Dana Blankenhorn

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.

Europe Plays the 1837 Game

The Greek financial crisis, which will be followed by similar events in Portugal, Ireland and Spain, has a lot of journalists wondering if this has ever happened before, and whether there are lessons to be learned.

It has. Here. And there are.

What Europe is playing is a version of a game we played, and lost, 173 years ago. In 1837.

I have written up the story several times. Many states tried to emulate what New York had done with the Erie Canal. They bet big on their own canals, which failed. When the states defaulted, the American government refused to step in. Andrew Jackson had just won his greatest victory, destroying the U.S. Bank, and he wasn't willing to step in.

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.

Asynchronicity

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 17 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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A study from the Pew Internet Center says 88% of teens with mobile phones text, that one-third text more than 100 times per day, that it's now the most common way for them to communicate.

OMG, say parents. WTF? Kids are, like ROFLMAO.

What's going on is now a generation-long trend. Asynchronicity.

(The illustration here is from John Suler's very fine 2002 work, The Psychology of Cyberspace.)

Most electronic messaging is, by its nature, asynchronous. That is, the two parties don't need to be together in time or space for communication to happen. (When we're doing things at the same time, that's synchronous. Asynchronous is its opposite. Hence asynchronicity.)

As we become busier, by choice, by habit, or because we have to, the need for asynchronicity naturally grows, and the desire for better forms of asynchronicity grows as well.

As Suler's article notes, asynchronicity is just one aspect of how our lives change in a cyber world. Suler calls such things as disassociative anonymity, invisibility, and solipsistic interjection part of  The Online Disinhibition Effect. It's supposed to explain why we flame, participate in web mobs, and do other things we feel distant from but which have immense impacts on our targets.

All true, but it's asynchronicity which, to me, is the most important skill to master.

Isn't proportional representation the only real issue in the British election? Once that goes in, every Parliament is hung, every government must be negotiated, and small parties can wag the big dogs. I don't necessarily believe that, I'm just amazed no one has talked about it. Why not?

Guy Kewney was the best computer journalist ever

I lost a good friend last week, and computing lost a great man.

Guy Kewney died. He was 63. He had cancer. The announcement was delivered by his daughter Lucy on her dad's Facebook page. We learned of it when my wife went to the BBC Technology Web site yesterday.

Guy chronicled the PC revolution from its birth. He knew such entrepreneurs as Adam Osborne and Clive Sinclair personally, interviewed Steve Jobs and Bill Gates when they were all in their salad days, and stayed at it through the age of the Internet.

What made Guy great wasn't his tech savvy. It was his attitude. He looked at everything from a user's perspective, and he was an avid user of everything that came his way. He never wrote down to his reader. His columns always read as though you were sitting right next to him, and he were trying to understand the new in context as you sat there and nodded.

It was Guy's status as the "customer's man" that made him truly great, and that kept British computer journalism relevant even as its American cousins -- so devoted to vendors and their strategies -- collapsed early in this century, their credibility shot.

Guy never lost his credibility.

Convenient Enemes

The way you push back against what seem like heavy odds is to find a convenient enemy. (The painting is called Fisherman, by Roland Heath. From his blog, with permission.)

I've been one. It's no fun being a convenient enemy. But the convenient enemy gets no sympathy, and can be used to bulldoze through what seem like impossible problems.

More important, a President can use convenient enemies to make a larger point, and win that point, so that opponents who once appeared all-powerful become amenable to compromise or can be bulldozed.

In this President's case, his two biggest problems right now involve financial reform and energy reform. He is fortunate in that history has given him two very convenient enemies, Goldman Sachs on the one hand and Don Blankenship on the other.

I'll explain.

Republicans are re-running their health care strategy with financial reform. That is they're united in opposition, not just to a specific set of proposals but to the idea that anything can be done while Democrats are in power. The same is true with climate change legislation.

With health care, the President had to compromise-and-compromise with his entire party -- even the most rigidly opposed -- in order to get a bill passed over that opposition.

This time he's going to use the convenient enemies. He's going to win through because convenient enemies work both in Congress and before voters. No one wants to stand with the convenient enemies when voters go to the polls -- you're likely to be hung alongside them.

The American Civility War

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 16 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The most important issue before the American people right now isn't Afghanistan. It's not the deficit. It's not health care.

It's civility. (This is the logo of the Civility Center, a non-profit run by Dr. Jay Newman of Michigan.)

Political and technology trends have combined over the last 40 years to make us a very uncivil people. The Nixon Thesis' adoption of McCarthyism, of thinly disguised racism, and later of religious intolerance resulted in the Bush Excess, a time during which Republicans decided they could make up their own reality.

That Excess is still alive in the Tea Party, whose signs, abuse of public figures and threats of violence are all direct attacks on the American experiment. History will prove that their incivility makes them traitors. It will bury them as it did the hippies before them.

I first saw this trend, online, in 1988, when I entered some Usenet discussions concerning politics through the old GEnie service. The level of vitriol, of insult, and sheer incivility I experienced there stayed with me.

It's easy to insult someone online. It's easy to call them names when you don't know them, when they're not standing in front of you. It's easy to ignore any moves toward compromise, or apology. It's easy to dehumanize.

It is in dehumanizing others that we dehumanize ourselves. The Web makes it easy. Some artists, reading that sentence, are already, right now, getting ready to flame me again, because I made a mistake with a piece of art and they have no intention of accepting any apology, explanation, or suggestion aimed at prevention.

I can't do anything about that except pity them.

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.

How I Stole the Mona Lisa

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 15 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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It was a piece of cake. I went to my friend the Google. He found her quick and sweet.

I downloaded her, and I sized her to fit on my virtual wall.

Here she is. Nice, huh.

Of course, you say, there's no copyright on the Mona Lisa. True, but that doesn't mean this image isn't subject to copyright. It doesn't mean people aren't trying to make money off her and trying to keep me from placing her here.

Take, for instance, Andrew Hall of Portland. He created a 300 pixel image of her hanging in the Louvre. It's got his copyright notice. He's selling prints of it. I don't think Leonardo da Vinci or the Louvre is getting a cut.

No matter your view on the law, or of me, there are important issues at stake here, which Mona and I would like to discuss with you.