Lessons on Blogging from Jon Stewart

The New York Times today has a fascinating profile of Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show, entitled Is This The Most Trusted Man in America? The article is a wonderful celebration of the person and the spirit of the show he's created.

But perhaps more interestingly in the internet context, this article is a must-read for anyone who cares about the future of journalism. It shows how the informality and attitude that we take as characteristic of blogging can be combined with the tough-mindedness, research, and craft that is displayed by the best investigative reporters.

Let's start with passion about stuff that matters, something top bloggers and top journalists ought to have in their genes:

MR. STEWART describes his job as “throwing spitballs” from the back of the room and points out that “The Daily Show” mandate is to entertain, not inform. Still, he and his writers have energetically tackled the big issues of the day — “the stuff we find most interesting,” as he said in an interview at the show’s Midtown Manhattan offices, the stuff that gives them the most “agita,” the sometimes somber stories he refers to as his “morning cup of sadness.” And they’ve done so in ways that straight news programs cannot: speaking truth to power in blunt, sometimes profane language, while using satire and playful looniness to ensure that their political analysis never becomes solemn or pretentious.

“Hopefully the process is to spot things that would be grist for the funny mill,” Mr. Stewart, 45, said. “In some respects, the heavier subjects are the ones that are most loaded with opportunity because they have the most — you know, the difference between potential and kinetic energy? — they have the most potential energy, so to delve into that gives you the largest combustion, the most interest. I don’t mean for the audience. I mean for us. Everyone here is working too hard to do stuff we don’t care about.”

Much like blogging, a key to the show's success is its authentic, personal voice, and its ability to synthesize news with viewpoint:

Ms. Corn [the show's executive co-producer] noted that while things “may be exaggerated on the show, it’s grounded in the way Jon really feels.”

“He really does care,” she added. “He’s a guy who says what he means.”

Unlike many comics today, Mr. Stewart does not trade in trendy hipsterism or high-decibel narcissism. While he possesses Johnny Carson’s talent for listening and George Carlin’s gift for observation, his comedy remains rooted in his informed reactions to what Tom Wolfe once called “the irresistibly lurid carnival of American life,” the weird happenings in “this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, hog-stomping Baroque” country.

“Jon’s ability to consume and process information is invaluable,” said Mr. Colbert. He added that Mr. Stewart is “such a clear thinker” that he’s able to take “all these data points of spin and transparent falsehoods dished out in the form of political discourse” and “fish from that what is the true meaning, what are red herrings, false leads,” even as he performs the ambidextrous feat of “making jokes about it” at the same time.

But there's also a lesson for bloggers that the show, however personal, is finely honed, with lots of research:

“We often discuss satire — the sort of thing he does and to a certain extent I do — as distillery,” Mr. Colbert continued. “You have an enormous amount of material, and you have to distill it to a syrup by the end of the day. So much of it is a hewing process, chipping away at things that aren’t the point or aren’t the story or aren’t the intention. Really it’s that last couple of drops you’re distilling that makes all the difference. It isn’t that hard to get a ton of corn into a gallon of sour mash, but to get that gallon of sour mash down to that one shot of pure whiskey takes patience” as well as “discipline and focus.”

And:

The day begins with a morning meeting where material harvested from 15 TiVos and even more newspapers, magazines and Web sites is reviewed. That meeting, Mr. Stewart said, “would be very unpleasant for most people to watch: it’s really a gathering of curmudgeons expressing frustration and upset, and the rest of the day is spent trying to mask or repress that through whatever creative devices we can find.”

The writers work throughout the morning on deadline pieces spawned by breaking news, as well as longer-term projects, trying to find, as Josh Lieb, a co-executive producer of the show, put it, stories that “make us angry in a whole new way.” By lunchtime, Mr. Stewart (who functions as the show’s managing editor and says he thinks of hosting as almost an afterthought) has begun reviewing headline jokes. By 3 p.m. a script is in; at 4:15, Mr. Stewart and the crew rehearse that script, along with assembled graphics, sound bites and montages. There is an hour or so for rewrites — which can be intense, newspaper-deadlinelike affairs — before a 6 o’clock taping with a live studio audience.

What the staff is always looking for, Mr. Stewart said, are “those types of stories that can, almost like the guy in ‘The Green Mile’ ” — the Stephen King story and film in which a character has the apparent ability to heal others by drawing out their ailments and pain — “suck in all the toxins and allow you to do something with it that is palatable.”

What a call to action! What a way forward for all of those trying to understand the future of news! Point of view fused with fact checking, bluntness and informality fused with ruthless editing, a humanistic vision that acts as a filter to make sure that the stories covered actually matter!

Segway CTO Leaves for Apple as Product Design VP

Phil Torrone noticed today on the Segway Chat forums that "Doug Field, the chief technology officer at Segway who heads their entire engineering team (and has since Day 1), is leaving Segway to become a VP of product design at Apple." The announcement continues:

Doug has been the driving force in making the Segway what it is today and will be sorely missed at the company. However, with every change comes good and bad. So while it's bad the rich history and experience of Doug is leaving, it's good in that perhaps the team will get a fresh perspective into possible engineering solutions for future versions of the Segway (or Segway-like applications). And hey, what can be better than a gig at Apple? These days, in the design and engineering world, not much!! We wish Doug all the luck in moving on!!

I have no idea what Doug will be working on at Apple, but both the Segway and Apple's recent ascendancy remind us how the computer industry is no longer just a software game. For so long, the standardization of computing hardware gave most of the business advantage to software. Now, the end game of that trend has re-emphasized the differentiating power of hardware design. Meanwhile, Moore's law, coupled with the rise of software above the level of a single device means that smaller and smaller devices can flex computing muscle. As a result, computing functionality is migrating from computers per se into the world of stuff.

We've been chronicling the alpha geek and enthusiast edge of this trend in Make: magazine, but it's a mainstream trend as well. Designing computer infused stuff is the wave of the future, and people who are good at it are going to be in high demand.

Video of Rich Wolski's EUCALYPTUS talk at Velocity

Rich Wolski gave a truly impressive talk at Velocity about an open-source software infrastructure for cloud computing called EUCALYPTUS . The API is compatible with Amazon's EC2 interface, and the underlying infrastructure is designed to support multiple client-side interfaces. EUCALYPTUS is implemented using commonly-available Linux tools and basic Web-service technologies making it easy to install and maintain. Watch and learn...

You can see more videos from Velocity on Blip.tv.

Unexpected Pleasures in Gates/Ballmer interview at D Conference

In the joint interview with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer at D last week, I loved some of the stories about the early Microsoft, especially Ballmer talking about how Gates wouldn't let him hire anyone unless he could prove that they would pay for themselves. Gates was incredibly conservative, and always wanted to have enough cash on hand to keep people employed for a year even if sales fell off a cliff. Everyone thinks about Microsoft as the gorilla of the industry, but it was great to see that view of them as an early, scrappy startup. And that kind of financial conservatism is great advice for startups.

I also liked the description of how they worked together. It's great to have a partner in running a business, and they did a great job of complementing each other's strengths. A CEO/COO partnership can be really great. (We have that now at O'Reilly, and it's been fabulous.)

It was also great to see how relaxed Gates was. He was happy to let Steve take point, had a slightly bemused smile on his face a lot of the time. It was definitely the face and body language of a man who had let go and was ready to move on. It's nice to see, in an era of aging, driven corporate titans, someone who can step aside. As Lao Tzu said, "To retire when the task is accomplished is the way of heaven." Microsoft may still need to reinvent itself, but Bill is done.

I wanted to add a comment by Linda Stone that I overheard in the hallways, namely, that it seemed like a real missed opportunity on the part of Walt and Kara that there wasn't some kind of effort to honor Bill Gates for his enormous contributions to the industry. They acted like this was just a panel like any other. Despite my many criticisms of Microsoft, I truly respect the company and what they have achieved. They played a huge role in the commodification of computing, and made so much possible (even the rise of open source and the internet), and a huge part of that was the vision and talent of Bill Gates. I'm glad he's now focused on a new "big hairy audacious goal" beyond Microsoft (eliminating diseases like Malaria.) Even if I think that Microsoft has had trouble finding a new BHAG, it's clear that Bill himself still thinks big.

P.S. Despite what I said about "aging, driven corporate titans" above, I have to admit to being very impressed with both Rupert Murdoch and Barry Diller. Both are brilliant, forceful, and surprisingly candid. You could have knocked me over with a feather when Murdoch came out and all-but endorsed Barack Obama. I love it when people don't fit your preconceptions. (I was twittering this live, but twitter managed to have an outage so all my notes were lost. Glad there's video -- even better, though you don't get to see my amazement and delight.)

It was also fabulous to hear Barry Diller talk about Carl Icahn and Yahoo! and the responsibility of management to maximize shareholder value. I loved the way Barry said that he feels a deep responsibility to do well for his long-term shareholders, but that he feels absolutely no obligation to make money for short-term speculators (and presumably that Jerry shouldn't feel any responsibility to folks like Carl Icahn either.) All shareholders are not created equal.

These guys are blunt and insightful, afraid of no one, and still having fun. Great role models for any entrepreneur.

Ignite Boston 3 - Next week

The third Ignite Boston will be next week - Thursday, May 29, from 6 to 10pm at Tommy Doyle's in Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA. There is no cover charge or any sort of fee. The event is free as in 'Free Beer'. In fact, Microsoft is sponsoring the night and there will be a free beer for those of you who check in when you get there.

RSVP If you plan to attend, email IgniteBoston at oreilly dot com for the chance to win $300 worth of O'Reilly books of your choosing. You must be present to win. There will likely be other items like tee-shirts and other promo items for those who alert us ahead that they plan to attend.

From 6-6:45 pm, mingle and talk tech with your fellow FOOs, alpha geeks, and techies from the greater Boston area. After the mingling and social stuff, we'll have a couple of special keynotes by Jonathan Zdziarski and John Viega to kick off our Ignite talks. Then, onto the lightening talks.

(continue reading)

Bezos on innovation, customer-focus and long-term thinking

Business Week has a great interview with Jeff Bezos as part of their innovation issue. The interview is entitled How Frugality Drives Innovation, but Jeff talks about far more than frugality. Here's my favorite bit:

Q: Every company claims to be customer-focused. Why do you think so few are able to pull it off?
A: Companies get skills-focused, instead of customer-needs focused. When [companies] think about extending their business into some new area, the first question is "why should we do that—we don't have any skills in that area." That approach puts a finite lifetime on a company, because the world changes, and what used to be cutting-edge skills have turned into something your customers may not need anymore. A much more stable strategy is to start with "what do my customers need?" Then do an inventory of the gaps in your skills. Kindle is a great example. If we set our strategy by what our skills happen to be rather than by what our customers need, we never would have done it. We had to go out and hire people who know how to build hardware devices and create a whole new competency for the company.

Well worth a read. Another great line: "The key is to pick things that you think are really iimportant, and then focus on them." It seems obvious, but so few of us do it as consistently as we should!

@ETech: Tuesday Morning Keynotes

Saul Griffith started the day with a sober, but ultimately hopeful, talk about energy literacy. The subtitle of the talk was "know what you can do, do what you can," and the core of his talk (we'll point to the slides when we get 'em) was the steps we need to take, individually and collectively, to be able to have a rational conversation about energy.

1. We need to understand the link between CO₂ and climate
2. Based on that understanding, make a temperature choice. The planet is warming. The question is how much. Where do you want to stabilize the earth temperature? He set the dial at different levels and sketched out the different consequences we have to accept at each level.
3. Based on the temperature we choose, we have to decide just how much carbon that allows us to release. He pointed out that temperature stabilization can take 100-300 years.
4. Based on the amount of carbon we choose to release, we have to decide how much fossil energy we can use.
5. Based on the usable fossle energy we can use, we have to decide what clean energy sources we need to supplement the fossil fuel.
6. Based on what clean energy sources we have access to, we have to determine a new energy mix -- and how we'll engineer.
7. Then -- and Griffith acknowledged that this "might be the hardest part" -- we have to turn off our use of existing carbon fuels."

He then showed how he is trying to change his lifestyle based on his decisions during those seven steps. He pointed out what we know already -- that even reasonable, moderate people in the developed world have a big carbon footprint -- and something I, for one, didn't know -- that public carbon-footprint calculators give low estimates.

As he listed the changes he's trying to make, Griffith noted that the things he wants to do to lower his carbon footprint are things he wants to do already (eat less, travel less, etc.). If you're optimistic about your ability to change, you can be optimistic about how we gets to his new life -- and how we can.

Then Megaphone founders Jury Hahn and Dan Albritton delivered a fascinating phone-game demo. Their combinations of tiny mobile devices with simple games those devices play on a big, communal screen were both technically interesting and fun to play. Albritton promised us something "really, really weird," and he delivered. You really haven't lived until you've sat next to someone next to you in a dimmed conference room standing up, yelling "ribbit" like a frog, and looking to see if his perfect match responds.

Eric Rodenbeck, CEO of Stamen Design walked through some of his firm's more high-profile visualization projects. Trulia Hindsight maps homes over time, but also reveals more (like where pollution is); Oakland Crimespotting reveals both patterns of crime -- and patterns of crime enforcement; a project for mySociety shows how multiple variables -- home prices, commute time -- can be elegantly combined in a single interactive visual.

Rodenbeck spent some time showing how information visualization, while it may be hot right now, nothing new. He displayed some century-old pre-computer infovis examples that were"both beautifully arranged and scientifically valuable." Then, as now, the best information visualizations are those where cool and useful overlap, where story and headline overlap. This dovetailed nicely with an obvservation Griffith made in his earlier talk, when he cited an 1896 article by one Svante Arrhenius that linked carbon with warming. We keep discovering the same things!

Sun Microsystems chief gaming officer Chris Melissinos, was there to talk about the company's J2SE-based, open source (via GPL v2) game-development platform Project Darkstar, but he had plenty of provocative one-liners and observations:

* "If we calculated the carbon footprint for World of Warcraft, we'd all vomit."
* "This is the first generation of gamers raising gamers."
* "Women over 35 comprise the largest segment of online game players."

Finally, Elizabeth Churchill, of Yahoo Research, reported on studies she made of public multi-touch displays, emphasizing how the real and the virtual interact. In particular, I was taken by her descriptions of how people learn to be part of communities of practice by watching -- or as the online world calls it, "lurking," an activity that is often dismissed. But Churchill maintained, "Lurking is an important practice. What we reveal in the virtual serve as the icebreaker for real life."

I'm only giving a quick taste of a strong, diverse session, but I want to get back into the breakout sessions, which have started already...

@TED: Best of Day 4 and a Wrap-Up

The last day at TED is a combination of exhaustion, anxiety, and wistfulness: exhaustion because we've been neglecting our sleep, anxiety because we remember how much work awaits us after the event is over, and wistfulness because we realize we can't live like this all the time.

Perhaps because the programmers knew that we'd be pulled in multiple directions, the last half-day of TED was stuffed with talks that demanded our full attention. Here are some of the best moments from today:

* Johnny Lee Chung showed his jaw-dropping Wii Remote hacks, which create, for less than $50, an interactive whiteboard. (Jesse Robbins covered it previously on Radar.) When comparing it to a real, multi-thousand-dollar interactive whiteboards, Chung said of his project, "you get 80% of the way there for 1% of the cost."

* Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion, looked to a historical analogy to consider how to get countries out of poverty. The last time the rich world did something serious about developing another region, he stated, was in the late 1940s, when the U.S. needed to develop a devastated Europe. We can learn from what the U.S. did then -- providing aid, reversing a protectionist trade policy, moving its security policy from isolation to engagement, and abandoning some notions of national sovereignty to create the United Nations -- as a model for what we need to do now.

* Al Gore, who debuted his "Inconvenient Truth" presentation at TED two years ago, delivered a run-though of a new talk he's developing. This time out, he seems less focused on alerting us to climate change -- he's done that already -- and more on what to do about it, not only at a personal level but at a national level. As he put it, "changing the laws is more important than changing light bulbs." During his talk, I kept creating an alternate history in my head. Regardless of your political point of view, there's no doubt that the world -- and the U.S.'s place in the world -- would be far different now if we were in the last months not of the second Bush administration but the second Gore administration. Perhaps Gore did more good outside of the White House than he could have inside.

There were two other talks from yesterday that I wanted a bit more distance from before I tried to write about them.

The first was from MIT's Tod Machover, who spoke in the abstract about how music has power in people's lives -- and then proved it. His talk peaked when he brought out , Dan Ellsey, a longtime cerebral palsey patient from Tewksbury Hospital, outside Boston, to show how even someone with a profound disability can create music. Then Machover moved from talking about composition to talking about performance, and Ellsey, thanks to a system developed at the MIT Media Lab, was able to "play" one of his songs. Strapped to chair, imprisoned by his illness, Ellsey and his work were completely, miraculously alive. My words can't express the drama of the moment. Perhaps when this talk makes it to the TED website, you can see for yourselves.

It's also hard to describe what conductor Benjamin Zander achieved last night. The Boston Philharmonic conductor also spoke of music, connected his notions of music to inspirational ideas about leadership (and, it seemed at the time, everything else in the universe), and led a devastating experiment that had the entire audience singing Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" in phonetic German, with him urging us to take our amateurish singing higher and higher. I won't even try to describe what he accomplished (again, the filmed talk will do that for itself), but I do want to share with you -- despite this being a family blog -- the term he introduced that everyone was talking about last night: BTFI.

Zander told of a cellist auditioning to be in an orchestra. Zander, helping the musician, told him he was holding back: he had to do more. The cellist didn't get the job because, he reported to Zander, he was still holding back. But then the cellist said "fuck it," made himself audition for a better job at another orchestra, and got it. Zander's lesson: to excel, you have to get BTFI, "beyond the 'fuck it'." It's an idea he and his wife Rosamund Stone Zander explore in their brief and wonderful The Art of Possibility. (You can read the Google Book Search excerpt from his book, on the origin of BTFI, here.)

Most of the speakers at TED were people who had seen problems -- in themselves, in an industry, in society -- and had decide to get BTFI. That encapsulated TED and it's an appropriate note to go out on. Until next year...

@TED: Best of Day 3

The joke among TEDsters is that, around the third day, it becomes an endurance sport. It's one thing to be in a room listening to spectacular insights for a few hours. It's another to be doing so for half a week. Nonetheless, part of the experience you get from being at events like TED is that feeling of being overwhelmed: someone just said what feels like the smartest thing you ever heard -- and then the next speaker says what feels like the smartest thing you ever heard -- and then ... well, you get the idea. It's intellectually exhausting, but it's also thrilling.

Here are some of the best moments of Day 3:

* The "What's Out There" series of talks was pretty, er, out there. Particle physicist Brian Cox walked us non-particle-physicists confidently through the importance of the Large Hadron Collider, soon to open near Geneva. It was one of several talks in that section in which the enthusiasm of the speaker was so great that we all thought about dropping our careers and becoming particle physicists.

* The "What's Out There" panel was especially strong, but there were two talks that knocked me out. Joshua Klein, an animal behaviorist, talked about species that have adapted to human behavior. In particular, he talked about crows. He described his project to build a vending machine for crows and he showed short films about ways crows can take advantage of civilization: for example, dropping nuts onto boulevards so cars can crack them open. And author Richard Preston reported on his (and others') adventures high in the Redwoods, the unexpected ecosystems discovered up there, and the ecological threats they face. I don't want to simplify his rich argument -- his book The Wild Trees is a must-read -- but he does a great job of connecting the fate of the Redwoods and the fate of us.

* During the "What Will Tomorrow Bring?" session, the other Chris Anderson spoke not about his provocative "Free" thesis (on the cover of the new Wired) but about his less-than-$100 blimp, which he showed off, the product of his desire to make a "minimum unmanned aerial vehicle." Chris and the blimp will also be at ETech on Tuesday.

* Peter Schwartz argued that Wikipedia is a leader in the battle against poverty: it brings knowledge and possibility to places not getting them any other way.

The series of talks that most engaged me was the first one of the day, entitled "How Do We Create?"

* Designer Yves Behar urged us to question basic assumptions in out work. "Why do we have a CapsLk key on our computers"? he asked. "As a designer, I don't want to just slapping a new skin over existing technology." He certainly didn't do that when he designed the XO Laptop, which, among other delights, doesn't have a CapsLk key.

* Robert Lang, origami artist and mathematician, talked about how creativity depends on learning from those who came before us, even if we're taking lessons in ways the originators never intended. His best of many aphorisms: "the secret to productivity is letting dead people do the work for you."

* There was one particularly moving presentation during that session, from MIT's Tod Machover, which I'll give its own post after I have a bit more distance from it. (Benjamin Zander's great climax last night will get a shout-out, too.)

About that that anti-TED meme flying around the blogosphere that I mentioned last time...

Some of it has been cranky (such as a high-profile tech blog publishing the attendee list and vetting it), but at least one post -- from the usually very thoughtful Umair Haque, deserves to be addressed. His argument is that TED does more harm than good. I disagree. There are some things a reasonable person could argue against TED -- the inevitable elitism that comes with the high entry fee and the occasional self-congratulatory tone come to mind -- but by adopting a web-centric "ideas worth spreading" meme, I believe curator Chris Anderson has worked hard to make the ideas expressed at TED as available as possible. Most TED talks are available for free on the TED website. An official blog is reporting the events of the conference in near-real-time, as are a dozen or so unvetted ones. Haque's argument seems to be that TED does more harm than good because it hasn't saved the world (he denies that in the comments, but it seems to be his argument). Sure, it hasn't. No mere conference can. (Indeed, the even more elite Davos conference this year seemed to be full of leaders just throwing up their hands.) But while I suspect Anderson's goal is transformational change, the simple act of sharing transformational ideas -- first to a room of elites and then to the growing percentage of the world with Internet access -- lets them take root in unexpected places. That is definitely far more good than harm.

And now, off to the final day...

@TED: Best of Day 2

It was a day of extremes at TED, ranging from an extended session examining the pervasiveness of evil to an evening celebration of some of the most life-affirming ideas possible. It also ranged from the sober (how to survive a nuclear attack) to the self-referential and self-congratulatory (a brief sit-down with TED's originator, Richard Saul Wurman). Here's a quick rundown of some of the long day's many high points:

* There was a late-morning series of talks on the topic "Is beauty truth?", but it was in another session that we saw how truth brings with it some sense of beauty. Alisa Miller, president of CEO of Public Radio International, used the remarkable information visualizations of Worldmapper to illuminate what news stories get covered and what don't. (You can see her slides and hear her talk here.) In the end, she notes, "covering Britney is cheaper" than considering the more important stories.
* While interviewing Craig Ventner, TED curator Chris Anderson remembered an exchange they had a few years back. Anderson had asked, "Can you be accused of playing God?" Ventner's reply: "We're not playing." It was a joke, but Ventner took is as an opportunity to deliberate on how we're "supposed to use our knowledge to improve humanity." He also contrasted the optimism of TED with the pessimism of Davos
* In a brief talk, Dean Ornish gave his standard talk on why "our genes are not our fate," detailing the importance of lifestyle change. It was an interesting complement to Ventner and others showing how our fate could be in creating new genes.
* Philip Zimbardo, top researcher of the classic 1971 Stanford prison study and an expert witness for Abu Ghraib guard, showed some photos from the Iraqi prison that were more graphic and troubling than what's been in the mainstream press, and hammered on the parallels between his landmark study and what is happening today. Countering the "bad apple" theory of people who behave terribly when placed in unsuperivised positions of complete power over others, he stated, "it's the barrel that's bad, not the apples." As intense as that session was, it kicked off with a brief clip about the just-ended next-generation DVD wars that managed to be both hilarious and offensive.
* While accepting their TED prizes, novelist David Eggers delivered a tour-de-force tour through his 826 writing and tutoring project, and Neil Turok shared his double life as a physicist (he's not so sure the Big Bang started everything) and as a founder of the African school for math and sciences.

And that doesn't even include Samantha Power's stirring talk about diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello ... or Susan Blackmore's sharp application of Darwinian principles to everything ... or Isaac Mizrahi's star turn ... or 100 other fascinating moments. And the best news is that this event is only half over.

Finally, I've noticed an anti-TED meme flying around the blogosphere this morning. I'll address that tonight, when I write my post about today's events.

@TED: Best of Day 1

If nothing else, TED is a trip. The veteran conference has gone through many permutations. Under curator Chris Anderson, TED is still full of technology, entertainment, and design, but it has really lived up to the change-the-world rhetoric that was always a bit more under the surface during Richard Saul Wurman's ace stewardship. Al Gore's talk about global warming turned into An Inconvenient Truth after a movie producer saw him deliver the talk at TED; Pangea Day, an ambitious attempt to create a world-wide one-day film festival (it's coming May 10) came out of TED as well. And this week E.O. Wilson is debuting the first iteration of his Encyclopedia of Life, funded by a TED grant. Indeed, the change-the-world attitude is so great that the only truly negative feedback I heard at last year's event was over how wasteful the opulent gift bags were. So this year the bags are constructed from 100-percent post-consumer recycled beverage bottles by Rickshaw Bagworks.

The conceit of this year's TED, now in its final installment in longtime home Monterey before a move to Long Beach, is "The Big Questions." I'll chronicle some of the high points of the conference here. For more detailed coverage, the official TED blog is offering blow-by-blow coverage. And the event, while aiming to be iconoclastic, has become so iconic (and expensive and exclusive) that it has inspired its own barcamp alternative, as noted by Jerry Michalski.

Some of the choice moments of the first day:

* Third generation paleoanthropologist Louise Leakey explaining what you need to do to if you want your remains to be found as a fossil (there's lots of luck involved if you want to be preserved for millenia), and how "technology removes barriers to population growth"
* Priceline founder Jay Walker demonstrating how it takes a lump of coal to transmit a megabyte of data across the Net
* Photographer Chris Jordan talking us through "Running the Numbers," a series of dramatic information visualizes focusing on consumption in the U.S. He learned that, for example, one million is the number plastic cups used on planes in the U.S. every hour and delivered a devastating visualization of that data point.
* * Guitarist Kaki King channelled Preston Reed and the ghost of John Fahey in a surprising and thrilling manner
* Roy Gould and Curtis Wong debuted Microsoft's WorldWide telescope, which may, as Gould put it, "change the way we do astronomy." Simply, it allows us to see the sky -- and what lurks beyond the sky -- in an entirely new way (the talk is already on the TED site).
* The presentation from the day that burned itself immediately into my long-term memory came from Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist who showed us a real human brain -- and spent most of her talking describing her own stroke and what she felt and thought while her brain was going wild, from the borderline-metaphysical ("I can't define where I begin and where I end") to the borderline-hilarious ("I'm a busy woman. I don't have time for a stoke"). Her description of her time in that strange state, caught between two worlds, the rare neouroanatomist who has been able to chronicle a brain-changing event from the inside, was astonishing.

And that's just cherrypicking from the first day, a half day of talks. There are 2-1/2 more days coming...

(There are always fun interstitial film clips between talks. You can't beat a harmonica-playing Darth Vader.)

Multitouch and Minority Report

I'm amazed at how quickly multitouch has spread into the mainsream. In 2006, Jeff Han demoed multitouch at ETech and we all thought "wow! Minority Report come true!". Just two years later, his company was powering multitouch analysis of Super Tuesday and companies like Microsoft and Apple have consumer multitouch products. PlayMotion and GestureTek have gestural interfaces companies can buy if they want to build their own impressive multitouch displays, and there's a tutorial by an Adaptive Path guru on designing gestural interfaces at ETech (oh, and Google tells me he's also writing a book for us :-).

Minority Report was only released in 2002. John Underkoffler, the science and technology advisor for that movie, did a bloody good job of showing us what the world would be like. I found an interview with Underkoffler in Salon, from 2002, where he explains that all his work was based on actual research going on at MIT. He went on to build a data glove (see the video) and got funding from Foundry Group for his still-stealthy Oblong Industries to commercialize the glove.

R.E.M., Open Source, and Staying Alive When an Industry Shifts

Over the weekend, Nat posted "Artistic License 2.0 and ... REM?!" which noted that the veteran rock'n'roll band was releasing its new video under an open license (if not in an open format). It's good to see an old band learn a new trick, and it suggests what those in the music industry might do if they want to have a future in it.

In "A rare post about the music industry that isn't completely depressing," I looked at Jill Sobule's attempt to fund her next record via online contributions. It's a savvy attempt that seems to be succeeding: she's more than two-thirds on her way to meeting her not-so-modest recording budget. A performer like Sobule (and, as we'll see shortly, R.E.M.) comes to alternate ways of funding or promoting new music with baggage -- unlike younger performers, like Yael Naim, who can get lucky thanks to novelty (see "Steve Jobs rules the recording industry. Now what?") These performers are experimenting with new ways to get heard because the old ways weren't working. Prince, to cite one high-profile example, wouldn't have started distributing his records via concert add-ons or newspaper inserts if the old distribution methods were still working for him.

R.E.M. can still be a thrilling band live, but its commercial heyday was long ago -- back when the U.S. president was Ronald Reagan, in fact -- and even diehard fans acknowledge that the trio's recorded work has limped since the band's original drummer, Bill Berry, left 11 years ago. The band's decision to distribute the "Supernatural Superserious" video is, at its heart, an attempt to create buzz for the record. That's something the band has been trying for months, in particular its attempt to hype the relatively rocking nature of the new record, after a number of ballad-heavy snoozefests.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. Commercial desperation can lead to innovation, both in terms of the art itself and the art with which you sell it. Everyone is eulogizing the death of the traditional rock'n'roll business, but the successful old rockers are still successful. Bruce Springsteen is selling out arenas and will move up to stadiums in the summer. Tom Petty's Super Bowl halftime gig -- timed right before his summer tour tickets went on sale -- rejuvenated his record sales. And the hoary hard-rock band Aerosmith has turned to a new installment in a successful videogame franchise to keep up its profile. Even when radio and even video outlets have turned cool to these performers, there's still an audience waiting to hear, see, or play with them. The lack of traditional intermediaries does not mean there's a lack of audience.

Having emerged from the early-'80s Amerindie movement, an assemblage of rock'n'roll bands with a combination of optimism and hardheadedness that mirrored the very best of the open source movement, R.E.M. knows it can't compete with what's at the top of the charts. It's unlikely that fans of the current flavors -- Miley Cyrus, Flo Rida, or T-Pain -- will be moved by R.E.M.'s music. But the band isn't ready to rent its songs to Madison Avenue or diverge from the aesthetic that made them stars. If you can't play on an even field, change the field. Just as open source projects reached critical mass by serving areas the proprietary vendors were ignoring or giving short shrift, the Amerindie bands -- in love with punk's sense of possibility -- provided an alternative to the mainstream. Now, the thinking goes, we can't get people to find out about our new record the usual ways, we have to find new ways. The future, as always, belongs to the clever.

I'm at Davos, but not blogging it

However, the Wall Street Journal is doing a great job of covering the World Economic Forum on their blog, The Daily Davos. (I don't know how they do it. I certainly don't have time.) Here are a couple of their posts:

• Soros: Free for All Fallout Requires Finance Sheriff. Legendary financier George Soros (who I'm looking forward to meeting in a few minutes at a philanthropic roundtable) suggests that we need "a massive injection of regulation and oversight over financial markets, saying that the lack of restraints on the markets has caused 'not a normal crisis but the end of an era.'"

• From the Cola Wars to the Clean Water Wars. A lot of big company CEOs are starting to recognize that clean water is one of the scarce resources that we've long been wasting, and that it's coming time to pay the piper. There have been a number of sessions on that theme here. It's one that's been on my radar for years, ever since I read Cadillac Desert years ago, and then saw an interview with Ted Turner in which he said that if he were a young man he'd be investing in water. Seems like his insight is starting to be more widely recognized.

• Ideas that take flight at Davos covers former SAP wunderkind Shai Agassi's new venture in electric cars.

They haven't yet covered the keynote discussion between Bono and Al Gore this morning about how to reconcile the issues of fighting global poverty with fighting global warming, but I'm sure that will be up soon. Good stuff.

The conference itself is rather overwhelming, with dozens of concurrent sessions spread across town. It's tough enough at a regular conference to get to everything you want, but it's even tougher when sessions can be twenty minutes apart. There's great stuff here, but sometimes a little hard to get to. But it's kind of cool to brush past Henry Kissinger or Hamid Karzai in the halls. I'll try to cover some of the sessions I attended when I get back and have some spare time.

Congrats to Yossi Vardi

I was tickled to read the Economist's profile of Yossi Vardi. Yossi is a Foo Camp regular and long-time O'Reilly friend, and it's great to see him recognized like this.

Born in 1942 in Palestine, Mr Vardi started his career in fields that would be called low-tech today. At the age of 27 he was appointed director-general of Israel's development ministry and then held a similar job at the energy ministry. Later he led or helped to found some 60 companies such as Israel Chemicals, the Israel Oil Company and ITL Optronics. Then, in 1996, he invested in his first internet start-up, Mirabilis, the company behind ICQ (“I seek you”). One reason was that his son Arik was one of the founders. But Mr Vardi also realised that instant messaging, then a novelty, would spread like a contagious virus. “Three major viral products emerged from this part of the world: the Bible 2,700 years ago, Jesus 2,000 years ago and ICQ ten years ago,” he jokes. Search for ICQ using Google and there are 675m matches, he points out, compared with 160m for the Bible and 178m for Jesus.

Message from the Web

If you haven't read Tim Bray's "Message from the Web", take a few minutes to do so now. He spoke at a conference working on an XML schema for accountants, and must have shaken things up with his brief but eloquent description of the web's sensibilities. It's already being cited by the likes of Sam Ruby, deservedly so. I need it on a playing card to hand out to the many people I meet who haven't absorbed the way things work now.

Getting started should be free. · Also, it shouldn't take more than a few days.

How much did it cost you to start using Google or Flickr or Facebook or YouTube? The answer is always the same. If you want people to adopt anything in any scale, you have to remove barriers, and money is one.

Let's imagine a scenario: There's a smart young-ish person who has a basic understanding of business realities and accounting fiction oops methodology. Let's call her "Emma". Emma decides that people are underestimating the importance of collecting receivables in Value-Investment portfolios, and figures out a better way to compute a number that reflects that. She lives in Manitoba and doesn't work for Goldman Sachs, but she can write CGI scripts. She has the idea on Wednesday and gets the script working next Monday, and one quarter later, either gives up on the idea or is incredibly rich. Both are good outcomes.

[Link]

Nice Warren Buffet interview

I just read some great comments by Warren Buffet from a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton. Whatever your politics, you have to appreciate the thoughtful responses of the "Sage of Omaha," so different from the usual political blather. Some tidbits, from notes taken at the event by Nick Nejad at Rational Angle:

Q: "Buffett, why are you a Democrat?"

A: I have what I call the minus 24 hour genie test. Imagine a genie poofed up 24 hours before you were born and asked you what kind of world you would want to live in. And you being the smart minus 24 hour baby would ask, "what's the catch?" And the genie would respond that you would have to participate in the "ovarian lottery" and draw one of 6 billion tickets. Things such as born United States or Bangladesh; white, brown, or black; male or female; smart or dumb; these would all be completely up to chance. Well then, what kind of world would you create? And my [Buffett's] world would be a society with equality that treated everyone fairly. And the Democrats seem to be better at doing that.

I like to think that, like a lot of people I know, I'm neither a Republican nor a Democrat, but someone who sees a middle road between the extremes that the two parties seem to pander to. I love Buffett's characterization of the social ideal put forth by the Democrats, at the same time as I recognize the idea expressed by the most thoughtful Republicans that harnessing free market economics rather than government intervention may be the best way to reach that ideal. But harnessing the free market is very different from letting it run wild.

What I really want out of politics is for someone to do what they say they'll do, and to have the results tested and evaluated, and changes made based on the results, just as any business has to do in order to succeed. And on that count, the Republicans have failed miserably. They call endlessly for smaller government (a really good idea), but the reality is the exact opposite: government spending (and our national debt) has seen its largest increases under Republican administrations. But the Democrats suffer from their own version of this failing. When a cherished program fails to achieve its promised results, they tend to throw more money at it and don't hold anyone accountable. (Of course, so do the Republicans, just with different programs. Each party spoils some of their children while calling for tough love for the others.)

To riff off George Lakoff's idea in Moral Politics that the two parties reflect different models of government as parent, we have a choice between an authoritarian parent who doesn't follow his own rules, and an over-indulgent parent who doesn't set enough limits. When will we get parents who steer a middle road between the two, supportive yet firm? (I loved Lakoff's book right up till the end, when he threw away his brilliant analysis by saying that studies show that the nurturant mother model is better than the stern father model. Any successful parent knows that you need both!)

Speaking of parenting, Buffett said a few words about that too:

Q: What is the best way to get kids off to the right start?

A: The most important job is parenting, and there is no rewind. Imagine if you could get one car of your choice, and get it for nothing. But the catch is you only get one. Well you will do everything and take the best care of it, reading the car manual, garaging it, etc. You should have the same mentality with your kids.

Actually, there's no rewind for anything in life. You only get one. So this is great advice for any situation. It reminds me of a line from a fabulous science-fiction book entitled The Last Dancer. The sentiment went something like this: "Most people say there's nothing worth dying for. But what you do every day is what you're dying for. Make it count."

I also liked Buffett on subprime and derivatives:

Q: Your views on new products such as derivatives, SIVs, etc. ?

A: There's utility in securitizations. But the problem is these have become complex and the originators and investors have been stretched so far in part in the whole process. "If you can't make money off the things you do understand, how do you expect to make money off the things you don't?"

This comment goes to the heart of some things I've been thinking about since the spring, when I wrote the Release 2.0 issue Web 2.0 and Wall Street, which we've just recently made available for free download. Web 2.0 and financial markets have a lot in common. Both are highly networked information markets driven by "collective intelligence", with a lot of money at stake. But financial markets have been around a lot longer, and are much bigger and more mature, so I wondered if they might give us insight into possible futures for the Web 2.0 economy.

As we build collective intelligence applications, which are the heart of Web 2.0, we need to make sure that their inner workings remain open and transparent, or we may fall into the same trap that ended up bedeviling Wall Street in this past year, in which no one understood any longer just how the machine they'd built was going to perform, and the Golem was out of control.

Fortune interview with Saul Griffith

Fortune has a very nice interview with Saul Griffith (see previous Radar profile), which, for the first time, discloses a bit about what his company Makani Power, is up to:

"Its plans are closely held, but anyone looking for clues should see Griffith tearing up San Francisco Bay, sailboat racing with catamarans powered by giant kites. 'We can outrun anything on the water,' he says."

and elsewhere, in the body of the interview, Saul says:

"We're still in the research phase, looking at high-altitude wind energy, and meaning above the typical 300-foot height of normal wind turbines."

The interview also has some nice tidbits of somewhat unconventional entrepreneurial advice:

Learn to live cheaply. Learn to live like an animal. One thing we had going for us is we all spent a lot of time in grad school, and long periods of grad school teach you how to live well on a low budget. That's good training for becoming entrepreneurs. It's easier to have a high-risk tolerance when you know where the dumpsters with free food are. Also, I definitely think you need to focus on a specific project in the market that you're going after....

We boot-strapped old-fashioned style. We slept in workshops, ate cheaply, and financed ourselves through consulting and other work while we nurtured our own sets of projects. As we "grew up" we realized that our own projects needed more funding and more focus. At that point we were ready to take venture funding and other financing sources to grow new companies from the technologies we underwrote ourselves at Squid Labs.

(Having enjoyed some of the fruits of said dumpster diving, I can attest to the fact that Saul wasn't kidding about finding sources of free food. Saul's friend Tim Anderson, whom I refer to as the homeless multimillionaire, is the master of dumpster diving, even though he no longer needs to do so.)

There's also a nice little bit about the origins of howtoons:

When I was in grad school I came across these compelling books published near the turn of the last century with titles like The Boy Mechanic that taught children how to make gliders, and bows and arrows, and all sorts of cool things. But these books are not really transferable to the modern age because their instructions are like, 'Find two eight-foot lengths of straight-grain spruce and four 12-inch strips of leather thong.' Hard to find at Home Depot. So there seemed to be an opportunity for me to find analogous modern materials like soda bottles and bicycle inner tubes and chop sticks and show step-by-step how to build things like the Infamous Marshmallow Gun. The underlying philosophy is that it's critically important in this technological age to teach kids to see the world for what it can be, not for what it is, to have them question why they can't make the world better by experimenting, and to teach them not have a fear of the physical world. That failure is fun, and that the physical world is a really cool computer game if you want it to be.

Speaking of Howtoons, the book is out, and apparently doing very well. I just checked, and it's currently ranked 211 on Amazon. Saul told me it hit a rank of 50 twice, once when it was first released and all the existing fans bought it, and a second time when he appeared on the Martha Stewart show last week. According to Morris Foner's analysis correlating Amazon rank to actual sales (which is reasonably consistent with our own experience), these figures would indicate that the book is selling between 50 and 100 copies a day on Amazon alone. A good sign that our engineering culture isn't dead yet!

Tribute to honor Jim Gray on May 31st, 2008 at UC Berkeley

A tribute to honor Jim Gray will be held on May 31st, 2008 at UC Berkeley. The general session is open to all, followed by a technical session reviewing a small fraction of Jim's lasting contributions. Registration is required to attend the technical session.

General Session Program 9:00am - 10:30am, Zellerbach Hall

• Opening Remarks - Joe Hellerstein
• A Tribute, Not a Memorial: Understanding Ambiguous Loss - Pauline Boss
• The Search Effort - Mike Olson
• Jim's Impact on Berkeley - Mike Harrison
• Jim as a Mentor: Colleagues - Pat Helland
• Jim as a Mentor: Faculty and Students - Ed Lazowska
• Why Jim Got the Turing Award - Mike Stonebraker
• Jim's Contributions to Industry I - David Vaskevitch
• Jim's Contributions to Industry II - Rick Rashid

Technical Session Program 11:00am - 5:30pm, Wheeler Hall (Registration is required)

• IBM/Transaction Processing - Bruce Lindsay
• Tandem/Fault Tolerance -
• Development & Effect of TPC/A Benchmark - David DeWitt
• DEC, Architecture, Memex and More - Gordon Bell
• Writing the Transaction Processing book: "Is There Life After Transaction Processing?" - Andreas Reuter
• The Adventure in Russia and the Terra Server - Tom Barclay
• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey - Alex Szalay
• World Wide Telescope Project - Curtis Wong
• Undersea Data Collection & Sharing - Jim Bellingham

Sun's counter-attack on NetApp and the defense of free software...

Jonathan Schwartz is treating NetApp's lawsuit over ZFS as an attack on free software. He posted his position and plan for counter-attack to his blog:

Their objectives were clear - number one, they'd like us to unfree ZFS, to retract it from the free software community. Which reflects a common misconception among proprietary companies - that you can unfree, free. You cannot.

Second, they want us to limit ZFS's allowable field of use to computers - and to forbid its use in storage devices. Which is quizzical to say the least - in our view, computers are storage devices, and vice versa [...] . So that, too, is an impractical solution.

We're left with the following: we're unwilling to retract innovation from the free software community, and we can't tolerate an encumbrance that limits ZFS's value - to our customers, the community at large, or Sun's shareholders. [...]

So later this week, we're going to use our defensive portfolio to respond to Network Appliance, filing a comprehensive reciprocal suit. As a part of this suit, we are requesting a permanent injunction to remove all of their filer products from the marketplace, and are examining the original NFS license - on which Network Appliance was started. By opting to litigate vs. innovate, they are disrupting their customers and employees across the world.

In addition to seeking the removal of their products from the marketplace, we will be going after sizable monetary damages. And I am committing that Sun will donate half of those proceeds to the leading institutions promoting free software and patent reform (in specific, The Software Freedom Law Center and the Peer to Patent initiative), and to the legal defense of free software innovators. We will continue to fund the aggressive reexamination of spurious patents used against the community (which we've been doing behind the scenes on behalf of several open source innovators). Whatever's left over will fuel a venture fund fostering innovation in the free software community.

And on that note, I want to thank the free software advocates from across the world who've offered expert testimony, and reams of prior art to defend ZFS, and the community of which Sun's a part. Please rest assured we will use this opportunity to highlight the futility of using software patents to forestall competition - in the commercial marketplace, and among the free community.

You can read the back-story here:

• Free Advice for the Litigious...
• On Patent Trolling: "Thank you Network Appliance"

Technorati Tags: IP, jonathan.schwartz, lawsuit, netapp, opensource, patents, sun, ZFS