Tech writer iced for expressing opinion. Not 'objective' [The Register]

The story is probably going to become typical as the days go by.  Corporate ownership of the press is an ugly business only overshadowed by state ownership of the press.

I found the Reporters sans frontières worldwide press freedom index quite interesting.   The USA languishing at #17 didn't surprise me but the UK being at #21 did.  I hadn't realised that things were actually worse here!  I doubt anyone in Italy will be surprised by their showing at #40.  Thank you signor Berlusconi!

THE LISTENING LEADER

"Lifting Listening Leadership Awareness and Action Worldwide"

03/31/03

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LISTENING-BASED INNOVATION

Continuing success comes from value-creating innovation stimulated by disciplined listening. Occasional surveys are insufficient. Organizations need to build listening systems that capture, summarize, and disseminate the unmet dreams and unfulfilled wants of multiple customer groups, including existing, prospective, and internal customers (employees).

Listening systems uncover fresh marketplace intelligence, help guide decision making, and nurture creative thinking. Effective listening systems involve both formal and informal methods, conversations with customers, the use of trend data to reveal changing patterns, the distribution of relevant information to all employees, and active discussion and application of findings in work groups.

Listening leads to learning, which sets the stage for innovation. Innovation is more likely when employees are well informed about the customer, unafraid to try something new, and committed to the organization's success.

Charles Schwab uses multiple methods to listen for customers' dreams that often start with the phrase, "I know it's not possible, but I wish....." Schwab's top management travels extensively to interact with customers in informal settings. Branches host monthly customer receptions, and at least once a week in different cities. Schwab holds town meetings to hear employees' ideas, suggestions, and concerns.

Gary Hoover, who has created three innovative businesses (Bookstop, Hoover's Handbooks, and TravelFest) claims that the customers always get what they want. It is just a matter of who gives it to them when. Companies that sustain success continually search for new ways to create value for customers. They choose to lead rather than follow, to act rather than wait, to heed the customer instead of the competitor.

Source: Leading for the Long Term, Leonard Berry, Leader to Leader

More good stuff from the Listening Leader (one of the few daily e-mail shots that I subscribe to).

For a company that is ready to hear (and encourage) real news from the front-line a network of internal action journals would mae a very powerful listening system.  More intelligence (and potential for automated news gathering) could be added to this by using simple topic map techniques (e.g. annotating each post with 1 or 2 topics describing the business area/project, tone of each post, etc...)

Some of you may already have spotted that my weblog has moved.  With grateful thanks to Paolo I have relocated C&C to its new, permanent, home @

http://matt.blogs.it/

(With apologies in advance for the likely upheaval over the next couple of weeks as things get straightened out)

Project Portfolio Management. Project (Portfolio) Management...Like Herding Cats? by Glen B. Alleman. Glen is a regular contributor to PM World Today writing on Information Technology projects. Check out his other articles when you visit this one.

While many of us project managers struggle with our own project, firms often need to manage collections of projects. Glen has been writing about how to think about and organize an approach that can be successful.

Glen writes, "Before projects can be ready for (project) portfolio management (PPM) they must possess certain attributes.

• The clear start and end date – what is the drop–dead date?
• A definition of “done” – what needs to be in for this project “earn its keep?”
• A business case – on what day does this project breakeven?
• A priority ranking – what projects are more or less important than this one?

"These attributes seem “obvious” at first glance, but it is breathtaking how many projects don’t posses these simple attributes."

The Foundation of Portfolio Management

Glen says PPM depends on four concurrent processes.

• A Balanced Scorecard strategy to define priorities and establish a connection between every project and a specific strategy and objective.
• A public registry of projects, resources, and deliverables housed in Microsoft Project 2002 Server.
• An Earned Value performance reporting and measurement processes to make visible performance metrics for cost and schedule.
• A process to select, classify, measure, and guide the implementation for collections of IT projects.

"(W)ithout a business context and a strategic goal, the project manager is simply a cog in the administrative wheels of the firm."

Stick with this guy. He's thoughtful, practical, and working at the edge of emerging theory and practice.
[Reforming Project Management]

I could post so much more from Hal's blog.  It is a veritable treasure trove of good stuff for those involved (or just interested) in managing projects.

Can we win the hearts and Minds?.

I have just skimmed though Milton Viorst's Book "In the Shadow of the Prophet - The Struggle for the Soul of Islam". My questions about whether we can ever win the hearts and minds of the Arabs have deepened and I also question whether democracy can be inserted into a culture that has experienced the history and culture of Iraq.

MV's basic view is that Islam defaults to orthodoxy which in modern times has become Fundamentalist. It is not survivable for a Muslim leader to espouse a secular state. So, Muslim states are locked in a stasis. Orthodoxy precludes innovation. It precludes Representative government. The result:

• Income in the Arab world has fallen more than 20% since 1980
• GDP has increased at around 1% annually since 1980 while population has increased from 165 million to 245 million. In oil states, there has been a cushion but in the rest a fall in living standards.
• There are 5 million arabs in France many of whom are young male and unemployed - that is 10% of the French population. That would be the equivalent of 20 million in the US and 3 million in Canada - now maybe we can sense why France is nervous about a conflict that could become religious.

The way out, if there is one, can only be found inside the Arab world. As assassination is the fate of reformers, I can't see how this can occur. So the Arab world most of whom are male and young and angry have no choice but to vent their anger at us..

My second point is about our hopes for democracy. Surely Iraq, like Ukraine, is like a battered family with a long habit of abuse. Abusers come from the ranks of the abused. There is no trust in this type of society. Putnam has shown how this affects economics and society in his work on Italy. In the South, Mafia land, the culture is top down patriarchal and the economy is stagnant. In the North where there are many horizontal links and high trust, the economy booms.

Sicily looks like a dream world compared to what the Iraqis have  been through for hundreds of years. Remember before Saddam there were the Hashemites supported by the British and before that hundreds of years of Turkish rule. Like Ukraine there is not even the myth of freedom to recall. If we are honest we can admit that there is no chance of having a Democratic state - it is not culturally possible until there have been generations of no abuse.

My main point -  Let's drop the illusions  The war in Iraq may be only a campaign in a long and deadly struggle between Islam and the secular world. Currently there is no possibility of reconciliation. We are in reality locked in a lifetime of increasing conflict. Let's take off the blinkers and see our situation for what it is. I have no idea what to do but is not the first step of finding a solution to find out what is relay going on?

[Robert Paterson's Radio Weblog]

Robert's posting these last few weeks have been both thoughtful and interesting.  But I have to disagree in at least one sense.  I don't see the war in Iraq as being the opening salvo in a struggle between Islam and the secular world.  Iraq is, largely, a secular society under Saddam Hussein. 

If you read:

• Where did Saddam come from (Part I)
• Where did Saddam come from (Part II)

you can see more of the fabric that made up the events leading to the first gulf war.  In particular you will see how British and more recently US interests (and stupidity) have shaped events.  It makes a mockery of the whole US position and the new war.

Heres some items that stand out:

Saddam Hussein directed the cascade of oil wealth into the improvement of the lives of ordinary Iraqi citizens. Our ambassador to Iraq in these years, Edward Peck, tells me there is no question that as much as ordinary people in Iran came to hate the Shah, the ordinary people of Iraq came to love Saddam. The wealth went into free education, K through university, modern hospitals, water and sewer facilities, and the greatest expansion of living standards in the history of modern Iraq. His biographers agree he was conscious of the need to share the benefits of the oil wealth as widely as possible in order to keep the support of the masses.

In the period between this meeting and the Kuwait invasion, the record indicates that the Bush administration bent over backwards to indicate that it was thrilled to pieces with Saddam, especially as he was using his oil money to buy what we permitted him to buy to reduce our trade deficit.

The next day Saddam Hussein summoned US Ambassador April Glaspie to his office in what was to be the last official contact between Baghdad and the United States before the invasion of Kuwait. Even at this late stage, with an obviously deteriorating situation in the Gulf, Glaspie still made efforts to placate Saddam Hussein. She emphasized that President Bush had rejected the idea of trade sanctions against Iraq, to which Saddam replied: ‘There is nothing left for us to buy from America except wheat. Every time we want to buy something, they say it is forbidden. I am afraid that one day you will say, "you are going to make gunpowder out of wheat"

"I admire your extraordinary efforts to rebuild your country. I know you need funds. We understand that, and our opinion is that you should have the opportunity to rebuild your country. But we have no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts like your border disagreement with Kuwait. [Author’s italics]."

In the years since, I’ve concluded that Saddam had no intention of invading Saudi Arabia. I later learned, as did you, of the "green light" that April Glaspie gave Saddam in their July 24 meeting. I also learned that Ms. Glaspie was subsequently "surprised" when the Iraqi army did not stop at the oil fields, but went on to Kuwait City. Of course, if you consider that Kuwait is only 13% the size of your home state of North Carolina, and Iraq is 10,000 square miles larger than California, you will see that it did not take much for tanks to overshoot Kuwait City and appear to be menacing Saudi Arabia. In his invasion of Iran, remember that Saddam did stop when he got what he wanted, and was later criticized for not pushing as far as he could so that he would have a better bargaining position.

Indeed, the consensus was built with money and arms. Turkey, Syria, even Iran joined the coalition with sudden fountains of credit produced by the World Bank. It does appear in my readings that there came a point where there had to be a war to justify all that had been done. In the last weeks before the bombing of Iraq began on January 16, it is clear with hindsight that there was no interest in talking to Baghdad because Iraq had to be taught a lesson. Several hundred thousand Iraqis died as a result of the bombing. The reason we lost only 148 men was that Iraq was attempting a retreat throughout the 100 hours of battle. If it had put up any resistance, they would have been completely slaughtered. As it was, Colin Powell called off the "turkey shoot" after it had accomplished partial slaughter.

What we can see is a leader, cold-blooded and ruthless to be sure (but he's in good company), who gets a green-light from the US to invade Kuwait and recover what he sees as the costs of his war on Iran (for which he had the backing, if not the support, of the west).  When he overshoots and appears to be threatening Saudia Arabia the US overreacts and a pretty soon the situation spirals out of control to the point where there is no turning back --  Hussein has been demonized as the next Hitler, billioins of dollars of fake money have come from the World Bank and have to be spent somehow.

So, why are we going back to war with Iraq?

Some while ago I talked about the facility for users to share topics with each other.  I was just beginning to experiment with topics and blogging and, at the time, was thinking of an ad hoc P2P mechanism by which users could ensure they were talking about the same thing by using the same topics.  I called this concept a topicroll playing on the theme of the blogroll.

More recently Paolo and I have been working on making use of topics to create a superior Action Journalling environment.  Paolo has also been involved in the Italian Blog Aggregator project about which he has written on several occasions.  These efforts have begun to dovetail and I wanted to document some of what we are doing.

For a while now liveTopics has provided the ability for Radio users to associate multiple topics with their posts.  This allows for fine-grained, ad hoc, associations between posts in a much more flexible way than categories allow.  Release 1.1.3 (due RSN) adds also the concept of topic types and these are central to our efforts.

liveTopics types are a way of classifying topics into functional categories.  For example the default types created by liveTopics are:

• generic
• person
• project
• place
• time

Each topic can belong to only one type (which defaults to generic).  Now my topic Paolo can be classified as being a person topic.  Now all topics are not equal and our software can start to provide useful interfaces based upon topic information.

Systems such as the Italian Blog Aggregator may want to define a control language for topics rather than allowing users to make up their own.  Even if it does not wish to control the topics, it may be useful if users can pre-fill their topic list with system defined topics.  That's what the topicroll is all about.  Now we're going to implement it.

To begin with we have choosen to use the OPML format for the topic roll (later on we will probably implement them in XTM as well).  Whilst OPML is not a semantically ideal language for describing a topic roll it has a number of advantage for us right now:

• It's simple: It basically has only 1 tag <outline> so it's pretty easy to get along with
• It's a standard: OPML is already used & understood around the world, we're not inventing it ourselves
• There are tools: In principle you should be able to create a topic roll in any OPML editor and load it into liveTopics and vice versa

As an example you can see my current topicroll for yourself (although I notice that Radio doesn't seem to make anything of it, I wonder if my OPML is bad).

[28/03: With a little help from Paolo the topicRoll OPML is now fixed and the outline works in Radio!]

The next step is to allow liveTopics to import topicrolls from other locations.

I'm about to edit some OPML files, I want to use my XML editor XML-SPY but it works best with either a schema or DTD.  Fortunately I was able to find an OPML DTD thanks to Wayne Steel.

Creating change.

From Dave Pollard's excellent new blog, How to Save the World, comes a piece of advice that could be helpful for people who want to effect change in just about any sphere of activity. It also hints at the challenge inherent in such an agenda.

[...] Change Management is all about getting people to do different things, or things differently. In business, the guru of the moment on this subject is John Kotter. In his book Leading Change he describes the eight steps to getting people to do different things or things differently, and they are irrefutable:

1. Establish a sense of urgency
2. Form a powerful guiding coalition
3. Create a vision
4. Communicate the vision
5. Empower others to act on the vision
6. Plan for and create short-term wins
7. Consolidate improvements 
8. Institutionalize the change

The underlying principle here is that, in business as in real life, you don't bring about sustained, meaningful change by edict. You need to persuade, enthuse, and engage people in sufficient numbers to change behaviours, laws or processes. If you want to do this in your business, buy Kotter's book, since that's what it's focused on. But the same preconditions apply to political, economic, artistic, scientific, spiritual or moral change. Whether the change agent is a preacher or a politician or a philosopher or a post-modernist, the process is the same. [...]

[Seb's Open Research]

Kotter's to do: list is remarkably succinct.  This could be a manifesto for anybody at work (which reminds me of Gary Hamel's assertion, I think in Leading the Revolution, that we can all be leaders, whatever our station).

A nice Java pluggable look and feel is what Diego is looking for to apply to his great spaces app. A decent font rendering by the Java VM is what I hope Sun will provide, sooner or later. [CristianVidmar.com]

Of the L&F that I have seen Alloy looks quite promising.  However I think the best L&F I have seen so far is that of the Intellij IDEA development environment.  I wonder if they could be persuaded to package it?

Paolo wanted a macro that would link directly from a term like Paolo Valdemarin to the first hit returned by Google for that term. Here is a macro that will do that. (To install, right click the link and select "Save As" then save it as googlami.txt in your Radio Userland macros folder).

To use it you would use the source view in the post editor and type in:

<%googlami( "what i want to search for")%>

and it will generate a complete HTML link for that search.  If you want the text for the link to be different to the term, pass a second parameter with the text of the link, e.g.

<%googlami( "Paolo Valdemarin", "Paolo" )%>

Consider it a 1st birthday present for your blog :)

"Shut your mouth". As radio giants censor antiwar musicians, TV networks bully pro-peace actors, and Attorney General John Ashcroft prepares a new assault on civil liberties, a climate of intimidation creeps over America. [Salon.com]

Life would be much easier if everything was black and white.

Only one year. One year ago today I opened this weblog. Yesterday I went trough the last 12 months of posts. I didn't read them all, but... well, I saw my life passing before my eyes. There are some posts that I wrote about one year ago that look like they could have been written yesterday while others belong to a very distant past, when my company and my life were different, we had other projects, other dreams. A lot of stuff has happened since them, good and bad. Among the good thing, I must say that weblogging in the last year has been a great experience, more than 61,000 "unique visitors" came on these pages, more than 1,5 millions hits. I have met a lot of incredibly smart people in the blogosphere and some have become friends. A warm thank you to everybody for this wonderful year. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]

Paolo is among the nicest people I have had the privilege of meeting and getting to know.  I don't think that would have happened but for his blog, so:

Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday Paolo's blog,
Happy birthday to you!

Just one question: Are the English and Italian blogs twins?

If like me, you use WinAmp to manage your Windows MP3 library (and heavens why wouldn't you?) then treat yourself to the

RemoteSensing skin by Mike McCaffrey.  As beautiful as it is unobtrusive.

[@17:01 - I seem to have a problem with the Media Library and the background not being properly overwritten.  How annoying.  I wonder if this is a problem with the skin or maybe my graphics driver]

War and North American Airlines - Why Southwest Airlines is Different.

I suspect that an important casualty of this war will be the traditional North American "Full Service" airline. I suspect that they cannot be reformed as their basic flaw is one of culture. Yes Southwest have a number of operational differences such as a one model fleet, no hubs, no expensive reservation system and so on. But the real difference is in managerial culture. Southwest is where "Servant Leadership" is exemplified. Where the senior guys take the first pay cuts. Where staffing is mainly on attitude etc.  "They don't' have a unions" you say. But Southwest is 85% unionized - they have different relationship with their unions.

“Southwest’s secret is simple…You fly one type of plane, you concentrate on short, point to point routes, you don’t serve food and you don’t assign seats”. Kelleher slammed his fist down on the desk “Anyone can copy that, and they have. But they can’t copy the culture!”

Here is what the Chairman of Southwest Airlines, Herb Kelleher, thinks about this point. “Manage in good times to prepare for bad times. To succeed in today’s marketplace, the company cross trains employees  and increases their skill base so that individuals at all levels can take personal responsibility for keeping the company marketable, for maintaining high trust relationships, and identifying effective options for dealing with transitions.” In addition Kelleher and his leadership team inspire loyalty by communicating openly and truthfully with their staff, respecting the life work balance and fostering continuous learning. Southwest employees know that their voice matters and that they can implement new programs, make decisions and help customers in times of need. A guiding principle is: if you use your best judgment to do what is right, your leaders will stand behind you.

Donna Conover, EVP Customer Service (an interesting tile in itself) at Southwest Airlines explains that the company has high expectations for each employee: “Just doing your job well does not make you a good employee. The attitude and spirit towards others complete the needs the company has of the Employee. As leaders if we allow lack of teamwork or low productivity, we are being unfair to the rest of the team”.

My bet is that United and Air Canada will be gone in 6 months. For us in Canada this will leave a huge vacuum. The worst move would be to prop up the Zombie. The best would be to allow the vacuum to be filled by a new system. The key will be culture

[Robert Paterson's Radio Weblog]

Rob is delivering some really great content.  Some key points from this piece:

• “Anyone can copy that, and they have. But they can’t copy the culture!”
• Manage in good times to prepare for bad times.
• company has high expectations for each employee
• Just doing your job well does not make you a good employee

What Southwest seem to have done is internalize a very healthy culture.  I wonder what kind of knowledge management practices they have in place.

One year blogging. One year ago on Friday, I started blogging. I created my first weblog and made my first post, to announce my first open source project, Python Community Server. Since then, just about everything computer-related I've done in my spare time has had something to do with blogging.

The first weblog I regularly read was Joel On Software. I found out about Dave Winer's Scripting News when looking for information on SOAP (during my brief period of contribution to the Mono project), and that lead me to Radio UserLand and much hacking on community servers.

Blogging has brought me in touch with loads of new people -- notably Rogers Cadenhead, who appeared one day on my blog server, Robert Barksdale, who's still blogging there, and Georg Bauer, who's pretty much taken over the work on the PyCS project. More recently Seb Paquet (Mr. Personal Publishing), Marc Canter (International Man of Mystery) and Matt Mower. The ecosystem project brought out N.Z. Bear and many others. Somewhere in the middle of all that, Stephen Dulaney (who does research into social behaviour when he's not writing software) started writing to me out of the blue, and we've had some great conversations.

So thanks, guys, for making my last year much more interesting, helping me grow as a programmer and inspiring me to hack up new tools and sites. I wonder where we'll be next year ...

Comment

[Second p0st]

Congratualations to Phil, he's achieved a huge amount in a short space of time.

I've had an old friend come visit from Yale so I haven't been slave to the keyboard for a few days -- I'm catching up though.

Blogging = Investing. I don't spend much time reading good old paper off-line and since I was reading a book at the time I missed until today this article on an almost one month old issue of The Economist.

For the past decade or so, sociologists have been pushing one more concept, "social capital" - trust or community, in one of its guises - that is now also being taken up by economists. Crudely speaking, the more people trust each other, the better off their society. They might work more efficiently together, for example. In business, trust might obviate the need for complicated contracts, and thus save on lawyers' fees.

Besides using "social capital" to measure countries' economic power, I belive that the same concept can be applied to any community. Applied to the weblogs community, this concept help explaining the huge power that has been unleashed by blogging. Reading other people's weblogs creates trust and efficiency, and it's an excellent base to build businesses and relationships. This is interesting also for k-logging (or "business journalling"): if a country with a better community is richer, then also a company with a better developed trust and efficiency amoung its workers is going to be better off than others. So, no, we are not wasting time writing on our weblogs, we're investing. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]

I've little to add to a good piece by Paolo, other than that we are also exploring the ways in which companies can develop the infrastructure to allow employee's to make these investments and in how they can reap the benefit of their investment.

Peter Shaplen, broadcast veteran, chimes in

My partner in production efforts, Peter Shaplen, who began his career as Walter Cronkite's desk assistant, chimes in. Alas, Peter is blogless, so I'm posting this for him:

Once again we are confusing technology with editorial substance. The ability to see a military column with night-scope technology and moving in the dark is neither a news event in itself nor indicative of anything strategic.

Asking a reporter to "tell us the latest" from there is gratuitous. First, from his perspective this milepost is not significantly different from the one 5 minutes earlier. Second, from his humvee and note it is NOT the command vehicle he is no better off than any other forlorn private in the convoy being carried along in the desert.

We have entered a media war with reporters and cameras embedded with troops, subanchors in Qatar and Kuwait, and if they could, news organizations would likely rent their own AWACS to create skyboxes much the way they are accustomed to covering political conventions.

But the sad reality is that they have little to say, little to offer in terms of news, and it seems from the first 4 days of coverage, they have little if any intention of gathering news.

They are doing a play by play. They are content to tell us about mile posts and sand as if that is a substitute for reporting on the progress of the war or the condition of the men or the leadership of the generals.

This has once again - become more about the media than the war.

In Gulf War I, Arthur Kent was dubbed the Scud Stud in some sort of weird accolade as the bravest or sexiest reporter on the beat.

We have yet to see who will emerge as the next Beauty in a Bush Jacket for Gulf War 2, though I am certain that, once again, there are countless talent agents hoping and coaching their clients to become the next Ashley Banfield.

War reportage is not about the personalities of the reporters covering the war. Thus far, those reporters embedded with the troops have done an appallingly poor job of truly introducing us to the men they are covering.

We have no sense of them, their view of the war, the perspective of the GI. We have no sense of how they view their commanders. We have little insight to how they feel about being there. And who could blame them? Speaking honestly in the military or expressing the counter-to-the-prevailing-wisdom opinion is not healthy for one's career.

So in turn, the media turns to itself to discuss and debate how the campaign is going.

The networks (and local stations) ploy of having a platoon stand and proudly, happily and loudly proclaim they are the "such and such of the whatever company, Good Morning America" or "Hi Mom, I love you and we'll be home soon" is a poor substitute for substance.

Murrow did find substance tho aboard the night bombing mission over Europe. He introduced us to the boys. He let them speak. We could listen and hear that they were truly just like the young men of our town. We knew them. We related to them. We felt their fear and their sense of mission.

Jack Laurence did it too with his work for CBS on Charlie Company. His book "The Cat From Hue: A Vietnam War Story" (2002, Public Affairs) should have been required reading for all of the reporters embedded in Gulf War 2. Its 848 pages are a chronicle of a tortured media experience covering a US led coalition.

But it took time. It took time weeks for Laurence to become part of Charles Company. It took a commitment from a network to enable him to do itŠ support itŠ film it. And they gave him air time. Not enough perhaps, but he won it by sheer reporting excellence.

That rarely exists today. While we are being treated to war 24/7, there is almost no time set aside for true reporting.

The vast amount of air time has become consumed by live shots and interviews with experts and listening to one anchor after another remind us that he/she was recently in the theatre of operations and which time they sawŠ or they were toldŠ or they heardŠ As if! As if their access and tour wasn¹t as scripted or controlled as anything we might imagine.

My point is that war, just like so many other stories the media claims to be expert at covering, does not unfold nicely, neatly or on a timetable. Yet many in the media who should know better seem to be looking for a perfect fit.

Once upon a time, war correspondents and photographers would file their dispatches that would be printed hours (or days) later. Attacks and counter attacks were long completed before the first dispatches ever appeared for the homeland readers. There were political debates of course. And in time, the memoirs of the generals and the politicians would be published to fill in whatever gaps remained. In some cases they were shocking accounts. In others, they revealed true strategy and surprise.

Today, we want the instant gratification of knowing where the troops are going, what they are expecting, what the outcome will be, and what will they see next.

It is as if the progression of the Third Marine Battalion into Iraq was a Discovery channel travelogue. But "My Journeys With Bravo Company on the Road to Baghdad" is not what this war is about.

One cannot fault Brokaw, Jennings, Rather or the others for at times tossing to the embedded reporter in desperation to hear anything new, but they should (and do) know better than to expect any truly astounding news. They can look sincere, concerned, puzzled and reflective until their crows feet grow deeper and become more embedded on their own faces, but the handoffs to the satellite-phone equipped field reporter is likely to garner very little that is "news."

In fact, there is very little news period. And that should be no surprise. This is war coverage. It is deliberate and progressive.

Following Coalition Commander in Chief General Tommy Franks news conference Saturday morning, NBC¹s Today show did a rather good recap between Katie Couric and Jim Miklaszewski featuring "Mik's" insight to what he heard that was significant and what he heard/read between the lines of Gen. Frank¹s statements. It was solid interpretation and offered value.

But what also seemed apparent was that the real value of the Couric-Mik dialogue was to fill the time required to get Matt Laurer¹s signal and Kelly O'Donnell into an IFB harness to report from Qatar.

No sooner did Couric handoff to Laurer than he tossed to O'Donnell to elaborate on her questions regarding Turkish incursion along the northern border. For any one who had been listening for more than 15 minutes, we had already heard her original question and Franks' answer. There had been no opportunity for follow up. There had been no other question asked on the subject. Once Frank had left the room on live TV, there had been no chance for additional questions with other senior officers as she was hustling to get ready for her live shot.

In short, O'Donnell's question had been asked and answered in the news conference. Now she was being called upon to merely regurgitate on national, live TV. Why? Because they had a signal to Qatar and needed to put something--anything--on it.

I am often critical of the way media local more than national covers a plane crash. For instance, how often have you watched as the NTSB has arrived at a crash site before a reporter earnestly asks for the cause of the accident. Any one who has watched more than 15 seconds of news knows that an accident investigation moves at glacial speed and can be as exciting as watching paint dry, nonetheless we watch from the sidelines as a reporter asks an unanswerable question. "So do you know the cause of the crash?"

It is like watching a traffic accident in slow motion. The reporter licks their lips take a deep breath knowing that they have the air and asks with a booming voice, "So what do you think was the cause?" And within a nanosecond, the grimace from the NTSB lead investigator reveals not only his/her contempt for the media but dismisses the reporter with a terse, "We only just arrived."

It will be months if not a year before the NTSB files its report. It will no doubt be considerably longer before that reporter learns how to be a journalist.

What is served by asking a question that cannot be answered at that time?

The same holds true at the Pentagon of JOC briefing. Reporters - standing there earnestly asking questions that they know are unanswerableŠ I am left to wonder, for whom are they performing? Are they posturing for the general? The TV audience at home--or more specifically for their bosses at 30 Rockefeller Plaza or West 57th and 67th Streets?

General Franks will not be tricked into divulging news. He has been too well media trained and is not going to reveal the secrets of the campaign on live TV.

We can watch our news anchors breathlessly throw to the reporters in the field for the latest updateŠ we can watch them twist slowly, helplessly in the wind as they chat amicably back and forth between the field and NY anchor podsŠ but we would be mistaken to think or expect that news is going to break out in these exchanges.

There are specific kinds of news from a war. There are of course the pictures. Dating back to Matthew Brady, there are pictures. Apart from a location caption, often times the pictures require nothing more.

The picture of the burning of London, St. Paul¹s Cathedral, or the faces of the huddled population in the Underground speaks volumes.

For any one who doubt the power of this with troops in the field, I refer them to the work of Larry Burrows of Life Magazine. (The magazine resources must be available somewhere; surely his book "Compassionate Photographer" can be found).

We continue to see a derivation of this in the live cameras from Baghdad. All that is really needed from those vantage points is the summary of "We're looking north...." or "the building on fire is the palace of...." We don't need much more because the picture itself is the story.

We don't need to be told the building is on fire if in fact we can see the flames. Telling me that is to tell me the obvious. Tell me instead what time of day is it, was the building likely occupied, were there air raid signals in advance of the explosion, were people seen running from the scene, are there ambulances removing the injured, are fire crews able to get to the scene?

We have heard none of that reporting.

We have heard plenty of hit-runs-and errors kinds of summary, "Oh that was a big one," or "Tonight¹s explosions were louder than last nights." Forgive me if I dismiss this is as not substance but rather play-by-play and color commentary punctuated by bomb blasts.

The next type of reporting is the on scene report. In Vietnam this was usually obtained by small crews (a reporter, cameraman and soundman) who truly risked their lives by traveling to a forward base, persuading the military PAO to put them on a chopper and ferry them to a hot spot. They shot their story, did a few interviews, asked some fairly decent questions both on and more off camera (for film was expensive and heavy), and then it became the responsibility of the reporter to put it all together. To add depthŠ to add perspectiveŠ to bring his or her knowledge and prior experience to bear and create a tapestry of the news.

In Nicaragua and El Salvador, we managed to get there on our own usually arriving as uninvited guests. Now in Gulf War 2, the media is being carried along as official guests. But thus far, the censored and self-censored coverage has been reduced to a play by play of a road trip.

The last kind of reporting and sadly it cascades out of the TV and radio is exactly what the press used to deride as the "Five o'clock follies" that was the daily staple of MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam the precursor of the JOC at the Coalition Command Post). There on a daily basis, senior officers would interpret the news and field reports for the Saigon based press corps.

The only difference today is that the networks have hired their own interpreters and experts from the retired ranks of the military to cut out the middleman. They do their own "follies." For it is surely a folly to ask an arm chair general in suburban Virginia to interpret a campaign about which he has little, if any, first hand knowledge.

We are also being treated to former journalists who have pitched themselves as experts to local media. In San Francisco, one former Vietnam reporter has been hired to sit on the set and explain in depth the military strategy. He is offering little more than what has been gleaned from the printed press from network pundits and from other, previously available sources. Yet sitting on the anchor set he and the host proclaim, as if they have just assessed this on their own, that the attack on Iraq "will be a coordinated one" or "will open with a blistering air campaign followed by ground columns from the south, west and north." As Homer Simpson eloquently says, "Well, doh."

We are receiving an overwhelming amount of noise in this war. Noise from the battlefield, from the JOC, from the Pentagon, and from the anchor desk.

Instead of sifting out the best to present that within the news window, the window itself has been expanded to "take it all in" and to present it back in often an unedited, unshaped fashion.

The press has abrogated its responsibility to be editors rather preferring to become facilitators.

Unable or unwilling to edit and shape the reporting, they are content to use technology to let it flow into our living room.

Unwilling to risk upsetting the political apple cart by taking a stand or showing something it fears would be unpopular or worse, deemed unpatriotic, the network/mainstream media has decided it is safer, politically wiser, economically advantageous to be a "pipe" rather than an editorial resource.

Yes, we¹ll get to "see it live" though it remains uncertain just what "it" is. If war is death and destruction and pain and blood and suffering and loss, then we surely haven¹t seen "it" yet.

Instead, we have seen and heard noise and bombast.

Live feeds, individual captions, blogs and so much more technology enable us to experience this battle, but often as not much more than a game show.

I have yet to see anything that shows me the war has begun that people are paying the supreme price and that the technology has improved either the editorial understanding of the campaign or will prevent us from new wars to come.

[RatcliffeBlog: Business, Technology & Investing]

It's simply about power. I keep reading comments on the upcoming war. It's about oil. It's about freedom. It's about terror. It's about a nasty dictator. It's about business. It's going to be easy to win. Unfortunately I'm now convinced that it's somehow much simpler than that. It's about power. And about lack of power. The U.S. feel that they can establish a new kind of imperialism to the world and that all existing international organizations, leftovers from the last century, are not needed anymore (if not to clean things up once they're done). Only Europe, as a friend od the US, could have opposed this imperialism. But we failed. Right after September 11 the US were leading the largest coalition of countries ever seen. Now, whatever the US administration is saying, they are going to a war alone. Even in the countries officially supporting this war (Italy is one of them), very large majorities of the population are strongly against it. There's something terribly wrong about all this. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]

What do weblogs do?.

from Curiouser and curiouser!:

I don't think that weblogs do anything and I'm increasingly of the opinion that the benefits that we are seeing at the moment are simply those of tapping into a particular type of personality, i.e. the enthusiastic early adopters who will do something with anything you throw at them.

I agree, but with a twist... what weblogs have done is help the group of enthusiastic early adopters become self aware, to recognize themselves as a group, and to help make strong social connections between people of like minds.  This is very valuable and I hope we can find other ways to partition the blogsphere so that, as other social networks come online (lawyers, doctors, teachers) they too can find themselves and be stronger for having done so.

[Micah's Weblog]

I guess I was a bit too quick there...  I agree with Micah that weblogs have offered an improved medium for people who want to communicate with each other to do so.  So yes, I was wrong, they do do something.

But what I'm trying to say is that enabling early adopters to communicate better isn't really doing what I'm interested in.  My take on the history of KM and it's technologies is that the early adopters are not a good predictor for how the rest of the wave will use a technology and I'm not sure that the early or late majorities, within organisations, will take to this medium as the early adopters do.

What weblogs have done is provide an easy lowering of the technological barrier.  But this is just allowing what I consider the real, social, problems to rise to the surface.  Of course this still does something good.  Exposing these problems is the first step towards solving them.  In my own journey I think I started with a view that the problems were mostly technological -- get the technology right and the problem is solved.  I don't think like that at all any more.

High stakes for President Bush. BBC Washington correspondent Rob Watson considers what is at stake for President Bush's standing at home and abroad. [BBC News | World | UK Edition]

Okay I find the following (quoted from this article) chilling:

As war approaches, President Bush himself is said to be serene - a serenity aides say comes from his conviction that what he is doing is right, despite the worldwide chorus of doubt and disapproval.

I may be wrong, but my understanding of the state of mind of previous US presidents (including Nixon) when contemplating war is that they were not serene.  They were battling to find another solution, to avoid war.  Serenity when contemplating war strikes me as the pose of the religious zealot or ideologue. 

Six Reasons why InfoPath is DOA.

Six Reasons why InfoPath is DOA:

Although he hasn't yet used it, Richard Tallnet has posted an article, "Six Reasons why InfoPath is DOA". They are all very valid reasons. I have a post to make later on the subject, but Richard is dead on with his take, this is not a tool for developers (but that does not mean its not a good tool in general).

Source: .NET Weblogs *

[Archipelago]

An interesting rebuttal of the pro-InfoPath view.  All the reasons given are valid but I think the best are:

1. No security.  This is likely to be a killer in any real deployment scenario.

2. No infrastructure.

But they forgot one thing: what company in their right mind already has all of these key XML data formats defined, business logic developed, web services deployed, and lacks only a useful interface?.

If there are no good answers to these questions then I think InfoPath is going to struggle to be anything more than a hype success a la XBox.

Participants Share.

Sharing knowledge with yourself. Jim McGee nails the role of weblogs in KM, counter to Stephen Downes misguided claim that "Weblogs get data into the system, but that's never been the problem with knowledge management: no, the problem is in using the data in any meaningful way."[OLDaily]

In the organizations where I've struggled to make knowledge management work, one of the fatal flaws has been the notion that knowledge management is somebody else's problem. ...a huge amount of the knowledge important to me remains explicit and never ends up making the cut to tacit. ... Weblogs put the emphasis where I believe it belongs; on the individual knowledge worker. It encourages them to begin thinking about their own knowledge work more explicitly and systematically. It helps them realize that they are the problem and the solution. You have to learn how to share knowledge with yourself over time before you can begin to share it effectively with others. [McGee's Musings]

What weblogs do, contrary to traditional enterprise software, is enage people as participants. 

[Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

More good thinking out loud from Jim & Ross.  I'm not convinced by the use of do in the last sentence though.

I don't think that weblogs do anything and I'm increasingly of the opinion that the benefits that we are seeing at the moment are simply those of tapping into a particular type of personality, i.e. the enthusiastic early adopters who will do something with anything you throw at them.

So far I'm not seeing the kind of evidence that weblogging (in whatever form you name it) offers a particularly unique solution to the KM problem generally.  Those solutions are going to have to come from us, in how we apply what is, after all, just another technology.  Otherwise I predict in 12-18 months time, articles about "how weblogging has failed us."

In my opinion, we do have an opportunity to use the current wave of popularity for weblogging to get people to experiment with this new medium, try to change some working assumptions and the practices that go with them and move things on a little.

Ready for the next wave.

A voice from Iraq. Seems reasonable today to hear what Salam, the lone local blogger in Baghdad, has to say. He seems like a normal, intelligent guy, who says what he thinks, but he has been very courageous in sticking his neck out so publically. He supports a regime change, but he doesn't support war, and he thinks the human shields should go home.

"No one inside Iraq is for war (note I said war not a change of regime), no human being in his right mind will ask you to give him the beating of his life, unless you are a member of fight club that is, and if you do hear Iraqi (in Iraq, not expat) saying 'come on bomb us' it is the exasperation and 10 years of sanctions and hardship talking. There is no person inside Iraq (and this is a bold, blinking and underlined inside) who will be jumping up and down asking for the bombs to drop. We are not suicidal you know, not all of us in any case.I think that the coming war is not justified (and it is very near now, we hear the war drums loud and clear if you dont then take those earplugs off!). The excuses for it have been stretched to their limits they will almost snap. A decision has been made sometime ago that 'regime change' in Baghdad is needed and excuses for the forceful change have to be made. I do think war could have been avoided, not by running back and forth the last two months, thats silly. But the whole issue of Iraq should have been dealt with differently since the first day after GW I.The entities that call themselves 'the international community' should have assumed their responsibilities a long time ago, should have thought about what the sanctions they have imposed really meant, should have looked at reports about weapons and human rights abuses a long time before having them thrown in their faces as excuses for war five minutes before midnight.What is bringing on this rant is the question that has been bugging for days now: how could 'support democracy in Iraq' become to mean 'bomb the hell out of Iraq'? why did it end up that democracy wont happen unless we go thru war? Nobody minded an un-democratic Iraq for a very long time, now people have decided to bomb us to democracy? Well, thank you! how thoughtful."

[Ming the Mechanic]

It'll be interesting to see if & what this guy is publishing over the next few weeks & months.  Assuming he lives.

Resignation.

Robin Cook's 11-minute resignation speech in the British Parliament says it all - highly recommended. [www.gulker.com]

I wish the US had the same tradition of resignation as other nations.  When its acceptable for someone to give up their job in the name of principles or shame it makes the institution stronger.  Without such traditions we all put on a facade of solidarity, forget how we got here (misbegotten chads) and feed a tyranny of majority.  Its expected that Tony Blair will loose several others in the coming days. 

 

John Brady Kiesling's resignation from the state department was more than admirable for a person of conscious.  He acted against the grain of tradition.  A protest unaccepted by his institutions, a voice needed and one that will cost him personally.  We yield to the Hobbsian Leviathan so quickly.

"Let them hate so long as they fear."

Lucius Accius (170 BC - 86 BC), believed to be a favorite saying of the notorious Emperor Caligula.

[Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

I've just read the text of the Cook speech and it is a good one.  A lot of people do not like Robin Cook but I would hope that they would see past that and read his words, summarized here:

• I have chosen to address the House first on why I cannot support a war without international agreement or domestic support.
• I applaud the heroic efforts that the prime minister has made in trying to secure a second resolution.
• Now that those attempts have failed, we cannot pretend that getting a second resolution was of no importance.
• France has been at the receiving end of bucket loads of commentary in recent days.
• Germany wants more time for inspections; Russia wants more time for inspections; indeed, at no time have we signed up even the minimum necessary to carry a second resolution.
• The reality is that Britain is being asked to embark on a war without agreement in any of the international bodies of which we are a leading partner - not NATO, not the European Union and, now, not the Security Council.
• The US can afford to go it alone, but Britain is not a superpower.
• The legal basis for our action in Kosovo was the need to respond to an urgent and compelling humanitarian crisis.
• Our difficulty in getting support this time is that neither the international community nor the British public is persuaded that there is an urgent and compelling reason for this military action in Iraq.
• The threshold for war should always be high.
• I hope that Saddam, even now, will quit Baghdad and avert war, but it is false to argue that only those who support war support our troops.
• Over the past decade that strategy destroyed more weapons than in the Gulf war, dismantled Iraq's nuclear weapons programme and halted Saddam's medium and long-range missiles programmes.
• We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a threat.
• Only a couple of weeks ago, Hans Blix told the Security Council that the key remaining disarmament tasks could be completed within months.
• Yet it is more than 30 years since resolution 242 called on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.
• We do not express the same impatience with the persistent refusal of Israel to comply.
• Nor is our credibility helped by the appearance that our partners in Washington are less interested in disarmament than they are in regime change in Iraq.
• That explains why any evidence that inspections may be showing progress is greeted in Washington not with satisfaction but with consternation: it reduces the case for war.
• I welcome the strong personal commitment that the prime minister has given to middle east peace, but Britain's positive role in the middle east does not redress the strong sense of injustice throughout the Muslim world at what it sees as one rule for the allies of the US and another rule for the rest.

OneNote and InfoPath.

I just saw the demos for OneNote and InfoPath.  OneNote is just a glorified Notepad, no where as good as NoteTaker is.  InfoPath, on the other hand, is going to be a catalyst, an monster underwater earquake that will start a tsunami of changes across industries.  Its going to generate Office suite upgrade momentum as well as Microsoft server and middleware software sales.  Buy Microsoft stock.  Their revenue will rise sharply in the near future because of InfoPath.  I am not exaggerating, folks.

[Don Park's Blog]

Reading Don's blog these past few months I've come to trust his judgement on this kind of thing.  The InfoPath demo certainly offers some attractive possibilities.  Looks like M$ may have a winner.

Of course the usual M$ questions remain:

• Not browser based, back to the proprietary client
• XML forms but not XForms
• How easy will it be to work with non-M$ platforms

I guess that the last question is, ultimately, key.  If InfoPath is just another Web Services Architecture client (and something that propels that future) then it's a good thing.  Otherwise...

Scud Stud lobs a missile at Bush. During the Gulf War, NBC reporter Arthur Kent was famed for his boyish good looks. Today, liberated from the network, he's free to say that Bush is out of control. [Salon.com]

I don't remember Arthur Kent from the first Gulf War.  Perhaps because I quickly grew sick of being spoon fed the "ra ra" news coverage and turned it off.  However I wish I had caught his pieces.

His is a very thoughtful point of view that we should be hearing more of.  The following is just a sample that resonated with me.  I'd encourage anyone to read the whole article.

I'm still trying to shake from my mind the disbelief that a modern American administration can be as clumsy, as brusque and as crude as this one. Think back to Sept. 12, 2001: Kids in Paris were wearing American flags out of solidarity with the American people. Countries were lining up, tripping over one another, to come and touch the hem of the cloak of power in Washington D.C. The Bush administration had allies and support and emotional empathy from people around the world. It's gone. Where has it gone? It hasn't disappeared by Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein pouring a potion over people. It's gone because the administration has so offended the sensibilities of peace-loving, democracy-loving people that they simply have to take to the streets, or demand of their leaders to tell the Bush administration to stop and to think.

I don't want to see a "coalition of the willing." We need a coalition of the thinking. We need countries and leaders to get together and think. The campaign against terror is a battle of ideas. We have better ideas; we have better societies. You outthink terrorists and you outmaneuver them, economically, socially, politically, diplomatically, as well as militarily. We have got to get into the Muslim world and the Third World in a nonviolent fashion and outperform the al-Qaidas and Saddam Husseins of the world with the promise of a better tomorrow for those people, as well as our own. Otherwise, we lose.

Americans should ask themselves: Whose agenda, besides the Bush administration's, is served by a rush to war? The answer is Osama bin Laden's and those of the people like him. They don't care about the Iraqi people, or Saddam Hussein, but they are confident a deployment of raw, American military power in the Middle East will create more anti-American sentiment, which will help them. If you're falling into your enemy's trap, what's the hurry? Why aren't there smarter solutions? As journalists, these are the questions that we should be prompting the public to ask. Instead, I see coverage about the inevitability of war and the deployment.

Israel carries out deadly Gaza raid. At least nine Palestinians are reported killed during an Israeli operation in a central Gaza refugee camp. [BBC News | World | UK Edition]

I don't know why the BBC bother to keep mentioning dead Palestinians.  Don't they realise that they are wasting valuable space that could be taken up with news about celebrities or adverts for hair products?

Java generics are going to come at a cost according to Eric Allen's article and I'm inclined to agree.  The prize of keeping compatibility with previous JVM's is, I guess, a valuable one but for me breaking the type system like this (or at least introducing ways to create new and subtle bugs) seems too high a price.

What are you looking at?. This morning a friend of mine, Luca Reginato, who works at SrLabs in Padova sent me this very cool movie. Using a technology that they are developing, he tracked his eyes movements while browsing my weblog. The blue spot you will see in the movie shows where he is looking, the larger the spot becomes, the longer he has been looking at a specific item. It's really amazing. While today these services are available mainly to large companies (with large budgets), I'm trying to convince Luca that such a service made available at affordable prices would not only make sense, but be profitable. How much would you pay to have this kind of feed-back on a site you are designing or that you already have? [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]

This is way cool.  I want a version of this software for $99 that runs on my PC and uses my webcam.

Between Hope and Memory

I'm interested in memory because memory is all we have. We are unable to perceive the temporal singularity of the present, which is a razor-sharp edge. It cuts our experience into past and future. We understand the division, but cannot comprehend the blade.

I have nothing but my own quickly fading memories out of which to build my reality. These memories lose focus and detail as they disappear behind me, drifting far into the past.

How hopefully I bind them together even as they fall apart. How boldly I proclaim reality even as I forget it.

We live in the transition between the future and the past. We are the moment that hope becomes memory.

Someday I will be dead and my children will cobble together their ragged memories and create me anew. They will create me in their own image. I will be clay in their hands with only the breath of their memories to give me life.

So I spend a fair amount of energy trying to create good memories for my three daughters. This may seem rather contrived, but I’m of the opinion that parenting is mostly contrived. There’s really no time for much else.

Plant good memories while you can, mommies and daddies. Our time on earth is short and hope becomes remembrance in the twinkle of a little girl’s eye.

AD 2063
A 70-year-old woman points her grandson’s hand toward the Eastern sky on a November evening. Orion’s belt of three stars hangs low near the horizon, forming a nearly perfect vertical line.

“The middle star, that one’s mine. Its name is Alnilam. That means ‘string of pearls’. My father gave me that star because I was his middle daughter. He said I was his string of pearls.”

She stares at the star and tilts her head slightly. “I was his string of pearls.”

“What about the other stars, Grandma”

“Well, the top star is Susan’s. She was the oldest. The last star is Sharon’s because she was the baby. Each year they rise in the east, just in the order we were born. See?”

“Most people call it Orion’s belt, but daddy always called it ‘The Three Sisters’. He said he had as much a right to name the stars as anyone. He used to say, ‘Look for the three sisters in November, when I am gone.”

“Look to the sky and remember that you were loved.’”

The Preacher

To Be Continued. I’ve just watched the final episode of Farscape (recorded from last night on BBC2) Oh my god! Not content with... [From The Orient]

I had exactly the same experience.

I read that the stated reason for the axing was how much the show cost to produce.  All I can say is that nothing good comes without cost and producing good shows is why you make television.

This reminds me of something Greg Costikan said yesterday.  He was talking about games design and the way publishers will, by and large, only fund sequels to successful games & spinoffs of already successful licenses and how this leads to a dearth of innovative games.

To quote from that piece:

I'm fairly friendly with Tom Doherty, who built Tor Books from a start-up to the single largest publisher of science fiction and fantasy in the world. He has an attitude I like: There's crap you just have to publish. There's stuff that allows you to stay in business. You publish it, and you sell the hell out of it, because you know it can, and will, sell. But fundamentally, that's not why you work in publishing; there are easier ways to make a living. You stay in publishing because you sometimes get to publish books you really like.

Tom Peters, the business guru, echoes the sentiment: No successful business exists to produce a profit. Yes, you need to produce a profit; in a capitalist system (and thank god we have one), profit is the condition of survival. But profit isn't the goal; no one other than the stockholders get excited at that. A corporation is one way or organizating a group of people to strive toward an objective--but that objective, the vision they share, is always, for successful businesses, something other than mere profit.

A game publisher exists to publish games. If its managers and employees are decent human beings, a game publisher exists to publish cool games. And if they aren't decent human beings, they should go out of business instantly; there are far better and easier ways to earn a decent return on investment.

In the same way a TV publisher exists, or should exist, to publish cool TV programmes.  But Sci-Fi and it's owners Universal Television Networks are just out to make a buck.  Profit is the be-all and end-all of their existance.  Cancelling Farscape (without a better show to replace it) proves that they don't give a rats ass about the shows themselves.

A movie?  I've heard it too often.

Goodbye Farscape, you will be sorely missed.

Does the EFF exist in the UK?

Is there a UK branch?

How do you get involved?

A fantastic article by Matt Taibbi about how the White House press core and the mainstream media no longer serve a useful function.  (My spin in italics).

Here are my highlights, but read the whole thing:

• After watching George W. Bush's press conference last Thursday night, I'm more convinced than ever: The entire White House press corps should be herded into a cargo plane, flown to an altitude of 30,000 feet, and pushed out, kicking and screaming, over the North Atlantic.
• Particularly revolting was the spectacle of the cream of the national press corps submitting politely to the indignity of obviously pre-approved questions, with Bush not even bothering to conceal that the affair was scripted.
• Abandoning the time-honored pretense of spontaneity, Bush chose the order of questioners not by scanning the room and picking out raised hands, but by looking down and reading from a predetermined list.
• In other words, not only were reporters going out of their way to make sure their softballs were pre-approved, but they even went so far as to act on Bush's behalf, raising their hands and jockeying in their seats in order to better give the appearance of a spontaneous news conference.
• In his best moments Bush was deranged and uncommunicative, and in his worst moments, which were most of the press conference, he was swaying side to side like a punch-drunk fighter, at times slurring his words and seemingly clinging for dear life to the verbal oases of phrases like "total disarmament," "regime change," and "mass destruction."
• Moments later, the camera angle of the conference shifted to a side shot, revealing a ring of potted plants around the presidential podium.
• It would be hard to imagine an image that more perfectly describes American political journalism today: George Bush, surrounded by a row of potted plants, in turn surrounded by the White House press corps.
• This was just Bush's eighth press conference since taking office, and each one of them has been a travesty.
• But the White House press corps' idea of "taking a shot" is David Sanger asking Bush what he thinks of British foreign minister Jack Straw saying that regime change was not necessarily a war goal.
• And then meekly sitting his ass back down when Bush ignores the question.
• They can't write what they think, and can't ask real questions.
• What the hell are they doing there?

What indeed?

You are about to go to war.  A war which the secretary general of the UN has stated publicly could be an illegal act.  And the best your ace reporter can do is ask Shrub "How is your faith holding together?"  Shit!

Have any of you guys looked at Afghanistan lately?

It's not Iraq you should be torching.

How about:

• Action Journal

I like action because it emphasizes my view that good knowledge is inextricably woven into what we do.

I like journal because it sounds more diary like than logging.

Chris Gulker: "The culture at Google is just not open and responsive to users." [Scripting News]

In following this Google: Jedi knights or Sith lords thread I came across something interesting and useful.  A site, using the work of Dr. Michael C. Labossiere, which attempts to classify all the types of fallacy used in debate.

The Management Secrets of the Brain. M. Mitchell Waldop urges us to manage projects from the bottom up. In an article published in Business 2.0 in October 2002 (so I've been sitting on this one for awhile...) The Management Secrets of the Brain he draws parallels to recent understanding of how our brains work to managing organizations.

Your brain is the ultimate example of a complex, decentralized organization. And because we (usually) behave coherently, smoothly integrating new circumstances as they arise, the brain is also the epitome of an adaptive organization, a learning organization, a shared-vision organization -- in short, the ideal modern company.

Waldop makes five claims:

1. Never try to micromanage a large, complex organization.
   There's not enough executive attention in the world to ironmonger this level of activity.
2. Don't let bottom-up self-organization go wild.
   Without leadership standard operating procedures are directionless and blind.
3. The best way to control your subordinates is to just point them in the right direction.
   This new model...assumes that [leaders have] just one job, which is to generate a neural map of the [organization's] goals, strategies, and current situation.
4. Be careful listening to the voice of experience -- that voice could be your own.
   Sometimes an organization has to break out of its rut and try a new approach.
5. The organization can't succeed without passion.
   Unless we know what's important, what matters, then all the rationality in the world gets us nowhere.

Waldop makes a great case for managing projects on an agile or lean basis. The brain is ideally suited for project complexity, uncertainty, inevitable learning, and the underlying humanness of the endeavor. Why would we even try a different approach.
[Reforming Project Management]

Leadership & strong vision are the key to a successful project?  I'll buy that.

MultiJava is an open project to add open classes and symmetric multiple dispatch to Java.

Open classes allow one to add to the set of methods that an existing class supports without creating distinct subclasses or editing existing code.  Multiple dispatch, found in languages such as allows the method invoked by a message send to depend on the run-time classes of any subset of the argument objects.

In concert with AspectJ this would appear to add some very powerful capabilities to Java.

Of course Greenspun might argue that you should just use Lisp in the first place... ;-)

Name Change?? Help.

Which name is better, blogfish or shesafish? (shes a fish)

[shes a fish]

I like Blogfish, but then I liked Blunt Force Trauma too!

What 10 odd Hours of Hacking Can Produce: An RSS Search Engine.

What 10 odd Hours of Hacking Can Produce: An RSS Search Engine

further ado, I give you:

R O O G L E

(yeah that's RSS google)

And the UI is a total Google ripoff.  Thank you to Google for the time being before I get around to changing it.

Want to see what feeds are indexed?  Check out this out.

[The FuzzyBlog!]

This is pretty cool.

Peter De Vries. "Nostalgia isn't what it used to be." [Quotes of the Day] [Seb's Open Research]

I loved Peter De Vries "The Mackeral Plaza" which I read about 8 or 9 years ago.  It was really an introduction to American humorist writers.  Sadly his books are not easy to come by (my copy of Plaza was quite an old 2nd copy).

Outlined RSS Comes to the Browser. [img] I have finally released activeRenderer vs 1.4. The new version packs 3 new features:

• activeRenderer now renders RSS format files (news feeds) in active outlined form,
• with activeRenderer installed in Radio, you can now visualize both OPML and RSS local files in the new outline browser,
• activeRenderer's rendering engine is now accessible as a web service, via both a local URL and a public one at services.activeRenderer.com/activerenderer/render.

Here are some more screenshots of the outline browser: win/mozilla - win/msie - mac/msie - mac/safari).  [read more] [s l a m]

This is really cool.  Marc's pretty close to realising his vision.

Declaration of Content. Dan Gillmor writes:

"U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, has a strikingly simple idea to bolster customers' rights to freely use software, movies and music that they've paid for: Force the sellers of such products to tell the truth about the restrictions they're imposing on users.When customers know, for example, that the compact disc they're buying is technologically rigged so they can't rip MP3 files from it for use on a portable player, they won't buy it. Eventually, these informed customers will demand change in the copyright laws..."

Yep, simple and elegant. Force the manufacturers to clearly, in proper English, explain what you're buying, including the features they have painstakingly built in to make the product LESS useful to you. And the market will decide what people really want.If the truth were always clearly visible, market economics alone would transform the world. The only reason that large numbers of people are choosing that which they don't really want is that they're being deceived. [Ming the Mechanic]

(With apologies to PKD for the Title)

I like this idea.  I like it a lot.

RSS Shell Integration.

RSS Shell Integration

Chris has some neat ideas on RSS integration right into the Windows shell:

Imagine this: a "News" submenu sitting at the top of your Start Menu, right above the Programs submenu. It cascades out into an organized list of feeds (each feed has its own folder). [_Go_]

Definitely interesting.  My only concern would be performance.  I have a quite large Start menu without this and its already slow.  I can just imagine would it would be like with feeds streaming in all the time.  Microsoft's whole shortcut based shell concept is cool and all but its damn slow.

[The FuzzyBlog!]

I haven't read Chris' post so maybe I've missed some nuance but, as described, I think it sounds like an awful idea for a serious reader - maybe it would work for someone with only a couple of feeds.

As Scott says I really don't want my Start menu to slow down any more.   I think having 100's (I have 103 and counting) of feeds folders, containing lots of items will do that.  It will also clutter it further.  When I'm trying to start a program I don't want the shell to halt while it processes 2000 posts because I accidentally ran the mouse over the wrong sub-menu.

Also I think it's the wrong interface.  Reading news isn't like starting a program or opening a document (at least, to me it isn't).  I would rather have it contained in an application which gives.  Also putting feeds in folders (the one advantage this route offers) is hardly a new idea.

What I am looking for is an application designed to handle at least 250 busy feeds.  I want an engaging user interface and an approach that acknowledges interests and values as being central to my reading experience.

Brown 'to pledge' more war cash. Chancellor Gordon Brown is expected to say on Tuesday that he is prepared to set aside even more money for a possible war in Iraq. [BBC News | UK | UK Edition]

I'm glad to know that, in the midst of a growing depression, our government has made provision for all the arms dealers and arms manufacturers to weather the storm.

Those of you out there scripting XML on the client-side might find this usefull. Sarissa is a JavaScript library for scripting XML under Moz and IE. Methods to obtain DOM Document/XMLHTTP objects, Synchronous/asynchronous loading, XSLT transformations, implementation of some IE extentions for Moz, NodeType constants for IE...

This is an alpha release and I hope people will come up with feedback on bugs and suggestions.

Distributed under the GPL, but I may consider other licenses as well.

More at

https://sourceforge.net/projects/sarissa

[Posted to xml-dev]

THE LISTENING LEADER

"Lifting Listening Leadership Awareness and Action Worldwide"

DANGER!! THE INTERRUPTION!!

The following excerpt is from "Time to Think: Listening to Ignite the Human Mind" by Nancy Kline:

What is it about the interruption that is so tantalizing? We seem unable to resist doing it. I once asked a group what they were assuming that made them interrupt their colleagues.

They listed these things:

• My idea is better than theirs.
• If I don't interrupt them, I will never get to say my idea.
• I know what they are about to say.
• They don't need to finish their thoughts since mine is an improvement.
• Nothing about their idea will improve with further development.
• I am more important than they are.
• It is more important for me to be seen to have a good idea than it is for me to be sure they complete their thought.
• Interrupting them will save time,

There is a cost to each of these items. They all can be summed up with the expression - "It's all about me."

LISTENING LEADER LESSON: Why not check yourself in the interruption category? Let others experience bliss by knowing that you will not interrupt them.

[The Listening Leader]

I'm guilty of this far more often that I would like.  Especially given my wholehearted belief in Stephen Covey's 5th Habit Seek first to understand, then to be understood.  I guess it's just hard.

Sharon's world. Bush is on his side, a longed-for Iraq war is coming, and the Palestinians seem to be under control, but the economy is in ruins and his right-wing coalition could be shaky. For Israel's ultimate survivor, it's business as usual. [Salon.com]

I can't escape the feeling that the Bush & Sharon administrations are gradually backing the Arab states into a corner.  Where will this lead?