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C2C In Quaker meeting, one is moved to speak only if one can improve on the silence. This is why I have had exactly nothing to add to the best online discussion to come along in years: the Decentralization forum on eGroups. It's an email list, but I'm glad the archive is on the Web so the rest of us can follow along. So many terrific thinkers and do-ers are involved: Dave Winer, Clay Shirky, Wes Felter, Tim O'Reilly, Lucas Gonze and a pile of others. The focus is mostly on P2P, but in a broadly drifting way. This morning a guy named Julian Bond de-lurked and posted a series of provocative observations, all based on lots of experience trying to make B2B (and other acronyms) work in the world of a zillion increasingly empowered and clueful customers. HIs most provocative line: In Business, dis-information is often more important than information. My first response was to recoil. Then I remembered how, in most traditional markets, the vendor's stated price is always both high and negotiable — in other words, somewhat dis-informational, at least in the literal sense. But, as my priest (a veteran customer of rural markets in East Africa) puts it, in real markets, true value is only discovered inside a conversation. And a real conversations — ones in which both parties fully participate — can only happen between parties of equal power. Anyway, provocative stuff there. Check it out. The difference between Buzz and zz Great line from Buzz.Weblogs.com: News is what someone doesn't want published. All else is publicity. No joke I'd like to know more about what Poland's doing to tax Linux. Blog Rolling A nice link among a couple of generous mentions by the Head Lemur, from whose home in Phoenix rises an alternative version of Winter Wonderland. New Christmas Resolution Last year I gave Joyce a Motorola Star-Tac cell phone for Christmas. As a phone, it's wonderful. The sound is better than anything else I've heard (in both directions), and it performs even better than my Nokia 6160, which I love. But its functions, other than dialing, are incomprehensible. They don't need to be (the Nokia is amazingly easy to figure out, considering), but they are. A year later and neither of us know (or in my case, remember) how to use any of the 'advanced' features of the thing. Somehow, not long after we got it, I entered a bunch of names and numbers in the thing. Now I have no memory of how I did it, and most of the numbers have changed (thanks to the temporary nature of cell phone numbers, area codes, dialing prefixes and other variables). Failing to learn from this experience, I repeated it this Christmas by giving Joyce the Creative Nomad Jukebox. I actually bought it about a month ago after she said she would like an MP3 player that she could plug into the car stereo. The fantasy was to put our home CDs on the thing. Ripping CDs with Soundjam's software (for which I also paid money) was a snap. I like the way the software goeson line, looks in a database and identifies the album name and all the track titles, giving each track a usefully descriptive name when it turns into an .mp3 file. Nice. Loading music onto the Nomad was also snappy. Hit "add" in the Transfer Manager (or whatever it's called) navigate to the ripped tracks on the hard drive (sorted into separate directories for each album), select the tracks you want and click "okay." This is so brainless and automatic that I could do this over and over with many, many CDs. I stopped when I had about 800 tracks on the thing, which amazingly used only four out of the unit's six gigs of storage. Pretty cool. But then we tried to make the Jukebox actually work. It couldn't be done. Navigating the directory tree is marginally better than the unintelligibility that comes standard with most 'advanced' consumer electronics. Worse, more than half the tracks simply couldn't be found. They're there. When the unit is plugged into the computer, the Soundjam softare sees 814 tracks. But it only lists about 300, no matter what view I use. Where are the rest? On the Jukebox I have a choice of several different content views: Playlist, Album, Artist and Genre. Inside each are listings that make sense in some cases but not in others. There are Artist categories in the Album view and Album categories in the Artist view. Some albums list only one track even though I transfered every song on the album. There are jazz tunes in the Alternative category and classical tunes in the Classic Rock category. In spite of this chaos, I spent about an hour yesterday putting together a terrific playlist of 160 songs or so. Only 40 of them show up on the list. Why? I have no idea. While I was playing DJ to nobody, every other member of the family was otherwise absorbed in their media of choice (TV, computer, VCR, robot dog). Except Joyce. She was cooking up a terrific meal. So. at the end of the evening Joyce and I had a long talk about the electronification of Christmas. Then we made a decision we should have made a year ago: next year will be electronics-free. We've had enough already. The crap stops here. Next Christmas we'll give each other something much more precious. Time. This morning I packed up the Nomad and chalked up its electronic contents as a loss. Stupidly I didn't realize that you can put music on the thing, but you can't take it off. You can only delete it. That sucks. If Buy.com won't take it back I'll sell it on eBay, along with the 62 others that are already there.
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