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I'm taking a wait & feel position on the matter Let's admit it. George W. Bush's inaugural speech was pretty damn good. I love this paragraph: We have a place, all of us, in a long story, a story we continue, but whose end we will not see. It is the story of a new world that became a friend and liberator of the old. The story of a slave-holding society that became a servant of freedom. The story of a power that went into the world to protect but not possess, to defend but not to conquer. It is the American story, a story of flawed and fallible people, united across the generations by grand and enduring ideals. I can't imagine hearing a better expression of our new American Myth. (Who really wrote it? We need to know.) And dig the next paragraph: The grandest of these ideals is an unfolding American promise: that everyone belongs, that everyone deserves a chance, that no insignificant person was ever born. Americans are called to enact this promise in our lives and in our laws. And though our nation has sometimes halted, and sometimes delayed, we must follow no other course. This is Liberal stuff. Belonging. Deserving. The country as a nurturing family, rather than a punishing dad. None of that strong-is-better-than-weak stuff that seeps through so much conservative rhetoric. It does skew right a bit toward the end: America has never been united by blood or birth or soil. We are bound by ideals that move us beyond our backgrounds, lift us above our interests and teach us what it means to be citizens. Every child must be taught these principles. Every citizen must uphold them. And every immigrant, by embracing these ideals, makes our country more, not less, American. "Compassion" is the only nurturant (i.e. Liberal) word in that last sentence. But the conservative words aren't the usual ones (e.g. "strength," "determination" "will") that get the country's macho mojo flowing. I dunno. It left me a bit, almost, optimistic. If nothing else, it reminds me that good writing can be a hell of an effective reality distortion field. How home DVD production will undermine the digital movie cartel I just posted some must-read correspondence between John Gilmore and Ron Rivest that was emailed to me (and a bunch of other folks) with a request to post it. I don't know why it isn't up on the Web somewhere (if it is I can't find it), so I decided to put it up myself until I can point to it at EFF or something. Note the paragraph about the new DVD-recording deal between Pioneer and Apple. The entertainment industry apparently wants to restrict DVD recording to home movies and other digital lifestyle indulgences by "consumers." What they don't realize is that by restricting digital store-and-play video to content that doesn't come only from big producers, they are democratizing their industry back to the steam age. Yes, we'll make movies. (Thank you, Steve!) Lots of them. And guess what? Plenty of them will rock. Then what? Think we're only going to share those movies? Guess so. Heh. Sooo.... while the entertainment church preserves their manufacturing and distribution cathedral, the rest of us will put up our own new bazaar — a real market — in the vast common spaces that surround the old cathedral. There's no other way. We know markets are conversations. They don't want to talk about it. That's how even the clueless get to win. What the hell is IT No, we're not talking about Information Technology here. Nor about the third person singular pronoun. We're talking about an invention that's getting a lot of buzz. Reporters don't get much crustier than Michael Malone, who says this about it. Or IT. I want one, of course. As Thorstein Veblen said, invention is the mother of necessity. Pushed me to the edge in about three seconds JOHO points to a Search Engine Watch report that tells us that a new search engine called Webtop commissioned a study that established 12 minutes as the point at which Web search futility crosses over to rage. So I went to Webtop and tried a search for my surname. The results were pure Whaaa? Not even one correct spelling of Searls. For a controlled study, I tried the same on Google. If you click the "I'm feeling lucky" button, which sends you to the top result, you end up right: here. Stroking with the grain of the Web There's Chris Locke's latest EGR. Which comes on the heels of of one we might describe as rage noir: It's the little things that get you. An inadvertent word. An offhand gesture. A bullet through the windshield. Then there's David Weinberger's latest JOHO (I also think his largest). Terrific interview there with Internet pioneer David Reed, among other mind-opening things.
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