The Newest Garrett · 27 words posted 02/16/2007 08:09 AM

Our first child, a boy, arrived five hours ago in Washington, DC. I’ll be offline for a few days whilst studying the intricacies of burping and napping.

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Wall Street Journal finds social bookmarking sites follow a power law curve · 129 words posted 02/14/2007 05:04 PM

The Wall Street Journal reports on the Wizards of buzz behind social sites like Digg and Reddit and finds that a few influential users generate a hugely disproportionate share of the content (via).

Although the words power law distribution don’t appear in the article, that’s precisely what the WSJ has uncovered: a small number of highly linked tastemakers are the hubs at the center of a scale-free network. Blogs are a classic example of the power law distribution at work: for every Gruber and kottke there’s hundreds of, uh, me.

See:

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Nicholas Lemann on Citizen Journalism · 612 words posted 08/03/2006 04:17 PM

Nicholas Lemann has posted Amateur Hour, a lengthy rebuttal of the idea that blogging can be equated with journalism. I don’t agree with everything he says, but the article is thoughtful and worth reading.

In a nutshell, Mr. Lemann argues that the phenomenon of “citizen journalism” is over-hyped (duh); and that real journalism may be distinguished from blogging in large part because “real” journalists have access to those in power and the resources to report stories of breadth and nuance for a duration exceeding self-funded bloggers. Finally Mr. Lemann claims that bloggers tend to narrowcast and can’t possibly reach across “the usual bounds of geography and class”; this last assertion is especially rich coming from The New Yorker, for gosh sakes.

Dismissing narrowcasting out of hand misses the point. Let’s look at a real life example: the dust-up between John Gruber of Daring Fireball and Brian Krebs of the Washington Post over an alleged WiFi security hole in MacBooks, with follow up here and here. Krebs’ reporting on the security issue sucks.

It’s not entirely his fault though: specific, thorough, and accurate technical reporting is hard to get right, and the difficulty is compounded by writing on a deadline for a general audience. But that’s the point: Mr. Gruber doesn’t have to make concessions to audience or calendar; his brand of writing—delightful, verbose, detailed, technically accurate, and occasionally tendentious—should shame most technical reporters in the mainstream media.

He’s not alone. Mr. Lemann offers a roster of pabulum: Barrista of Bloomfield Avenue, Backfence.com. This prose apparently won an award:

Among the many definitions of “hero” given in The American Heritage Dictionary is “A person noted for special achievement in a particular field.” Reston is a community of creative people, so it seems only right that our heroes should be paragons of creativity. Therefore, I’m nominating Reston musician and freelance writer, Ralph Lee Smith for the post of “Local Hero, Creative Category.”

Well.

If Mr. Lemann’s point is that most citizen journalism is written in a folksy style best consumed in rocking chairs by invalids, he’s probably right. But the same can be said for traditional media.

Here’s a better sample of real citizen journalism: Argentina on Two Steaks a Day, which compares favorably to any travel writing on Argentina the New York Times has published recently:

The classic beginner’s mistake in Argentina is to neglect the first steak of the day. You will be tempted to just peck at it or even skip it altogether, rationalizing that you need to save yourself for the much larger steak later that night. But this is a false economy, like refusing to drink water in the early parts of a marathon.

Mr. Lemann does have his finger on one vital point though: mainstream journalists have better access to the powerful than do citizen journalists. But that’s not the fault of the citizen journalist. When I caught Apple phoning home via iTunes earlier this year (and this was original reporting, not an opinion piece), Apple refused to respond to my queries and nearly shut the story down by asserting, anonymously, to a mainstream outlet that “Apple doesn’t do that.” (Apple eventually changed its behavior as a direct response to the story).

The New Yorker, or the Times, or The Atlantic, or any one of the innumerable arborescent pamphlets may yet produce the definitive debunking of citizen journalism and the value of blogging; Amateur Hour is not it.

~~~

Incidentally, Mr. Lemann is author an exceptional book on the African-American Diaspora: The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America. You can buy it from Amazon to support this site. Citizen journalists gotta eat.

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Accessing Gmail via T-Mobile t-zones · 227 words posted 07/26/2006 10:51 PM

I got a Motorola PEBL today and the first thing I did was set up Gmail access. I’ll post the steps here to get them into google. (This is nothing new; Gmail Mobile is covered here and here and there, but I couldn’t find information pertaining to my particular plan).

Assuming you have the $5.99 t-zones plan, you have two options for checking gmail:

As Engadget points out, if you check your Gmail via WML you even get the benefit of viewing your attachments.

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The New York Times Cites Wikipedia · 76 words posted 05/08/2006 09:03 AM

In today’s Times, Paul Krugman writes (registration required):

A conspiracy theory, says Wikipedia, “attempts to explain the cause of an event as a secret, and often deceptive, plot by a covert alliance.” Claims that global warming is a hoax and that the liberal media are suppressing the good news from Iraq meet that definition.

Leaving aside the politics of the piece, is this the first time the Times has cited Wikipedia as a source of information?

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Jane Jacobs is Gone · 201 words posted 04/25/2006 02:05 PM

Jane Jacobs died today.

Her most famous book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, found a cult following among programmers because arguments about urban life are, in essence, arguments about networks. “Death and Life” is full of these arguments, some spot on, many debatable, but all worth considering. Her prescription for interesting city streets, for example: short, mixed-use blocks with frequent intersections. Think about the difference between Manhattan’s streets and avenues.

Here, her pithy take on privacy in cities:

Architectural and planning literature deals with privacy in terms of windows, overlooks, sight lines. The idea is that if no one from outside can peek into where you live—behold, privacy. This is simple-minded. Window privacy is the easiest commodity in the world to get. You just pull down the shades or adjust the blinds. The privacy of keeping one’s personal affairs to those selected to know them, and the privacy of having reasonable control over who shall make inroads on your time and when, are rare commodities in most of this world, however, and they have nothing to do with the orientation of windows.

Those words have aged well in the 45 years since she wrote them. I’m sorry she’s gone.

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A Simple Rule for Living a Happier and More Productive Life when Confronted with Potentially Objectionable Cartoons or Memes · 7 words posted 02/02/2006 10:05 AM

Don’t get offended on someone else’s behalf.

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Microsoft Cell Phone or MIT $100 Laptop? · 353 words posted 01/31/2006 11:14 AM

As the New York Times has reported, Microsoft may plan to make an end run around the MIT $100 laptop by creating a cell phone PC, with inputs/outputs for TV and keyboard:

Bill Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder and chairman, demonstrated a mockup of his proposed cellular PC at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month, and he mentioned it as a cheaper alternative to traditional PC’s and laptops during a public discussion here at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum.

Craig J. Mundie, Microsoft’s vice president and chief technology officer, said in an interview here that the company was still developing the idea, but that both he and Mr. Gates believed that cellphones were a better way than laptops to bring computing to the masses in developing nations. “Everyone is going to have a cellphone,” Mr. Mundie said, noting that in places where TV’s are already common, turning a phone into a computer could simply require adding a cheap adaptor and keyboard. Microsoft has not said how much those products would cost.

Which device is better? There’s a clear answer: both.

Development entrepreneurs, just like players in any marketplace, have to compete for mind-share and capital. Some aspects of the open-source laptop program will encourage substantial market distortions: in particular, the laptop’s consumers typically won’t pay for it. Instead, government and private funds will put the laptops in the hand of its end users. Lest one doubt about the effect of third party payers on efficiently allocating consumption of resources, look at the current state of the US health care system.

It’s a win-win situation if Microsoft’s entry into a market spurs the MIT program to lower its costs, expand its reach, and build a better product. And Microsoft may be on to something; cell phones in poor countries already meet many of the development goals that drive the distribution of laptops.

I’ve used this space for several years to highlight development projects in countries like Laos and Nepal. It’s not easy to get it right, but without a doubt: more players in this field are better than fewer.

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Lee Felsenstein on the $100 Laptop · 192 words posted 11/18/2005 10:51 AM

Lee Felsenstein, one of the primary forces behind the Remote Village IT Project in Laos, raises questions about the feasibility of MIT’s $100 Laptop. Felsenstein sees two classes of problems with the $100 Laptop plan: technical (underpowered laptops and insufficiently dense mesh networks) and structural (top-down planning and distribution).

The Jhai Foundation, chaired by Lee Thorn, has attempted to build and distribute rugged, low-cost computers designed by Lee Felsenstein. It’s hard to know how much of Felsenstein’s critique is sour grapes: the Jhai PC is nearly extinct, while in both ambition and press attention the $100 Laptop project easily eclipses the Remote Village IT project.

I’ve featured two interviews on the challenges developers face in getting low cost machines into the hands of people in developing countries:

From that small sample group, one might conclude that the following ingredients increase the chances of a successful developement project:

Whether the $100 Laptop project has drawn the same lessons from previous development work remains to be seen.

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Carpenters Level Widget on the new PowerBook · 77 words posted 09/30/2005 06:54 PM

According to Apple, new PowerBooks have a sudden motion sensor that detects motion in the event of a fall and quickly turns off your hard drive to prevent data loss.

I’ve felt strangely tempted to drop my PowerBook to test Apple’s claims, but thank goodness Pall Thayer has released the Carpenters Level—a Dashboard widget that shows the angle of tilt on your laptop (via Macworld).

And it works:

Pictured in the background: The Superficial. Because You’re Ugly.

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