A Declaration of Software Freedom was posted 14 February, 2001 by FreeDevelopers.net. More background at Linux Weekly News.

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Traditional online media are still blind to an ordinary fact that should have exposed every illusion that the Web would ever be "TV with a buy button." — that every TV remote control comes with the opposite of a buy button. It's the go-to-hell button euphemistically labelled MUTE. There is negative demand for unwanted advertising. It subtracts value from editorial "content." The bigger the ad, the greater the subtraction.

Use your head. Don't give it.

The headline (pun intended) came to head (still intending here) when I was thinking about Ev, the indefatigable auteur of Evhead and enabulator to the Blogger community, which exceeds the population of most of the world's towns. Ev didn't grow up in a town, so he made his own.

Like 60+ percent of the U.S. population at the turn of the last century, Ev grew up on a farm. You've flown over it often, probably. One of those square looking green spaces in Nebraska.

Anyway, there's a great interview with The Man here.

The Long When

Heard a piece on NPR this morning about a family in Palo Alto that built a house so completely "green" that it often produces more energy than it consumes, contributing its surplus to the local supply, resulting in a $40/month energy bill, even at currently inflated prices. (Lawrence Lee of Tomalak's Realm points to the audio.)

Then I followed a link from Scripting News to a NYTimes piece on global warming.

Here's the problem with global warming, irrespective of whatever we're doing to exacerbate it: the Earth has been warming up since the last ice age more or less ended ten thousand years ago. It will warm in any case. The seas will continue to rise. Greenland will continue to melt. If the pattern holds, the next ice age will come in another hundred thousand years.

Meanwhile we're using up all kinds of stuff that took many millions of years to produce, or was produced in a unique geological event that took place up to billions of years ago.

Oil is familiar enough. We put dinosaurs in our gas tanks, literally, every day. Let's talk about more elemental stuff. Here's what John McPhee writes about iron in Rising from the Plains:

The surface expressed the great transition of twenty-five hundred million years ago in its own way. Although life had be gun in the form of anaerobic bacteria early in the Archean Eon, photosynthetic bacteria did not appear until the middle Archean and were not abundant until the start of the Proterozoic. The bacteria emitted oxygen. The atmosphere changed. The oceans changed. The oceans had been rich in dissolved ferrous iron, in large part put into the seas by extruding lavas of two billion years. Now with the added oxygen the iron became ferric, insoluble, and dense. Precipitating out, it sank to the bottom as ferric sludge, where it joined the lime muds and silica muds and other seafloor sediments to form, worldwide, the banded-iron formations that were destined to become rivits, motorcars and cannons. The is was the iron of the Mesabi Range, the Australian iron of the Hammerslee Basin, the iron of Michigan, Wisconsin, Brazil. More than ninety percent of the iron ever mined in the world has come from Precambrian banded-iron formations. Their ages date broadly from twenty-five hundred to two thousand million years before the presenty. The transition that produced them — from a reducing to an oxidizing atmosphere and the associated radical change in the chemistry of the oceans — would be unique. It would never repeat itself. The earth would not go through that experience twice.

On a long enough scale — thousands of times the duration of civilized humanity — oil is a renewable resource. Iron isn't. Nor are many other useful elements from the periodic table. The nickel deposits near Sudbury, Ontario are the likely result of a meteor impact 1.85 billion years ago that left a crater more than 60 km wide. From what I can tell by reading about the geology that produced them, it took millions of years for the Earth to mint our kitchen counters, which are white granite slabs laced with veins of iron and garnet. Earth manufactured the rock perhaps more than a billion years ago. The counters were mined in Italy in 1997. Most diamonds on Earth were formed more than 2.5 billion years ago, makes them more than half the age of the Earth itself. We can make new ones, but none to equal what the Earth made — just once — by itself.

Either we get green or our layer of the lithosphere wraps early. We have to learn to respect a scope of time that geologists and too few others even begin to conceive. That's why I love what the Long Now folks are trying to do. Our species has been operating on a free lunch program for the duration. We're a start-up species, exploiting everything we found when we came here, and giving back approximately nothing. If we don't come back from lunch pretty soon, lunch is what we'll be.

The Clue Rush

Here's a question. After the Cluetrain book came out, who do you think came to the authors wanting to hear more? Would it be the dot-coms, many of which were run by our own friends? To be fair, there were a few. But mainly it was Procter & Gamble, Omnicom, Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, Migros (the leading retailer in Switzerland), Ericsson, Nortel and General Electric. I spoke at a GE Global eXchange event last week in Orlando. To say these guys are on top of the issue is an understatement. They are equally determined, aggressive and open-minded about not having all the answers yet. GEX CEO Harvey Seegers told me we were right in Cluetrain to observe that markets are now characterized by a balance in power between supply and demand — something never seen in the entire Industrial Age, when supply was pretty much in charge. Perspective: one third of all B2B transactions in the world today involve GEX.

The fundamental problem in every industry today isn't just a lack of connection between supply and demand. It's a lack of demand for clues on the supply side. A baseline condition for winning suppliers is curiousity.

Lack of curiousity about a market's conversation wasn't a problem in the Industrial Age, when the main challenge was making or gathering goods and moving them from one end of the supply chain to the other. But in the Information Age, it's the problem, because in networked markets everybody is now one click, one email, one Weblog, away from everybody else. The grain of the Web favors the informative and the curious.

The industries in the most clueless position are those that have never had a direct relationship between first source and final customer, or worse, whose customers and consumers have always been different populations. That's the fundamental problem with commercial broadcasting, and to a lesser extent with subscription-based commercial media such as newspapers and magazines (whose consumers are also customers — though much smaller customers than advertisers). It's also the problem with politics. Voters are consumers of politics who each can't pay more than one vote, reduced by hanging chads and other discounts — while the real customers of politics are the large contributors who keep politicians in the business of selling their votes.

Networked markets obsolete business and political systems that aren't open to clues from everybody involved in their market's networked conversations. Big manufacturers like GE and Nortel are at least trying to learn how to take advantage of all the new qualities that are manifest in networked markets.

At the height of the Dot Rush, most start-ups weren't even companies. They were projects. Or worse, bets by VCs. They built gold rush towns on the new frontier, facing the media streets with false fronts on shacks filled with people whose first purpose was to create the appearance of importance, potential and success. They were each built to simulate real business long enough for a gullible public to fund their conceits with big IPOs.

There was no way a dot-com start-up could compete with a GE or an IBM in the long run, unless they took advantage of highly unique and strategic opportunities: in hidebound industries (Amazon in books), in the bazaar-friendly nature of the Net (eBay), or in the Net itself (all the truly enterprising online companies, plus offline companies that augment their business on line). The third category is actually huge. It just doesn't get much media attention (except, of course, by its own medium, which you're reading right now).

Remember who won the Gold Rush. It wasn't they guys who went to the mountains to pan and sluice for gold. It was the guys who built the infrastructure that civilized mining and the countless other the stable business categories that surrounded and succeeded mining. The guys who found the gold died broke and insane. The guys who built the banks and railroads — Crocker and Stanford, to name two — are the ones who made the real difference. And they weren't looking for gold. They were looking for clues.

For every traction there is an equal and opposite retraction

Tom points us to Hype and Anti-Hype, by Thomas Friedman in The New York Times. Quotage:

The real Internet wars are just beginning, and they aren't going to be between Amazon.com and E-Toys. The real Internet wars happen when all the old-line companies, with real assets, real size and real business models, fully absorb the Internet — including e-commerce, e-inventory, e- bookkeeping, e-training, e-customer management — into their traditional businesses and start to take each other on with meaner, leaner companies.

The real Internet wars happen when Goliaths like Target, Kmart and Wal-Mart, or G.M., Toyota and Ford, or Dell and Compaq fully absorb the Internet to speed up, lighten up and globalize every aspect of their businesses. And the real Internet wars also happen when the NGO's, human rights groups, conservationists and other activists become fully Internet-enabled and use its power to challenge big companies and to force transparency on big governments.

As this Internet build-out continues, says Joel Cawley, the director of business strategy for I.B.M., it will enable businesses, individuals and activists to tap into a much broader and powerful base of creativity and innovation, with a much lighter touch. "So," he adds, "smaller and smaller units will become more and more empowered and bigger and bigger units will become more and more decentralized. None of us knows how this will play out, but we do know it will impact the hierarchy of power in, and between, institutions, governments and activists. And the new rules for these interactions are just beginning to be evolved."

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