*phew*

Great relief to see Blogger back up and running. This thing is too addictive to go without for long.

I have a monster-sized post in prep - a piece I've been brewing up over the last couple of years. Probably throw it up here sometime in the next day or so, if only to stop me from editing the darn thing any further.

Meanwhile...

Got an entertaining and well-deserved email spanking from Steve Miller “Technical Editor and Annoying Person” who blogs here.

He politely but directly tears into my own sloppy grammar in an earlier post in which I poked fun at Microsoft’s terrible writing.

A sample:

>>“typo’s” is a possessive. “typos” would be the plural.
>>Use of comma before “that” is incorrect. use “, which” or “[no comma] that.”
>>“five year old” would normally be hyphenated like “five-year-old,” when it modifies “copy of >>Word.”
>>And bonus points for over-the-top pedantic twittiness, ending with a preposition:
>>“...a five-year-old copy of Word would have tripped over.” While some grammarians consider it >>acceptable, your standard pruny English teacher would insist on:
>>“...over which a five-year-old copy of Word would have tripped.”
>>Also, in “...invective at the Borg, there’s many, many more important...” I think you mean “there >>ARE many, many more...”

Ouch.

There’s a lesson here. I am indeed a great pompous nit with nothing better to do than ineptly juggle sizeable stones in my big glass house.

Our regularly scheduled programming will return just as soon as your host has managed to remove the hardback edition of Strunk & White from out his fundament.

(Later it hit me - if I wanted to get really snippy, I could easily have pushed back on the "typo's" thing. Surely "typo" is a contraction - a shorthand way of saying "typographical error". So "typo's" is not necessarily a possessive - the apostrophe indicates the elided letters. Or doesnt. Or something. Whatever...)

We're back!!

The trusty old Compaq's working again - Windows Me and everything. Effusive, gushing thanks & kudos to Nathan in Y&R tech support for figuring it all out. He not only fixed it, he even cleaned it. Service above & beyond the call...

It's a huge relief to have this machine in the land of the living again. I was feeling pretty bad about killing it - it's probably the most dependable piece of hardware I've ever owned. A well built piece of kit and I mistreat it horribly. Phew.

On the subject of well-built kit: desperate for some blog-based relief last night, I took to editing on the Palm, using ThinkOutside’s miraculous Stowaway portable keyboard. This thing is more than just well built – it’s ninja cool. One of the engineering masterpieces of the 20th century.

First time I saw the demo dude flip the keyboard open at Internet World a couple of years back, I all but literally drooled on him. Made a complete nork of myself, actually waving a credit card under his nose – pleading with him to sell me the beta unit.

He wouldn’t, of course, but a few months later the constantly wonderful, ever surprising Sausage bought me a real one for my birthday. Greater love hath no woman than this…

Never entirely satisfied with what I've got, I'm now pining for the next step above my Palm Vx. He who dies with the most toys wins - my present techlust will not be satisifed until I get me an iPaq. Powerful, functional and just drop dead gorgeous. I want one.

The only thing missing from Compaq's design is an appropriate SciFi sound effect when you pull the machine out of your pocket. Maybe they could add a photocell that prompts the iPaq to make a nice "swoosh-bedeep-kerchunk" kind of noise as you whip it out and fire up that stunning colour screen. Or perhaps something like the "thwip ding" sound effect that plays when Steve pulls out his Handy Dandy Notebook on Blue's Clues (my son's all time favourite TV show).

Whatever.

Nothing works. Nothing.

6 solid hours dinking with the upgrade last night - it's FUBAR. I can boot into Windows, but that's about it. No email, no web, no Word, no naff all nothing at all NOTHING. (I'm even having to post this from the office).

This stuff's so bloated, of course, that it's way past my ability (or any one person's ability) to know exactly what's going on with this thing. 450 MB just to install the "standard" OS.

Here's what sucks most though - trying to troubleshoot the modem config problem that's preventing me from firing up email or anything, and the stupid in-built (in-bred) help system tells me "If you're still experiencing difficulty, more help is available at: http://www.microsoft.com/If/I/could/access/the/web/I/wouldn't/need/help/with/my/freaking
/modem/would/I/you/dozy/swines.html"

Sheesh.

Bring back CP/M - the last OS I can really claim to have fully understood at the code level.

Brace yerself.

I'm about to try upgrading the crusty old Compaq to run this Windows Me thing. Could be painless (yeah, right), or could have me offline for days.

We'll see. Wish me luck, Cap'n, I'm going in.

It's always darkest just before it goes pitch black...

Thought for the day: Are hyperlinks political? Sure, our personal politics could be inferred with reasonable accuracy by the stuff we choose to link to, but…

Started thinking of this after a comment Sausage made while I was reading the following sentence in one of the legal doc’s around the 2600 Magazine DeCSS lawsuit: “Hyperlinks are the very core of the Web, and an integral part of online dialogue about this case, connecting readers of 2600 with other supporters of the magazine and their political statements. As such, hyperlinks are expression that demands the full range of First Amendment protection.” Full document here.

This is stirring stuff. If you're remotely interested in the preservation (and, in fact, enhancement) of free speech through the Web - leave this blog right now, click on the link above and read this document. Quite apart from the fact that it's just superbly written, this stuff is really, really important.

There's numerous threads weaving together in this thought stream:

- Hyperlinks as political statements.
- The tension between Blogging as an ego-serving exercise balanced by the fundamental nature of any blog to point away from itself - which is almost Platonist.
- Dimly remembered scraps of Wittgenstein - the whole thing about pictures only having meaning when they direct attention away from themselves to the situation depicted. Deflective attention, something like that. I'll have to ask David about this stuff - he's the only real philosopher I know (Tangent: Can we really "know" a philosopher? In what sense can a philosopher really be "real"? Yipe! I think I just came over all moebian!)
- The ties between blogging and "uploading" (again).
- Blogging as a public access map of one's interests, desires, values, views, opinions, relationships.

What bloggers are building is a P-web, of sorts. It's like Don Tapscott's B-Web, but on a person-to-person level.

Much to noodle, much to noodle...

If I figure any of this out into some kind of coherent narrative, I'll post more. Meanwhile - anyone else want to pick up some of these thought threads and tug 'em to see how it unravels, I'd be glad of the help. There's an email link at top of the page.

*omigawsh*

We're a "Blog of Note" on the Blogger.com front page. I don't know what to say. Feel like my pet rabbit just won a ribbon at the State Fair.

Thanks guys.

Kind of ironic of course, that this happens two days after I manage to utterly hose the template turning the blog all squiffy.

Shucks.

Oops!

Lots of messing with the template. Learning how to screw up the simplest HTML beyond all recognition all by myself.

Added the email link above, then everything else turned to yuk. If things don't work or look funny - it's because I broke even more than I thought.

Fix it tomorrow. And so to bed.

Attention, Fat Corporate Bastards!

I wrote a few days back about the cluelessness of most Internet advertisers.

This makes pretty much the same point, but much more directly.

"When you think of the Internet, don't think of Mack trucks full of widgets destined for distributorships, whizzing by countless billboards. Think of a table for two."

Microsofties can't write for toffee

Talking about Hailstorm, btw (not that there’s really too much to add beyond Doc’s excellent commentary and useful pointers in his blog). But one thing in particular stood out for me in going through the official Microsoft materials. Is it just me, or do these guys desperately need to hire some better writers?

This piece, for example.

I have a tendency to be a pedantic little twit when it comes to this kind of thing, but quite apart from the obvious typo’s, that even a five year old copy of Word would have tripped over (e.g. "Microsoft showcasedfive major partners"), the general quality of the writing is just gruesome.

[Self-editor's note: On reflection, pretty much the whole of the mid section of this piece was just really boring. Greened about 60% of it. One great big and well-deserved *snip*]

While we're hurling invective at the Borg, there's many, many more important things to criticize than just their poor writing, I know.

Statements like this one, once you get past the tortured English, are just plain scary: "And rather than risk compromising the user-centric model by having advertisers pay for them, the people receiving the value -- end users -- will be the primary source of revenue. HailStorm will help move the Internet to end-user subscriptions, in which users pay for value received."

I really should be more worried about what they're proposing here than the manner in which they're expressing their intent, but I find it hard. When there's such gaping holes between what I guess they meant to say and what they actually end up saying, the whole thing quickly devolves into bizarre comedy for me.

Saving the best example for last: 60% of the way through the document, there's this extraordinary sub-heading:

"Open Access, Privacy and Security"

Am I the only one to find this unintentionally funny? Do you think they meant the word "open" to act as a modifier on the nouns "Privacy" and "Security"? If so, what exactly is "Open Privacy" and what are the specific benefits of "Open Security"?

Or maybe they're serious - now THAT is really scary.

Maybe someone at Microsoft could write to me and tell me.

Er…on second thoughts…

[CODA: Cruel fate. I posted a link to the tedious ramble above at the Topica/Cluetrain list. Of course, checking back in later on, I noticed a glaring typo in the title of my post, plus I'd got the link URL wrong. Dork]

Quasi-personalized cluehole

Here's an example of the sort of thing my inbox gets choked with every now and again.

Given the amount of angry & fairly public online ranting I've done about the US President-by-default, I shouldn't be too surprised to receive "targeted" marketing messages loosely based on some mindless demographibot's assessment of my interests. But, really, what on Earth have I done to deserve this sort of ordure in my email?

==========================
Bush Country
NewsMax.com Breaking News
Read about "the map" that showed Bush’s victory.

Dear fellow American:

Remember "the map" that circulated all over the Internet, the one Rush Limbaugh talked about on his show?

The map showed county by county how almost all of America -- the heartland—had voted for George Bush in the last election.

Small, isolated urban enclaves—colored in blue—had voted for Al Gore, but the blue was lost in a sea of red—most of the country, which had voted for George Bush.

Well, NewsMax.com—the number one source for news for conservatives -- still receives regular requests from readers for "the map."

So NewsMax.com has decided to offer a T-shirt, with "the map" reprinted for the world to see "Bush Country."

This T-shirt will win you friends and drive the liberal establishment -type nuts.

Take a peek, have some fun, and get your "Map" T-shirt. Just click here:
http://www.newsmaxstore.com/shirts/index.cfm?RefID=street2

And don’t forget. Turn to NewsMax.com everyday for real news. Michael Reagan, the nationally syndciated radio host, calls NewsMax.com his "favorite web site."

==========================
Insanely off target as this is, I’m still quite glad to receive it – for the amusement value if nothing else. This then serves as another good example of why things like Microsoft’s Hailstorm laser-guided spamware initiative worry me. If the sites and services I visit and use end up "knowing" too much about what I’m really "interested" in, I won’t get frighteningly silly things like this showing up in my mail any more.

I’ll miss the disconnects.

Shurely shome mishtake?

Eee....long time no blog. Not much of note to add & I'm kinda buried with r/t workstuff. Two quick things:

Thing One. Shopping in Toys 'R' Us at the w/end (All Your Time Are Belong To Us - it's impossible to escape from that store in anything under an hour). Came across a 1/18 scale replica of the '69 Dodge Charger from the old Dukes of Hazzard TV show. Faithful reproduction in nasty orange & rebel flag on the roof.

One glaring problem - text on the box that read: "Hood, Trunk & Doors all open".

And yes, I know it's pretty sad to admit that I immediately recognized this was an error.

Thing Two. Chills! Sausage & I made one of our rare visits to the movies on Friday night. (Brand new mondo jumbo Cineplex up the road a way in darkest Scarberia. V. cool theater indeed.) Sitting there, snarfing into the Nachos 'n' cheese effect product, happily snuggled down in the very comfty chairs.

Sudden jaw-drop: screen lights up with a single image of a slowly spinning rune-engraved ring and the v/o starting: "One ring to rule them all..."

Crikey! Guess I totally missed that they were doing a movie. Trailer looks promising - understated but v. atmospheric.

Please, please don't let it be pants...

(Choice of film that night, btw: 15 Minutes. Verdict: middling-to-utter pants in parts. De Niro on autopilot. Reasonable trapped-in-blazing-tenement scene. Largely predictable. Escapist, but ultimately unsatisfying).

*poof*

Felicity Jones just posted some good stuff to the Cluetrain list at Topica. Linking to this New York Times article (subscription required), she wrote:

> Interesting article, and pretty right on the money in most respects, but
> what really made me choke was this statement by Kevin Ryan, the chief
> executive of DoubleClick :
> ---
> "... online publishers must increase the amount of space devoted to
> advertising from about 20 percent to something closer to the 60 percent
> seen in newspapers. There is not enough advertising on the Web ... and
> it's not as intrusive."
> ---
> thhhhpppppptttt!

"thhhhpppppptttt!" is absolutely right and remarkably restrained of her, considering. Tom Matrullo had similar concerns, succinctly expressed in his blog here (scroll down to the "Big Buckeroos" post).

This kind of thing is the corporate equivalent of those seamy web sites that pop up billions of nested browser sessions when you try to leave them - resulting in a furious game of whack-a-mole as you shut one window after the next after the next. It's intrusive, intensely irritating, and just plain rude. This is MY machine and MY browser session - how DARE they try to take over my browsing.

Similarly: throwing up these vomitingly large ads across the face of even the best content sites will quickly prompt the typical netizen to run screaming from the site, never to return again.

Kind of OT:My home page of choice always used to be the ZDNet News page. Not anymore - not only do the blighters start force feeding me with those bog blocker large format ads; but they then go and hand the editor's reins to David Freaking Coursey! Give me strength. I ain't unsubbed from anything so fast in all my life.

The NYTimes quote from Ryan clearly underscores yet again how totally, woefully clueless the Doubleclick drones are. One of the biggest single mistakes being made here is that you simply cannot compare advertising on the web with advertising for print media. Just as print advertising cannot be compared to broadcast ads. It's apples to oranges in either case. Worse - it's apples to cinder blocks.

The way we experience advertising through a glossy magazine - in fact the whole experience of the magazine itself - is completely and utterly different from the experience of watching TV, which is different from listening to the radio, which is different from surfing the 'net.

Let’s look at one really, really, really simple example here, Kevin: in a magazine people are quite accustomed to seeing a full page of content to the left mirrored by a full page ad on the right (or vice versa) – it doesn’t too badly disrupt their reading pleasure – most of us have learned to tune out the crap ads that don’t interest us. But you don’t page through a site full of content in the same way you flip through a magazine (when did you last start at the “back page” of a web site and flip through it, back to front – as you might do with a magazine off the news stand?)

Imagine if this very NYT article, for example, that runs across three “pages” of web content, were interrupted by full page, graphically intense, context-jacking ads. If you read to the bottom of page one and clicked “Next”, only to be presented with a slow-loading page full of anorexic Calvin Klein models, you’d pretty soon take your “business” elsewhere, wouldn’t you?

When you lean on this stuff ever so slightly, even the vocabulary starts breaking down – it’s convenient for us to talk about the web in terms of “pages”, but they’re not. There’s a world of difference between the way we experience web content and the way we experience the New York Times in print. Last time I checked, it cost something like $170K to buy a full page mono ad in the NYT. How much could they possibly charge for a “page” on nytimes.com?? There’s no relationship, other than brand credibility, between the two.

I KNOW there's some smart people on Madison Avenue - I even work with some of them. Why have they not managed to figure this out yet? Even the "science" is wrong - agencies still quote "CPM" rates for Web ads as if that's a valid way of measuring the reach and impact of banners. I shake my head really, really hard - but I still can't get any sense out of this practice.

A thought occurs, btw: I wonder how many times in the last 12 months, in how many office blocks across North America, two different but subtly interconnected conversations have taken place simultaneously, without the participants being aware of each other:

---- On the 14th floor, we have Bill & Bob Startup, pitching away to the greasy VCs - cartoon dollar signs hanging pregnant in the air, threatening to blot up all available oxygen, as the VCs dream of their next million fuelled by another dot-com IPO. “Our unique & innovative business model is entirely predicated on advertising,” say Bill & Bob. “We know advertisers will be falling over themselves to get their messages (*gag*) in front of this community.”

---- Meanwhile: 16th floor, offices of Redframe & Slimebeast, Advertising Agents – “This banner ad crap just doesn’t cut it. The click through rates suck, half the time the freaking things don’t even load, and there’s all these evil bastard ad blockers out there trying to keep us from earning an honest living. We’re not putting any more clients into Web ads until the market stabilises and we get some decent numbers in from Jupiter. Let’s sell some more Superbowl slots and 15-storey downtown murals to these dot-com cretins – teach ‘em a lesson.”

At exactly the same time as advertisers were coming to grips with the fact that web ads blow, hundreds of dot-com dreams were being built on the premise of ad-based revenue models. Oops.

BTW: I did some work last year with the “other” co-founder of Doubleclick – the guy who actually invented the technology behind the cheesy, clueless façade. He used to live next door to Kevin O’Connor and they cooked up the whole thing around the barbecue. He’s a very, very smart, tenured, decent guy. He bailed out of the whole sordid business as soon as forces beyond his control started to pervert the thing - taking unnecessary and unsavoury liberties with personal information was not what he had in mind. Nice guy, and another example of a decent, concerned netizen’s good intentions being corrupted by the spectre of mammon.

What is going on at all...?

This Lennie Gallant bloke totally cleans up at the East Coast Music Awards (a fairly big thing here in Canada), scooping three awards, including both Album of the Year and Male Artist of the Year.

The CBC noticed, bringing him in to natter with Shelagh Rogers, no less.

So in the last couple of weeks I must have been into eight different record shops. Plus I've tried Chapters, Indigo, Sam the Record Man and Amazon.

Not a single copy of the award-winning CD to be found anywhere, offline or on. And it's not that they're sold out - most of the shops I've asked in have acknowledged that they've not had the CD in stock (or even heard of it) and would have to order it.

Knickers to it.

I'll just have to keep looping this until my copy arrives direct from the record company.

One of the dumbest comments I keep coming across, living this tech connected life, is: “email can’t convey tone of voice”.

“Sorry – I wasn’t being rude. It’s just the way email made it sound”

Bollocks.

It’s like saying that the skill of writing has somehow become a lost art in this age of 10-second spot commercials and 22 minute TV shows.

Yes, I know it’s not always easy to fully convey your desired tone when snapping off a one line response to a snarky message. Hence the evolution of “emoticons” out of the Internet soup – those dinky little sideways smileys often used in an effort to throw some extra emotion into the dry text. (Check out the link, btw - Dave Barry gets some neat kicks into the 'nads of cheesy "netiquette").

But I don't think writing is a lost art. I really, really don't think it is. In fact, I believe that almost the opposite is true.

It's not that the skill of writing has died, it's that email and the 'Net have made writers of us all – skilled or unskilled as we may be.

There are way more people today engaged in the occupation of writing, as profession or incidental necessity, than ever before. Trouble is: not all of us are any good at it.

When the world worked around quill pens and parchment, I’m sure there were proportionally just as many crappy writers. We may perceive education standards to have fallen since back then (I won’t dispute this one: in many ways they have – or at least they’ve changed). But the big thing, of course, is that the availability of formal education has increased exponentially at the same time – so the catchment area of people able to, needing to and/or having to write has extended dramatically. It balances out.

Still - has the “art of writing” really declined?

Tom Wolfe writes just as well as Dickens. Different – but both great wordsmiths (to my tastes, anyway). Martin Amis is not the same writer as his Dad, but he’s still pretty nifty with a metaphor.

Stuart McLean, Iain Banks, Nicholson Baker, India Knight - all big email users, all great writers.

And writing for electronic media is still writing - it still has the ability to illuminate the soul, invigorate the mind, wrench the imagination, stimulate the sumfingorudder.

Chris Locke’s EGR fits this category, or some of the stuff on Salon, or even the contributions to some fan fiction sites and, yes, even quite a few blogs I've come across.

When my daughter was born, I had three people tell me that the announcement email I sent out brought them to tears. It was 8 lines long. It fit within the attention span of the “Fastr” blipvert culture - but still, I guess, it must have been reasonably good writing.

I’ve had emails from friends that caused me to blow hot coffee out my nose.

I’ve had emails (many, many emails) that have made my blood boil.

I’ve had emails that made me want to reach through the screen and hug the sender.

And every day I get at least one email that starts my mind racing off down uncharted avenues of thought.

I know email does convey tone of voice. I know some of those emails that cook the corpuscles actually are just bloody rude. And I know that some are just crappily written, by people who don’t hear their own tone of voice in their heads as their thoughts travel through their fingertips and into the bitstream pointed at my inbox.

Everyone is a writer nowadays. Not everyone can write.

Or, to put it another way:

People can still write. Just not every people.

Yipe! A search button! And it only took me 5 attempts to get it in roughly the right place.

(Can't believe I've been online since, what, the early 90's or something - yet I've never gotten around to learning HTML.)

Props to Atomz, btw, for making funky insite searching available for free.

Person from Porlock...?

Just noticed, reading back through this thing, that I've made two separate references to Xanadu, in two different contexts, with the blog not even a month old.

Probably inconsequential, but curious (to me, anyway. I need to get out more).

Nothing to do with the copious draughts of laudanum, of course...

/stc

Gawsh!

I sent this to my brothers. They told me I'm a geek.

So, I'm a geek. I still think it's one of the most extraordinary photos I've ever seen.

Bush baiting

I've had a couple of fairly pointy questions from concerned citizens since I posted some equally pointy stuff about this whole Dubya situation to the Topica lists. Including this piece, which seems to have popped up in a few other places. (Caveat: I was pretty upset when I wrote this and my vocabulary got a little heated in places).

For the record #1 (in case it isn't immediately obvious): the guy scares me. He says scary things, has done scary stuff, and has publicly committed to do more of the same.

It's hard to remain calm when you read things like this: "...the greatest hope for the poor is not found in "reform" but in "redemption." In other words, religious belief"

For the record #2: FWIW, lest anyone get the wrong idea, and because I'm tired of answering the question - yes, I'm a Catholic. A badly lapsed one, but I still consider myself in general terms both a Catholic and, in general terms, a believer. I've no great beef with religious belief, per se. Even when those beliefs have boiled over into rabid God bothering. Yes, some of my best friends are avid Christians. They don't bug me about having fallen off the candle, and I don't bug them. Live and let live.

But I do have a HUGE problem when the President-by-default of the most powerful nation on the planet starts blurring the lines between Church and State. These are lines that just don't need blurring. Period. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and keep God the blinking flip out of it.

I mean, really, how can this statement be considered a reasonable (or even rational) position for a senior advisor to the President:

"Mr. Olasky and his followers believe that poverty is not caused by a lack of money, but by a lack of moral values on behalf of the poor."

Ah yes, of course, that must be the reason. Victorian missionary values are clearly the answer to the third world's economic troubles. I see it now, how could I have been so blind? Solid moral character can overcome drought, disease & crop failure every time. If only the people of Ethiopia truly believed in Mr. Olasky's God...

"...poverty is not caused by a lack of money"

No matter how hard I shake my head, I can't pry loose any sense in that statement.

I've gotta get me one of these.

Especially this one, for obvious reasons (and don't tell me you never looked up Barbie's skirt as a kid).

Could the graph at the foot of this page possibly be even remotely true? How the hell would they know?!? How do you measure something like that? And what's with the "vs."? Since when was it a race?

A lot of things about America scare me. This is definitely one of them.

Web Strangelove

In 1945, Vannevar Bush described an academic’s dream research tool. Writing in The Atlantic Monthly, he envisioned a future device that would give anyone ready access to the sum of all human knowledge through a machine built into their desktop. A key feature of Bush’s system, which he called a “Memex”, was the ability to link together pieces of information into a web of interrelationships.

Twenty years later, Ted Nelson coined the term “hypertext” in describing “non-sequential writing”. Presumably informed by Bush’s original vision, Nelson’s research led to the conceptual design of a system he christened “Xanadu” – a global information network that would allow anyone to share any information with any other individual or group. In the Xanadu system each element, each separate piece of content would be capable of being linked and related to any other piece through a simple hypertext metaphor.

An important new factor introduced in Nelson’s discussion was the importance of a viable commercial model in the development of any such system. Xanadu was envisaged as an e-business environment long before that label was even defined - with provisions built into the architecture for content authors to be paid a micro fee for each reference to, and use of, their contributions. His most recent work in this area has been in developing the concept of Transpublishing – “a proposed system that could clear up many Internet copyright problems”. Seems like Nelson was already figuring out how to answer Napster’s problems before Shawn Fanning was even born.

Both Bush’s and Nelson’s visions have come close to full realization in recent years, perhaps as much through necessity as by conscious design. The interconnection of various military and academic networks during the last quarter of the 20th Century to create the foundations of the Internet has led to unprecedented opportunities for advancement in the field of human knowledge – with a fabulous wealth of intellectual assets now available to an unlimited audience.

Subsequent iterative improvements have layered functionality and depth over the underlying network. Significant innovations, such as the Web this blog forms part of, have dramatically enhanced the usability of the medium and given rise to many, varied new applications far beyond Bush’s dream. Anyone with a computer and Internet connection has the ability to access a large part of whatever the world knows, and leverage this collected intelligence to create their own unique wealth engine.

Of course, the manner in which this has all been built and the tools used to do it don’t exactly light Ted Nelson’s candle. He has some pretty scathing and entertaining things to say about the dangers of HTML and the whole hideous mess we’ve created for ourselves throughout his site, especially here.

But that’s another story.

The Web’s crap, when you think about it. Magnificent, but also crap. A staggering volume of content connected to more content connected to more content – all held together by layer upon layer of arcane technology, sealing wax, baling twine, duct tape and silicone caulking. I’m constantly amazed that it all works as well as it does most of the time (even in the face of the many corporate efforts to “improve” it). Somehow we’ve created something that at times seems to be self defining, self healing, self organizing. Other times, it all seems to be on the point of falling apart forever.

Every now and then I start to worry about this stuff. I worry that the Web doesn’t work well enough. My entire professional life so far has centred around technology and yet it still makes me nervous. The first company I started was a one-man consulting & tech training shop. I so wanted to call it Ludd I.T. but didn't. Wuss.

(STOP PRESS: Just checked: luddIT.com is still available. If I could be bothered to pony up the 70 bucks I'd scamper off and snag it right now. Can't be arsed. I hereby gift the idea and domain name rights to anyone sad enough to be reading this drivel right now, on the sole condition that you grant me a seat on the board of the resulting dot-com when you steal my idea and go haring off in pursuit of your next paper billion. luddite.com,of course, already exists, although I've never been able to figure out if these guys are for real).

What was I saying...? Oh, yes.

As much as I worry about the inherent, defining brokenness of the Web, I worry about what might happen if it ever reaches the point of working too well. And what could come after that. For years I’ve been bringing up E.M. Forster’s short story “The Machine Stops” in the context of discussions about Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson or our society’s increasing dependence on, and faith in, technology.

Seems hardly anyone has ever heard of this story. I first read it as a set text at grammar school in England. Now, of course, I have a copy on my Palm, which seems almost self-referential, if you see what I mean. Forster paints a wonderfully bleak picture of a post-apocalyptic dystopia in which humanity has become so utterly dependent on technology as to be rendered completely helpless when, as the title suggests, the “Machine” that runs the world and all forms of life support, simply stops working.

Of course, the Machine has grown over time to become so big and complex that no one person or group is able to understand enough about the workings of the thing to start fixing it. “As technology advances, our relative understanding decreases, and our helplessness and confusion increases,” as that Weinberger bloke once said.

Neat thing about the Web, of course, is that Forster’s story is now available, out of copyright, online.

The Web has clearly already been a disruptive technology - shattering the most fundamental preconceptions of how the world works as emphatically as the Cartwright loom or moveable type printing press did in previous eras. Not everyone fully believes this to be true yet. Not everyone has fully understood the importance of the Web. When you’re right in the middle of a genuine paradigm shift and living it every day, things are bound to look messy. Revolutions always look messy on the inside.

Yet this new Industrial Revolution or “Information Revolution” is still only in its earliest phases. The first wave of discontinuous innovations has passed – overturning established business thinking and traditional market models within a span of less than ten years.

Now we find the business world drawing breath. Without the Web there would be no New Economy. Well, duh. But many of the lofty ambitions and disruptive ideas of the early vendors in the New Economy seem to have hit the wall with a noisy splat.

What have we missed in the hurry to get here? What is it going to take to fully articulate this new mode of business, and make it work? What are the barriers to adoption that caused so many dot-coms to fail consumer acceptance tests on the path to building a lasting franchise? I have some other set aside scribblings on this whole Idea Economy/Paul Romer thing somewhere. Have to dig ‘em out and slap ‘em up here at some point.

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I’ve wandered far and wide in this, I know. In erratic orbit around some central set of questions and issues already addressed elsewhere, better, by others. If I was publishing this through anything other than a blog, I’d want to rework, cut, rewrite and better organize this entire ramble. I find the blog format terribly liberating in this respect – it positively encourages stream of consciousness writing. Not necessarily a good thing, but bugger it.

Guess I’m like a lot of people who spend large parts of their life working in the New Economy, but are still trying to figure out what the Web is really for. Assuming it has a purpose at all. And is it even wise or necessary to worry about purpose here? Does it matter? This thing can be, and is, anything we want it to be. I learned to stop worrying and love the Web a long time ago.

I'm not sure my family have ever really believed me when I've said this, but if I die I really do want this played at my funeral.

One of the finest pieces of popular music ever recorded, imho, and I defy anyone to hear it without smiling. Especially if they were listening to it in a church :-)

...something about this blog thing has me contemplating my own mortality all of a sudden. Perhaps it's the illusion of permanence - "these words will live on". That's clearly one of the drivers behind this urge to publish something, anything, to make one's own small mark in the sand.

I was originally going to call this blog "The Moving Finger...". Too pompous. Or "Waffling on". Too obvious. I'm fairly happy with the palindrome instead.

Why we blog

So what is it all about then? What's this blogging thing meant to do?

OK. I know it's a dumb question.

We do it because we want to.
Because we can. (Thank you Blogger & Blogspot, btw).
Because we should (well, maybe)
Because we do.

Clearly a lot of these things are driven by vanity. Mine included, I guess. Keeping a public journal is a weird thing - nervous that someone you admire might read it and be unimpressed; equally nervous that no one will bother to read it.

I read somewhere that the 'blog phenomenon is simply another manifestation of the basic drive to “find oneself”. Friend of mine said a funny thing about this idea – “What’s with this need to find yourself? When were you mislaid?” Or something like that. Seemed funny at the time. Guess you had to be there.

Maybe it has a lot to do with what the extraordinary David Weinberger was hitting on in his oft-quoted piece on “The Longing”

All of what David says is well informed. Most of what he says is truly brilliant. A good deal of what he has to say, including this piece, is genuinely important - in ways I'm not sure I even have the capacity to define. If for any reason you haven't caught Dr. Weinberger's gig yet, you have to check it out at: Journal of the Hyperlinked Organisation

"Our culture's pulse is pounding with the Web." Yes. Of course.

David wrote this ages ago, but it still rings in my head:

"The memo is dead. Long live email. The corporate newsletter is dead. Long live racks of 'zines from individuals who do not speak for the corporation. Bland, safe relationships with customers are dead. Long live customer support reps who are willing to get as pissed off at their own company as the angry customer is.

"We are so desperate to have our voices back that we are willing to leap into the void. We embrace the Web not knowing what it is, but hoping that it will burn the org chart — if not the organisation — down to the ground. Released from the gray flannel handcuffs, we say anything, curse like sailors, rhyme like bad poets, flame against our own values, just for the pure delight of having a voice.

And when the thrill of hearing ourselves speak again wears off, we will begin to build a new world.

That is what the Web is for."

Perhaps we blog as an interim step - it's a necessary evolutionary watershed before we knuckle down and begin to build our new world properly - now that we've started to get the first widespread sense of what works, what doesn't - what's acceptable and what is to be ignored. What the traffic will allow. Blogging may be "the thrill of hearing ourselves speak again"++

Or it could all be bollocks. There's a half-thought rattling around about the similarities between blogging and the uploading movement. A desire for permanence. Something.

This is the first lengthy blog entry here, and I think it needs a little framing. My parents celebrated their 40th anniversary just last year. My three brothers and I came up with the idea of producing a small book of essays - one from each of us - describing what it was like to grow up as a child of two such blessed people. The following was my contribution.

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It's an old wooden slide that starts the trip…

Whenever I think back to my childhood, that old slide in our long back garden is always the first and strongest image to float to the top. It's the pilot of my memory, taking my wandering thoughts by the hand and leading me back through the endless carefree sunny days.

Freeze frame mental images, fading snapshots, the slide always there in the background.

It was our fort, our spaceship, our racetrack, our mountain…

- Gerard, upside down on the slide, playing Thunderbirds.

- A young bird, one of Kipper's victims, buzzing with summer bugs in the cool shade underneath the slide.

My first clear memory of pain - the slide's there too. Another cinematic moment: I can hear my own screams, tearing my 5 year old hand away from the red-painted wood at the side of the slide, the world's biggest splinter jutting awkwardly from my pinkly filthy palm.

Bubbles in time, crystallised into physical memory. The simple smell of damp wood can still reel me back every time to the garden of 247 Castle Lane and the slide gently creaking and popping as it dried out after a summer rain.

Summer. It was always, always summer when we were kids. Even the rainy days were filled with summer light. Mom would sit with me in front of the old iron French doors and we'd race raindrops down the panes.

When I think of Mom it's hard to single out any one particular memory or moment. She was just always there. Always, always there.

I guess it wasn't until I hit around 8 years old that I started to really think of Mom as a separate person. Before that she was just an extension of me. Everything she did, I wanted to do. I must have seemed like a little moon in steady orbit around her.

If we were going out to play in the woods, Mom would always tell us to check back every quarter hour to show we were OK. For years I couldn't figure out how she could possibly not know where I was and what I was up to just because she couldn't see me. Her presence in my own head was that strong, I figured mine would also be in hers.

Thoughts of Mom and I'm back on the slide again - she's at the bottom, arms out wide, coaching and catching as I wiggle down the sticky wood.

I see Dad like that too. But there's a defining difference: Mom would catch me at the end of the slide and hug me to her. With Dad it was jetplane time: Whoosh! off the bottom of the slide and wheeee! high up over his head, giggling silly dizzy in the heat haze.

Where Mom was comfort, calm, beaming smiles and goodies from the kitchen - Dad was excitement, energy, boisterous knockabout lunacy. He must have been knackered half the time, getting in from tough, physically demanding jobs and the mental sweat of night school, but we would never have known - he always had the energy to scrap with us in the armchair.

Long dormant memories float up as I write. No idea how young I was, or the occasion, or even if this really happened (or if I dreamed it) - but I have this frozen pure joy image: sitting on a woolly tartan rug in the heat of the back garden - Dad in white shirt and dark trousers, grinning like a loon as he feeds watermelon to an Action Man doll. Who knows why certain images stick...?

Whenever I think of Dad, his face is always towering above me. In my mind he is still the giant of my childhood - a huge character in every way. A boisterous presence that can set rooms ringing with laughter. Even in the quieter, gentler memories, the image I have is a strongly physical one. Like sitting at his feet, gazing up at his huge cropped head, listening in silent, drooling awe as he read to us - tales of dragons, tigers and heroes. A great man. A great man…

More thoughts flooding in:

- The wigwam.
- Crooked apple trees.
- Toppity Tortoise.
- A privet hedge full of discarded “mud pies”.
- "Trespassers will be prosecuted" on the garden fence.
- Womblemix (Womblemix!).
- Orange vinyl records with "Beatle-beat" nursery rhymes.
- Racing matchbox cars down the slide.

I am haunted by that slide...

Later, the slide fades. Replaced at the centre of my memory by other, more grown up images.

The bikes, of course. Jeezus, those bikes! Barely a notch above death trap on the “fun things for the kids” scale. I’m still amazed that Mom even let us on the things. Actually, that’s kind of unfair – makes it seem like the bikes themselves were the problem. I think it’s more accurate to say that what we did on the bikes was the scary part – bombing down near vertical hills in Hob’s Moat woods, missing trees by inches with our outstretched arms.

Back then, the woods were a sea of bluebells. It was Xanadu. I don’t think we will ever know the extent of the sacrifices Mom and Dad must have made, for us to have been blessed with growing up in such a sublime kids’ paradise.

Beyond just Mom and Dad, of course, growing up a Clarke meant growing up at the centre of the huge extended family. Everything Clarke was huge. The family get-togethers were legendary - epic events in scale and sheer noise level. Christmases on Silverdale Avenue – the wrapped presents around Granny Clarke’s tree, a very real mountain to small eyes. More loot than most kids could possibly have dreamed. Gifts for everyone and sticky yellow “snowball” drinks all round. A million billion brass ornaments glinting in the firelight.

Years later, the privilege of growing up a Clarke worked in different ways. I recall the strange pride when I first realised I was the envy of other kids, simply because of the relationship I had with my parents. Parents that other kids wished were theirs. Being a Clarke means never having to be embarrassed about your family. Never.

I think it’s a trust thing. I always felt Mom & Dad trusted us and recognised our right to be individuals. I could walk into the beer garden of The Mason’s Arms, any day or night, with my Dad beside me – knowing he wouldn’t be out of place with my friends, that his natural ease and abundant charm meant he’d be accepted as an equal amongst kids many years his junior. Growing up a Clarke meant you had lots of space, but were never more than a heartbeat away from Mom & Dad whenever you needed their comfort or counsel.

Now I’m all growed up, of course, with a family of my own.

It took me a loooooong time to get here. I’m sure there were times – too many times – when they thought I might never figure out a path and a place in the World. But they had patience, always. I would never have found this life without them. I owe them both so much.

As I watch my own kids grow I try to remember always how Mom and Dad taught and shaped me. When Leona was pregnant with Charlie I remember thinking ahead to what kind of parent I would try to be. Most of all, I decided, I wanted my children to grow up both respecting me but also considering me a friend – the way I’ve always felt about my own Mom & Dad. I’ve thought about these two things a lot and tried to figure out how to achieve them.

The respect thing, I’m sure, only comes to those who give first. I think of the quiet authority Mom and Dad always had about them. The particular authority of a good parent is nothing to do with physical presence, loud voices, stern looks, strong words or raised hands.

Authority is a gift. Your children give it to you, in return for the respect you show them.

If you treat your children with respect as individuals, they in turn will respect you, trust you and believe you. When you realise that, you also realise its ok for your children to grow separately and become independent, and they can do this without growing apart from you. I’m sure that’s right. It seems to be the way things happened to me.

The friendship aspect is also a kind of gift. I wanted Mom & Dad to be my friend because I always wanted their acknowledgement and approval – but I also wanted their friendship because they were just fun to be with. Always. If I can give Charlie and Lily one tenth of the joy, one tiny fraction of the wonder, some passing glimpses of the magic my parents gave to me – people will think me a good and successful father. And my kids will be my friends. I can’t think of anything in this world I want more than that.

* * *
As I read back through this now, I’m reminded of one other key force that shaped my early life. Words. We were always surrounded by the conjuring power of words – in books, on the radio, in the particular music of Irish voices in conversation.

And there’s the slide again. Another crystal moment of frozen memory – Eamonn’s at the top of the slide as I sit in Mom’s arms, Gerard beside us in the shade of the apple tree. Mom’s reading to us from a book or magazine; her mellow voice lifting the words from the page and dancing them over the lawn. The memory sequence that starts with the slide always leads to quiet moments like this – one or other parent reading to us in summer’s shade, in the library, at the bedside.

This may be the finest gift of them all. The lasting power of the gift of words and the love of language and literature. Whenever Eamonn, Gerard, Kieron and I talk or email, we’re always swapping book tips and story fragments. The way our early lives were shaped and informed by Mom and Dad’s own insatiable appetite for written words must be, more than anything, the defining element in who we are now.

Recently, I found a copy of a children’s book I first knew as a special favourite from my earliest visits to the library. “Tell the Time with Ant & Bee”. First published in the early ‘60s, this was one of a series of books that I remember being completely absorbed by as a five year old.

Coming home from the bookshop and sitting down to read the story to 3 year old Charlie, my voice caught in my throat as I turned the first pages. I remembered every single word. Verbatim.

Every. Single. Word.

I have another book. The Coral Island – a “boy’s own” adventure story in the highest tradition. I can practically recite the entire novel.

How many times did you read these to us, Mom & Dad? How many days did you sit with us, patiently, at the kid’s table in the library, reading and re-reading the same stories – to the point that the words are branded, indelibly, on my mind? How many nights did you thrill us with tales of Martin Rattler, Long John Silver, the Famous Five?

There’s a fragment of a half-remembered poem that sticks with me too. Seems to fit here:

You may have tangible wealth untold;
Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold.
Richer than I you can never be -
I had a Mother who read to me.

That’s it, exactly. You both planted magic in our minds and I love you.

Thanks Mom. Thanks Dad.

Happy Anniversary.

So what's this about and why?

Well it's mainly about me. Duh. And it was about time.

Still trying to figure out waddaheck a blog is anyway? This will serve as our FAQ:

"Weblogs aren’t about making money; they’re about revolutionizing communication." - Dave Winer

Latest Eurovision Font Contest Results:
Times New Roman - 10 points

So far the content sucks, but at least the soundtrack's got class.

OK, so the test thing worked. Now I'd better think up something a little more interesting to say...

Something pithy.
Something deeply pithy.
Something ironic, but still pithy.
Someting misspeled.
A cheesy link

So far, it's riveting. Dontcha think?