any medium has before. (Pictured, the capital of Rwanda.)

When George W. Bush was in Africa this week reporters were astounded by the number of people there who supported Barack Obama, who seemed to know all about him.

And why not? Africa is filled with Internet cafes. Africans don't have to listen hopefully for a word from the BBC anymore. They can pick up The New York Times.

Recently I mentioned the idea that Obama should go to Kenya and try to sort out the growing crisis there. Turns out he's been there, via radio. He made a statement and took questions at the end of last month. This has not yet had an impact, as the struggle has morphed into a tribe-on-tribe war over land. But he was there, and could be again, at any time.

It's not just politics where this medium is making enormous change. It's in every facet of life. The turnaround in Rwanda is being driven as much by information as anything else. The use of sympathy to reach markets, and the opening of an online stock exchange,  is enabling capital to reach all of East Africa. Trouble in Kenya can now quickly move capital to Rwanda and vice versa. Rapid capital flows can create a gigantic incentive to make peace.

The Difference Among Democrats

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 2 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

The difference among Democrats is subtle -- perhaps too subtle for TV to catch.

But it's there.

I've compared Hillary Clinton to Richard Nixon before, the key to that comparison being her role in the AntiThesis to Nixon's Thesis, which still governs America in 2008, and the ruthlessness which many Democrats, as a result, see as her strength. I've also talked about Barack Obama's comparison to Reagan and my love for John Edwards.

Edwards' star is fading fast, unfortunately. His populism is drawing people like me, those accused of wealth and guilty of education, but failing among its target audience, those with lower-middle incomes. Democrats in that group are going to Clinton, while Huckabee does well if they're Republican. Edwards is left with the "limousine liberals," those who know history. I have compared him here to FDR and to those of lower income that's all FDR is -- history.

What the media does -- and it wants to do this at an accelerating pace regardless of who it hurts -- is winnow down the field quickly. It does this with the early primaries. Single digits in Iowa and you're out. And after New Hampshire they want a two-man game in each party. Thus Fred Thompson and Giuliani have been dismissed, with Romney given the task of "Michigan-or-bust." And on the Democratic side, Edwards is considered gone.

We're left with Obama and Clinton, and the real issue, which is similar to what Republicans faced early in the last generation when the battle was between Reagan and Gerald Ford.

That is a choice between the new values and the old interest groups.

Obama Scaling the Intimacy

Pundits will debate the success of Barack Obama for some time.

Politically he is carrying out Ronald Reagan's unmade run of 1968, delivering a new Political Thesis, new Myths and Values, based on a new medium, to a people desperate for them. Reagan unfortunately waited until Richard Nixon had his nomination sewed-up in 1968 before trying, at the convention, to take it away. Nixon won that convention easily because there was no consistent representative of movement conservatism to oppose him before then.

Howard Dean, as everyone understands by now, carried out the Goldwater role in 2004. His failure came down to an unwillingness to scale the intimacy his campaign had in 2003 -- instead hordes of kids in orange hats descended on Iowans who wanted something more personal.

Obama's team, by contrast, delivered what Dean's team had only promised, a process revolution I wrote about in Let Obama Be Reagan, while minimizing the kind of nonsense I wrote about in ObamaRomney in December. 

The Obama campaign has caused the snapshot people saw as they focused on the early campaign to be the clear idea of a New Thesis, and voters are responding. The key moment, in retrospect, was his reaction to the Iowa victory, paired against Howard Dean's reaction to his Iowa defeat. Obama spoke to history, Dean to his disillusioned supporters. History is what people want to be part of, what they feel a part of, as a new political thesis emerges.

Dean's online campaign was an amateur hour compared to Obama's effort. It's like comparing a Buster Keaton short from 1921 to an MGM feature of 1939. Obama's people went to school on what Dean did, and failed to do, online. They went to school on the opportunities Dean missed for connecting the online and off-line worlds. And in retrospect (despite my early criticism) they have succeeded magnificently.

A campaign's technical effort is far more than a Web site, far more than a blog, far more than text messaging. It's an integrated whole, combining the ability to draw in massive amounts of data, and to use it in directing people to do the campaign's work for you. I can't tell you enough how important early 2007 was to Obama's Iowa win in 2008. It was everything.

While Dean's staff used the Internet as an adjunct, and top aides posted to the blog directly, Obama's team understood the process revolution the Internet makes possible. Thus, they collected small donations as the price of admission to early Obama rallies, and used that to build their database. Thus, they collected a ton of detail on the Iowa caucus process throughout 2007, and disseminated it to volunteers who lived in those districts and could man their own caucuses personally.

Obama's people understood that "people-driven media" is, in some ways, a sideshow to a campaign. They enabled it, but they didn't let that be the show. The main show had to be a branding exercise -- that's what campaigns are. So their online effort was directed at amassing tons of people and tons of real, little campaign jobs for those people to do.

In other words they scaled the intimacy. They scaled it even beyond where Markos Moulitsas envisioned its being scaled in Crashing the Gate. This is the process revolution Dean promised, targeted at the Internet Generation which would understand that message and run with it.