“If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.”

No, that quote isn’t from President Bush’s press statement today.  And it’s certainly not from Harry Reid.

It’s Digg.com’s founder Kevin Rose, forecasting possible doom for his high-profile Web 2.0 site over its decision to rescind an earlier decision to pull all posts that featured an HD-DVD hack:

In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

The “bigger company” to which he refers is a video licensing authority that enforces copyrights on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs — the Advanced Access Content System consortium, which was working with the Motion Picture Association of America.  They sent cease and desist notes to other websites where the code was posted, including Google.  For a time yesterday, some of the sites complied.

Imagine a flood.  Imagine you want to stop the flood.  Imagine throwing seven pebbles into the flood and waiting for it to stop.

This from TG Daily:

Copies of the cease and desist letters started appearing on the web yesterday and as we’ve seen in so many previous cases it was “Game On!” for the hackers.  The processing key in its full hexadecimal glory  sprouted like a weed all over the Internet.  Users of popular websites like Digg and Slashdot thumbed their virtual noses at the MPAA by posting the key into the comments sections, often using decimal, binary and other permutations.  Some users have also been creative enough to make up a shopping list using the numbers, 9 oranges, 9 fruits, etc.

The leaking of the HD DVD processing key isn’t a complete doomsday for the high-definition movie industry because the key only affects some players and presumably the movie companies could push updates that would prevent copied movies from playing.

This might sound very familiar.  Some years back, when I was in PR, MPAA was a client, and our assignment was to support its litigation to stop spread of a DVD copy-protection code hack — the famous DeCSS.  Only a three or four sites existed then that would post the hack, but I was told there were kids walking around New York City with the hack code printed on their t-shirts.  Now…fuhgeddaboutit.

Imagine if you really wanted to stop this flood.  What would you use?  That’s what should  really worry us.  What kind of bill are the copyright owners’ lobbyists writing now to reflect this new world?

Mush From the Wimps*

"Mush from the Wimp" refers to a famous journalistic gaffe — a headline placed atop a Boston Globe editorial about President Jimmy Carter's 1980 economic plan, which was supposed to be replaced with "All Must Share the Burden."

What made this episode funny and memorable was that the editorial was supposed to be an endorsement of Carter's plan. The accidental headline gave up the game. The Globe's editorial board didn't think the Carter plan was any good, but they felt compelled to instruct their poor readers to support it.

The public intuitively recognizes there is a gap today between what supporters of a politician or political party really think and the elaborate bows of fealty to political correctness that they make in public. In my opinion, it's the key reason why both Republican and Democratic approval ratings are so low right now. People don't sense that the parties and their standard-bearers are committed to the things they claim to stand for.

In this morning's New York Times, columnist David Brooks gives a clue as to why this gap has grown so large. (You'll have to either buy the paper, pay the Times for its TimesSelect service, or trust me, because I can't link to it.) Brooks suggests that if the legacy parties didn't exist, our politics would be divided between a party of "populist nationalism," (PN) and a party of "progressive globalism" (PG)

Per Brooks, the PNs stand for: America and Americans first; conservative social values; generous social welfare; universal health care; and closed borders. They are against the war in Iraq, for the wall to keep illegal aliens out, against outsourcing, and against gay marriage.

The PGs stand for: Free markets and free trade; liberal social values; an aggressive but multilateral interventionist policy in foreign affairs; reform of entitlements. They are for the war in Iraq, against continued oil dependence, for strong international institutions, against restrictive immigration policies, and for a woman's right to choose.

The PNs are suspicious of all elites: Government, corporate and cultural. The PGs are suspicious of populists who think they can create an America that is militarily, economically and culturally a fortress.

Brooks' realignment isn't so neat and tidy in the real world, but it has a ring of truth. If nothing else, it explains why all our politicians, from George W. Bush, to Hillary Clinton, to John Kerry, to John McCain, all sound like mushy wimps nowadays, as they try to straddle both the PG and PN camps.

I saw Al Gore on Larry King the other night. He was there to discuss his global warming documentary, but then Larry reminded him of the famous debate on his program, in which Gore defended NAFTA against Ross Perot — and did it so effectively that Perot was discredited and NAFTA was passed.

This trip down memory lane made Gore palpably nervous. Free trade, a PG issue, is highly controversial among Democrats now. Gore might want Democratic votes again someday, and the pro-free-trade contingent is a distinct minority. (Global warming is also a PG issue, but that's partly because no one's seen a price tag yet.)

But this kind of thing happens all the time. A couple of weeks ago, the Bush Administration was supposedly pushing for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, a classic PN issue–and an issue PGs tend to dismiss. The vote was timed to coincide with several primary elections, including California's. Everyone knew it was going to lose. Bush spoke up for it on his Saturday radio speech, which no one listens to.

And, according to Newsweek, Bush wasn't entirely sincere:

Though Bush himself has publicly embraced the amendment, he never seemed to care enough to press the matter. One of his old friends told NEWSWEEK that same-sex marriage barely registers on the president's moral radar. "I think it was purely political. I don't think he gives a s–t about it. He never talks about this stuff," said the friend, who requested anonymity to discuss his private conversations with Bush.

(snip)

Whatever Bush's motivation, his actions aren't likely to quiet his critics. (Southern Baptist leader Richard) Land says he's happy Bush is speaking out, but he'd like to see signs of real commitment to the issue. "We know what a full-court press looks like when we see one," Land says.

Bush needed anti-gay marriage voters to get elected in 2000 and 2004, and he'll need them again to maintain Republican congressional majorities in 2006. But, for Bush, the significance of a GOP majority is to maintain support for the war in Iraq.  This unpopular war draws most of its remaining support from PG's, who are acutely sensitive to the global consequences of failure in Iraq, not PN's, who believe secure borders are the key to winning the war on terror, not  planting democracy in faraway countries. It's an arbitrary–and perhaps temporary–thing that the pro-war and anti-gay-marriage constituencies are in the same political party.

Bush is a little more open about his PG position on illegal immigration. The press has identified a split in Bush's party between the globalists and the nationalists on that issue. The Democrats, however, are also split on illegal immigration. Democratic PGs recoil at the idea of a wall between America and Mexico, and the cultural intolerance that such a wall implies. But many key Democratic voters are PNs, especially labor union members and African Americans, who tend to be less tolerant of this flood of workers willing to work for low wages.

On the war, on immigration, on social issues like gay marriage and abortion, both parties oversee constituencies that are divided on the hottest issues. As the parties zig and zag to please these different interest groups, more and more Americans are just letting go of politics altogether, and pressing for their goals in places where they don't hear mush: Churches, union halls, the streets, talk radio–and the Internet.

Joe Trippi and others have pointed out that, because of the Internet, the barriers to creating new political organizations to replace the existing parties are falling. Trippi sees the evolution of a "unity" party that transcends partisanship. But that idea–a third party "above politics"–might even be too traditional (see Perot, and in 1980, John Anderson). The coming realignment might happen more quickly and dramatically than anyone predicts, and it might divide us even more.

*Revised, 6/15/06, 3:30 p.m., 10:30 p.m.

This Property is Condemned

Jeff Jarvis today tells the story of Mattel shutting down its online American Girl club, and the grief this corporate decision has caused:

Companies don’t realize that starting a community is a commitment. You can’t get people to move in and hand over their time and attention and then just one day decide to close.

Mattel is shutting down its American Girl Club and our daughter is rightfully upset. She joined the community and made friends there and now Mattel is pulling up and leaving town. Because of the anonymity features of the community, this means that thousands of friendships are suddenly cut off; they communicate only through the club.

It's an interesting comment on our times. Marriages and contracts are made to be broken, but one dare not scuttle an online community.

A Jarvis commenter throws his support behind Mattel:

Perhaps third grade is a good time for a girl to start learning that there are friends, and there is business. Mattel is a business, and makes business decisions. It’s not nice, but it is reality. Networks of friends… will someone find the business model to make that good business? Mattel pulled the plug. It’s not a bad idea to know what the motivations are for our associations…networts, and friendships. It’s a lesson worth learning or beginning to learn anyway in third grade.

Icy!

When PR people tell their clients they "need to understand how to communicate and connect in a new environment in which you have little or no control," it's not just an airy concept. Once you've ceded control to your consumers, you can't just decide one day to — poof – take it back, without suffering damage to your reputation.

iDon’t Get It, part deux

From Boing-Boing, more news of iPod rebellion:

Tomorrow, activists in seven cities across the US will picket Apple Stores, handing out information about the dangers of the DRM (Digital Rights Management) hidden in Apple's iTunes. iTunes DRM may seem pretty innocuous at first, but every time you invest in an iTunes Store song, you make it more expensive to switch to an Apple competitor's product at any time in the future. You didn't have to abandon your CDs to switch to MP3s (in fact, the more CDs you owned, the better your MP3 experience was, since you could rip those CDs to seed your MP3 collection), but if you want to go from Apple's iTunes to a competing device, ever, you have to be prepared to abandon your whole investment.

Yes!

My wife has an iPod.  I don't.  If I buy a song on Rhapsody for my mp3 player, I can convert it to a iPod friendly format so she can put it on her iPod.  BUT: If she buys a song on Apple's iMusic, she can't convert it to another format so I can put it on my device.

I've already written about the advantages of being a non-iPod mp3 owner: That I can stream on my computer, or download onto my device, music from subscription services like Rhapsody, so long as I pay my monthly fee.  iMusic does not allow this. You can listen to a 30-second clip, that's it. Anything more you have to pay for. And, as this protest shows, you're paying for less than what you think. 

It's an interesting premise for a consumer-based protest activity.  Basically, the marching cry is:  "You're not all that!"  In fact, the Free Software Foundation calls its anti-iPod group "Defective By Design." But given Apple's arrogant, anti-consumer attitude about their highly profitable product, they deserve the fuss. 

Here's the protest sked.  I don't think my wife, who still likes her iPod, will be joining, and of course I don't need to.  But you might want to gather at 10 a.m. local time tomorrow, June 10th at:

Apple Store – 1 Stockton St., San Francisco, CA 94108

Apple Store – 679 N Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60611

Apple Store – 4702 NE University Village Pl, Seattle, WA 98105

Apple Store – 100 Cambridge Side Place, Cambridge, MA 02141

Apple Store – 767 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10153

Apple Store – 160 Walt Whitman Rd. Huntington Station, NY 11746h

Apple Store – 6121 West Park Blvd. Plano, TX 75093

Blogger with a Guitar

Palm smacks to the forehead: Of course! Neil Young, blogger.

Hasn't Neil always been a blogger? Haven't all his albums been spontaneous reflections of whatever's going through his head and happening in his life at the moment? The rap on Neil was that his recording techniques were often slipshod, that he had no filter, he released too many albums with too many bad songs drowning out the great ones. But that's been his aesthetic since 1970. Write it, record it, put it out.

I remember Rolling Stone's review of "After the Gold Rush," complaining Young hadn't spent enough time on it. From that 1970 review:

Neil Young devotees will probably spend the nest few weeks trying desperately to convince themselves that After the Gold Rush is good music. But they'll be kidding themselves. For despite the fact that the album contains some potentially first rate material, none of the songs here rise above the uniformly dull surface. In my listening, the problem appears to be that most of this music was simply not ready to be recorded at the time of the session. It needed time to mature. On the album the band never really gets behind the songs and Young himself has trouble singing many of them. Set before the buying public before it was done, this pie is only half-baked.

Time has proven their judgment on that classic album to be wrong, but a good many of his subsequent albums, which he approached in the same haphazard way, are terrible. So what?, Neil seemed to say. I can always write another one, and maybe it'll be better. He's hit the mark enough times that you're compelled to at least check out anything he does.

Neil Young also freely, merrily contradicts himself — especially about politics. He's about the only baby-boom era classic rocker who had the nerve to release a few songs over the years with almost jingoistic right-wing messages. He hates the Iraq war now, but in the post 9/11 "Let's Roll," he waved the bloody shirt.

You've got to turn on evil,
When it's coming after you,
You've gota face it down,
And when it tries to hide,
You've gota go in after it,
And never be denied,
Time is runnin' out,
Let's roll.

Long ago, Young embraced Ronald Reagan for a time. But he's also tacked way to the left many more times, as he does with the new music on "Living With War."

"Living With War" is an audio blog. If you delve into his web site you'll learn he wrote and recorded all its songs in just the past few weeks. At this writing you can't buy it, and you can't download it, but you can listen to it as an audio stream, so long as you're willing to hear it from the beginning. You can't skip tracks. Eventually it will appear in CD racks, but by that time it will be a souvenir. Its impact is being felt right now. Bloggers all over the world are invited to link to it. He wants his fans to hear it now, while its themes are still hot.

This is a real Marshall McLuhan moment. Up to now, the Internet has been seen as just another channel to present music. But "Living With War" is music for the Internet. I don't know if it's the first example, but given Neil's fame and huge international fan base, I predict it will have immense influence.

Return of the Drive-In

Springwise.com alerted its subscribers today to MobMov, short for Mobile Movie. From its website:

What is the Mobile Movie?
We are a grassroots movement aimed at bringing back the forgotten joy of the great American drive-in. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, what used to be a dark and decrepit warehouse wall springs to life with the sublime sights and sounds of a big screen movie. Best of all, the MobMov is free.

(snip)

Our goal in creating the MobMov was to create a true "drive-in" experience by enclosing the projector and an FM transmitter inside a car. Participants drive in to a parking lot, tune their radios, and watch their favorite flick from the comfort of their car. As far as we know, we're the first ones to attempt this on a public scale. We didn't create the term "Guerilla Drive-in", but we're the first to use it correctly.

This new approach is better for a variety of reasons. Drive-ins were popular originally because it was like having your own private cineplex – if you wanted privacy, you'd just roll up your windows. If you wanted to be part of a community, you'd roll them down, open your doors, maybe even walk around. Secondly, while a traditional GDI only operates in the summer, you can stay in your car with the heater running while participating in a mobmov. That's rain or shine folks and folketts.

Like everyone my age, I am blessed with several great drive-in movie memories. The first few movies I saw were in drive-ins: One Hundred and One Dalmations, which was appropriate for kids, and Hud, which most certainly was not. I recall scenes from both of these movies vividly–Cruella DeVille's green cigarette smoke and horrible fur lust; Patricia Neal driving up to Paul Newman in a convertible, with a strange knowing look in her eyes.

A few years later, an attractive teenage babysitter took us to the drive-in see the James Bond spoof Casino Royale, with its bevy of 1960s beauties like Ursula Andress and Daliah Lavi, and, well, I still really haven't recovered. The drive-in is such an iconic experience, countless great movie scenes have been set at one — for example American Graffitti and Rebel Without A Cause. Just the other night, I saw a drive-in destroyed in Twister.

The MobMov has a sign-up area that indicates there are showing from Huntsville, Alabama to Winnepeg, Manitoba, but the copy on the site only references showings in Berkeley.

Just People Talking

Jeff Jarvis' Buzz Machine continues to impress me. Jarvis is a blog-evangelist, without question, and his focus is always on the future. But he's not overly impressed with himself, nor does he pump up the blog phenomenon to be more than it really is. In a post yesterday, he reports that some of the early, innovative bloggers he admires have become disappointed in the form.

Specifically, Matt Welch, an early and much-admired blogger who now works on the editorial pages of the Los Angeles Times, might have set his expectations a bit too high when he started his blog shortly after 9/11 — which started a genre that was called "warblogging." Jarvis quotes Welch from a recent Reason essay:

“What do warbloggers have in common, that most pundits do not?” I enthused. “I’d say a yen for critical thinking, a sense of humor that actually translates into people laughing out loud, a willingness to engage (and encourage) readers, a hostility to the Culture War and other artifacts of the professionalized left-right split of the 1990s…a readiness to admit error [and] a sense of collegial yet brutal peer review.”

Man, was I wrong….

To which Jarvis replies:

I think the problem starts when people get big enough to think that they speak for others… just like newspaper editorial pages. The real blogger speaks only for himself or herself. It’s just people talking.

It's hard not to get excited when you're at the forefront of a new communications media, as Jarvis and Welch both were. But while bloggers serve as sources of news and opinion for their readers, what makes this media truly unique is the way communities form around them–communities of people talking.

That's why I don't understand bloggers who refuse to allow comments on their posts. Too many of the most popular bloggers, especially those associated with the right, apparently are repulsed by the inane and obscene chatter that fills up comment areas on left-wing blogs, and fear that the left-wingers will clog their sites with the same angry bleats.

So? Make rules.

My favorite site, DodgerThoughts, has rules. Jon Weisman won't tolerate any four-letter words, and if one commenter attacks another personally, the comments are removed. If you want to post, just play by those rules.

The site flourishes. On Easter Sunday, about 600 comments were posted before, during and after the day's game. The comments Jon gets are disproportionately witty, informed and interesting –and some of them are stupid. But I think a reverse Gresham's Law works on his site and others like it — the good comments drive out the bad. People like their online community, and work with the site's owner to protect the conversation space they've created. Commenters will state a certain comment is out of line even before Jon notices it. What's really fun to see is when some of the regulars gang up on a nasty interloper, and drive them into submission through clever mockery–like Cyrano de Bergerac.

Jarvis says the blog-conversation takes place across different blogs, and that's certainly true too. Some of the comment-less blogs do a lot of linking, and respond to what's been said about their own posts. Fair enough, but not a good reason to block comments. A blog without comments is an incomplete experience — like a movie without music.

Talk About Zen P.R.!**

I know I was going to shut up for most of April, but this is too interesting to overlook:

At first glance, the video looks like a typical 30-second car commercial: a shiny sport utility vehicle careers down a country road lined with sunflower fields, jaunty music playing in the background.

Then, white lettering appears on the screen: "$70 to fill up the tank, which will last less than 400 miles. Chevy Tahoe."

The commercial is the product of one of the advertising industry's latest trends: user-generated advertising. On March 13, Chevrolet introduced a Web site allowing visitors to take existing video clips and music, insert their own words and create a customized 30-second commercial for the 2007 Chevrolet Tahoe.

In theory, the company was hoping that visitors to its Web site would e-mail their own videos around the Web, generating interest for the Tahoe through what is known as viral marketing. By the measure of Chevrolet Tahoe videos circulating the blogosphere and the video-hosting Web sites like YouTube, that goal was achieved. But the videos that were circulated most widely like the commercial that attacked the S.U.V. for its gas mileage, may not be what Chevrolet had in mind.

Nor was the ad using a sweeping view of the Tahoe driving through a desert. "Our planet's oil is almost gone," it said. "You don't need G.P.S. to see where this road leads."

Youtube.com is full of examples of these user-generated Chevy Tahoe ads that attack the whole idea of Chevy Tahoes as responsible for global warming or imminent oil shortages. But they're not all environmental lectures. This one takes a Freudian perspective on the whole notion of conspicuous consumption, as does this one, albeit more crudely.

A couple of months ago, I wrote a post about the potential for a Maybelline cosmetics site to be hijacked by those who hated the product. It appeared to me that the Maybelline people had probably accounted for that possibility, and figured that since negative comments were going to be made anyway, why hide from them? Chevrolet's advertisers have apparently come to the same conclusion, according to the New York Times:

A spokeswoman for Chevrolet, Melisa Tezanos, said the company did not plan to shut down the anti-S.U.V. ads.

"We anticipated that there would be critical submissions," Ms. Tezanos said. "You do turn over your brand to the public, and we knew that we were going to get some bad with the good. But it's part of playing in this space."

Drew Neisser, the president and chief executive at Renegade Marketing, a New York agency specializing in nontraditional marketing that is part of Dentsu, said companies had such a strong desire for user-generated advertising that they were willing to accept the risks. "There's this gold rush fever about consumer-generated content," he said. "Everybody wants to have consumer-generated content, and Chevy Tahoe doesn't want to be left behind."

Is it just that they're "willing to accept the risks?" Or are marketers finally deciding to participate in the real conversations about their products, the ones that say "yes, but…?"

Wouldn't it be great if political ads were opened up this way? Where, instead of shoving a message down your throat, a candidate would allow voters to express themselves about their platforms? And why are only advertisers of consumer products taking this alleged "risk?" Wouldn't a smart PR campaign also make room for critics and for, y'know, reality?*

I'm confident the people at Chevrolet are aware that some consumers will never buy an SUV strictly due to environmental concerns, and that others are conflicted and would appreciate some respect being given to their hesitancy. Letting customers joke about it shows the company is in touch. Going a step further would be to say, "We hear you" and respond in a way that treats these concerns thoughfully.

*(The best example is, of course, Amazon. If you put your product on Amazon, customers can review it. Many people, before buying a product, will check to see if it's on Amazon — not only to buy it there, but to see what other consumers think. Consumer reviews on Amazon have been decisive in many purchases I have made, both positively and negatively. Marketers obviously think it's worth "the risks" of having their products trashed in exchange for having them sold through Amazon. So why shouldn't you take the next step, and let consumers have their say on your own site…and then get into a conversation with them?)

**A few additions and edits made on 4/5/06.

A Few Updates

Time to catch breath. I've blogged on far more topics than I expected to when I started this up. I have received so many kind comments, both on- and off-line. I intend to continue it indefinitely, because I love writing it.

Some of the things I've blogged about deserve another quick look:

Salute to Ray Davies was prompted by the upcoming release of the longtime Kinks' leader's first solo album. I expressed nervousness about whether the CD would be good. The late Kinks albums were pretty weak.

Well, the album, "Other People's Lives" is out and it's not merely good, it's great from beginning to end. It manages to capture everything fans love about Ray, and yet sound quite different from anything he's done before. That might be because, as he explains in the liner notes, his Kinks songs were written in the studio, which suggests they were written to order, on deadline, with an expensive clock running, perhaps a little slapdash. This time, Davies labored his songs. He risked overthinking, but the extra effort pays off. I can't tell you what my favorite song is yet. There might be a "Waterloo Sunset"-level masterpiece among them.

Some will miss that shambling Kinks style. Ray's brother Dave was a guitarist of little technique and a lot of attitude. The skilled session musicians on the new one, aided by digital recording technology, come up with a much different sound — more rhythmic, more soulful, more American. Davies' vocals are strong and, as in his best Kinks music, very human. "Other People's Lives" is not to be missed.

I asked "Will There Be Flowers?" in Borrego Springs this March. I didn't make it out there, but apparently there is only a limited bloom due to the late-arriving rainfall. Things are a little more colorful in Death Valley. North of Los Angeles, the California Poppy Reserve is flourishing, and probably worth a trip. Check this site for desert wildflowers sightings throughout the desert southwest.

Hee Seop Choi is on the Red Sox's disabled list. His Dodger replacement, Nomar Garciaparra, looks like he's heading there, too, along with another new Dodger Codger, Kenny Lofton. To paraphrase Earl Weaver, Ned Colletti just got a lot dumber, and a lot closer to his injury snake-bit predecessor, Paul DePodesta.

The Tunguska meteor theory of global warming hasn't picked up much traction, although one of my commenters endorsed it. I'm not sure if I even endorse it! But I like asking questions.

Nobody's bought the former Knight-Ridder newspapers that McClatchy put up for sale, but bids are coming in, including a combined bid from the Newspaper Guild and Ron Burkle's L.A.-based Yucaipa investment firm.

Blogging turns out to be a good way to connect with old friends and forgotten enthusiasms. I wrote about the history of Elliot Mintz, spokesman for Paris Hilton and, before that, John Lennon, and got lots of great memories of 60s and 70s radio lore in the comments area. This blog has put my family and me back in touch with several long-lost friends — what could be more gratifying? People my age are starting to finally live their dreams, to rethink their careers, and to cherish the good health of their loved ones. It's also been wonderful to hear from other bloggers whose work I greatly respect, and from my fellow denizens of the greatest site on the whole Internet, Dodger Thoughts. Your kind words about this site mean so much to me.

Back in December, I started this blog with a somewhat dramatic, breathless recounting of the last three weeks of my last job — including a ferry ride across an icy lake that struck me as symbolic of my situation. In that post, I mentioned that, shortly after I lost that job, I was indicted. Now, 15 months later, I finally get my trial, starting tomorrow.

I've gotten so many wonderful notes of support and good wishes, and I'm so grateful for them. Many of these notes say something to the effect of, "You must be so stressed out." Well, the adrenaline is certainly pumping; I'm highly alert. But, no, I'm not stressed out. I'm a fortunate person. I have an amazing wife, a wonderful son, a brilliant and supportive family, and so many great friends. And, I believe our justice system ultimately will be fair.

During the trial, which will last about four weeks, blogging here will be light. There might be a guest comment or two. I'm not going to use this site to address my case while it is going on. If I do post, it will be the usual stuff I write about. Whatever that is.

The Blogosphere Pushes the Media to Ponder Change

Tom Glocer, CEO of Reuters, published an op-ed in the Financial Times yesterday that represents another educated guess, this time from a traditional news content provider, of what the future holds.

Last year, Glocer’s crystal ball told him the media needs to expect its consumers want to be their own editors of multiple streams of content–news “my way.” Now, Glocer says, the pace of change has accelerated. We don’t just want to read the news we want to read. We want to create our own content, using the mainstream media’s content as one element:

(W)e have seen an explosion of creativity. Conservative estimates suggest 80,000 new blogging sites are launched every week. David Miliband will soon be the first British cabinet minister to have his own blog site.

But it is not just bloggers – it is citizen journalists armed with their 1.3 megapixel camera phones, people “mashing” together music and images to create new music videos, kids making their own movies and posting them on sites such as Stupidvideos.com or MySpace.com. In fact, Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of MySpace.com, one of the most popular of the online forums, is probably the best indication yet that home-made content has made it to the boardroom decision-makers.

What can the mainstream media add to this outburst of creativity? Glocer suggests three things:

• “(M)edia companies need to be ’seeders of clouds.’ To have access to high-value new content, we need to attract a community around us. To achieve that we have to produce high-quality content ourselves, then display it and let people interact with it. If you attract an audience to your content and build a brand, people will want to join your community. This is as true for traditional “letters to the editor” as for MySpace.com.”
• “(W)e need to be ‘the provider of tools.’ This means promoting open standards and interoperability, which will allow a diverse set of consumer-creators to combine disparate types of content.”
• “(W)e must improve on our skills as the ‘filter and editor.’ Media have always had these functions. The world will always need editing: consumers place value in others making decisions about what is good and what is not.”

He’s on the right track, but I have concerns about each of these suggestions.

True, if every news story and opinion piece on (the example I’ll use throughout) the LA Times‘ website was open to comments, you might get some engaging discussions going. But there are good and bad online communities. I’m thinking of one site that covers LA politics whose reader comments are heavily weighted toward anonymous accusations and rumor-mongering. Some bloggers are also pseudonymous, but their “brand” must be accountable or they will lose audience. Not so with commenters, who can freely hit-and-run. I’ve heard of comment boards where “trolls” assume two different fake identities and argue with each other, just to whip everyone else into a frenzy. That gets boring. So, if Glocer wants media outlets to create a community around them, community members need to accept some level of accountability.

A better idea might be to open the doors to citizen journalists (CJ’s) who would take responsibility for what they write under their own names. Adding a corps of CJ’s to the Times‘ website who would file their own reports as well as commenting on the staff’s work could give their site significantly greater depth and reach. How well does the Times even pretend to cover the Inland Empire, Orange County or the South Bay? CJ’s could fill in the many gaps in the Times‘ coverage. How well do Times’ reporters understand the industries they cover? I got particularly exercised a few weeks ago about an LAX story that betrayed little knowledge of the airline industry. This town is full of aviation, aerospace and defense specialists. Wouldn’t one of them make a great CJ?

As for having the media outlets become “providers of tools,” my question would be, what value do you add? WordPress lets me blog here for free, and they make it easy. If I want to post a photo, I can, or I can insert a link to pictures on Flickr. I haven’t messed with video, but if I did, I could put up my content on Youtube.com, and point you toward it. Within a year or two, I bet WordPress or its competitors will incorporate the ability to download or link to video directly into their templates.

To be sure, the state-of-the-art will change. Perhaps the media can run ahead of the curve to find new and better tools that aren’t already available. But if you owned stock in the Tribune Co., would you feel comfortable if the Times invested money in developing or picking the next generation of tools? Maybe.

The “filter and editor” role that Glocer suggests throws up a yellow flag to me. It’s precisely because so many intelligent people no longer trust the media to be a fair, comprehensive or accurate “filter and editor” that political blogs get so many hits. (For a good example, read the item “Cherry Picking” from this column).

I’m not entirely happy about this. The perception of an unfair media has right wingers reading only right wing sites that apply a right wing filter. Likewise, the left-wing sites. Their most loyal readers live in ideological bubbles now. Will these readers suddenly start trusting the LA Times to tell them, “these blogs are good, those blogs are bad?” It’s analogous to criticism of government industrial policy. Government is not qualified to pick winners and losers among competing technologies. Newspapers might be qualified to pick winners and losers among blogs, but they aren’t trusted with that role.

The fact is, the blogosphere doesn’t need any favors from the mainstream media, except to get out of the way. This wheel’s on fire, it’s rolling down the road and no one going to stop it or co-opt it. However, the media can learn from what works in the blogosphere, and make their products more valuable by creatively integrating part of what has been developed out on the frontiers.

(A major hat tip to Jeff Jarvis’ Buzz Machine, for pointing to this op-ed, which he heard first as a speech Glocer gave at the Online Publishers’ Association.)

Lomita’s Great Awakening

Lomita, the little town in between Torrance, Rancho Palos Verdes, Harbor City and Carson — the town that has a lot of signs so you don’t forget you’re in Lomita — is the home of a new coffeehouse, Awakenings.

It might seem at first that Awakenings’ owners, Julie and Joseph Olson, have come a little late to the coffeehouse trend. Starbucks’ CEO Howard Schultz has expounded for years about making his giant chain a “third place” between home and work. Internet access is pretty standard; although Awakenings’ is free while Starbucks and Coffee Bean are hot spots only for paid-up wi-fi subscribers.

Open-mike nights and Saturday night jazz, blues and rock are scarce, but not unknown in the South Bay — Sacred Grounds in San Pedro, Coffee Cartel in Redondo are two places you can expect some indie-style entertainment on a Saturday night.

Awakenings, however, does add two things to the formula: Kids and God.

Starbucks is not kid-friendly (which doesn’t prevent a lot of South Bay moms from letting their little prodigies run wild in them) because too many breakable items are within a toddler’s reach. But according to the Daily Breeze story this morning, Awakenings has “separate kiddie room where children can play with toys or doodle, so long as their latte-sipping moms and dads supervise.” As for God:

…come Sunday mornings, spirituality is brewed.

That’s right, Joseph and Julie Olson are also pastors of the multiethnic church known as Vineyard Xtreme, which holds its weekly services at Awakenings.

But the Olsons stop short of billing Awakenings as a religious coffeehouse. It’s a venue for all sorts of performances and events, they say, including the Sunday service.

Nevertheless, Julie Olson acknowledges there’s a thin line to be walked as a businesswoman and pastor.

“Sometimes religion can polarize, and it has polarized in this country,” she said. “I don’t want anyone who comes in here to feel uncomfortable or alienated.”

Even more unique than all of this is foot traffic in Lomita. City officials quoted in the story were excited that something “new age” has come to their little village. “New age” is not the phrase that generally comes to mind when envisioning Lomita.

New Holiday Tradition: Feathers Fly

What to do on Valentine's Day if you aren't in a relationship? Send yourself flowers? A flash-mob organized in San Francisco offered this alternative:

Roughly 1,000 people drawn by internet postings and word-of-mouth converged near San Francisco's Ferry Building on Tuesday night for a half-hour pillow fight.

The underground event erupted at 6 p.m. in the center of Justin Herman Plaza with a mass rush of shrieking, laughing combatants – many of whom arrived with pillows concealed in shopping bags, backpacks and the like.

Within minutes, pillows were arcing, feathers were flying, and by the time the Ferry Building's clock tower clanged the half-hour, the plaza and hundreds of people were covered in white down that gave the scene a wintry lustre.

"I haven't giggled so hard for a really long time,'' said San Francisco resident Amy Davis, 35, an office manager for a construction company that manufactures stone facades for buildings.

Davis – who said she has been unlucky in love and was grateful for an antidote to Valentine's Day — lasted for most of the battle, but pulled out toward the end when she had her fill of breathing feathers.

Like many others, Davis learned of the pillow fight from a friend who directed her to a web site – in her case it was Wikipedia – that gave details about a planned flash mob pillow fight on Valentine's Day in San Francisco.

Apparently, last night's combat was only the latest in what is becoming a worldwide phenomenon: Pillow Fight Club. As in the "Fight Club" movie, Pillow Fight Club has rules (according to Wikipedia):

1. Tell everyone about Pillow Fight Club.
2. Tell everyone about Pillow Fight Club.
3. Turn up at the arranged Pillow Fight Club venue with pillow hidden in a bag.
4. At the exact given time pull out pillow and fight.
5. You cannot fight anyone without a pillow (unless they want it).
6. Nothing heavy can be hidden in the pillows

In addition, you are strongly encouraged to bring a feather-filled pillow. A fiber-filled pillow doesn't cut it.

The San Francisco Chronicle's SFgate.com has photos. Here's one.

San Francisco, like Los Angeles, has a lot of people in it who are separated from family roots; especially single, young people. Couldn't you see pillow fights become an alternative way to celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter… ?

UPDATE: More pictures here from SF blogger Laughing Squid, who participated and said afterward:

Man, I now have feathers in really strange places.