William Carleton, Counselor @ Law

More Morozov

This morning on the back porch with a cup of coffee I read "The Meme Hustler: Tim O'Reilly's crazy talk," an article by Evgeny Morozov in a magazine called "The Baffler" (I might subscribe to it, just based on the fun of the Morozov piece).

A few pages into it, I found myself wondering, "why would Morozov pay so much attention to a PR shrill? Won't it just encourage him?"

But deeper into the piece, as I recognized that the article pursues essentially the same theme as, and could serve as an addtional chapter in, Morozov's new book (to read my thoughts on that book, click here), I settled down. The Morozov thesis is one that bears repitition and iterative applications. And I feel in need of the corrective.

I myself am not so stupid as to subscribe to the O'Reilly RSS feed or follow him on Twitter. But I am stupid enough, even yet, to follow all sorts of people on Twitter who are meme hustling. I wish I had the courage to stop following all of them.

Anyway, the story of the day gets better. We walked to SODO and saw the Sounders kick the butts of the San Jose team. Lamar Nagle, the Man from Federal Way, scored two goals; Mauro Rosales scored on a wicked free kick; and Obafemi Martins came on in the second half and scored. All the Sounders had great games. San Jose is not a bad team.

And we walked home, and stopped at the neighborhood branch of the library and borrowed some DVDs. No Netflix, no Amazon, no internet. Throw in sunshine and it feels like living!

That said, I did order some cigars online this morning, early enough that they will ship today and hopefully make the meeting midweek I intend them for.

The difference between comments and a comment thread

A recent, random opinion piece in the New York Times has suggested that rude tone, alone, in reader comments, can skew how readers interpret the main posting.

The hook of the story by two professors from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Dominique Brossard and Dietram A. Scheufele, is: the Internet first made the reading experience wonderful; and then reader comments ruined it.

I have several reactions. I will try not to be rude.

What publications are they reading?

If Fred Wilson's blog, then they would have to know that reader comments are at least half the reason to read. And that's not to imply that Fred's posts would not be worthy of digesting without the trails of comments that always follow; it's recognition that Fred often, knowing that readers will weigh in, angles the post to facilitate the discussion.

Not every post on this blog attracts comments, but the community here is of the highest quality. When a comment thread gets going here - a recent example is the post about assignment clauses in the context of reverse triangular merger - this community learns, and collectively we share a wisdom that is indexed on the web and a resource to those researching the subject.

I think the main thing the authors of the New York Times piece are missing, not accounting for, is the difference between "comments," the solo riffs by which individual readers sound off or grandstand, and comment threads, the presence of which signals both that readers feel at home in the forum and that they value the comments of others as much as their own.

It's also true that singular comments on this blog often surpass in breadth, depth and value the very post being commented upon! Jeremy Freeland, Doug Cornelius, and Mark Anderson come to mind...

So my message to the University of Wisconsin, Madison professors is the same one I have for my kids: be selective about who you hang out with! Or as my Mom would put it, "you are the company you keep."

Photo: M1K3Y / Flickr.

Setting up my own Posterous site

Unlike half my family, I don't know how to  code.

I do know how to cobble blog posts together in simple HTML. And I can set up and get virtual servers running on Amazon Web Services.

Combining my simple HTML skills, lessons learned from Dave Winer's EC2 for Poets, AWS help pages on how to configure an S3 bucket to function like a website, and Editor for Chrome by Bryan Lynn, I have built it a handful of simple, handmade websites running on S3.

Some examples:

• a list of links related to the JOBS Act;
• a list of favorite Seattle restaurants; and
• a brand-free personal profile.

As you can see, my site building skills dead end at stylesheets.

I know the concept is rudimentary: set up an interlocking file structure and have individual pages pull style information from a single file. I can do this to pull pictures from a photo file, but haven't succeeded at attempts to import styles from a stylesheet.

Well, until Posterous shuttered.

The official announcement came only Friday last, but the vitality had gone out of the Posterous platform some time ago, and the availability of a Posterous export tool signaled your stuff was not safe for long on posterous.com.

I used the Posterous export tool a few weeks ago and intended only to archive the information behind an art collection site I had used Posterous for.

But the export didn't yield simple text files and pictures; instead, it appeared to replicate or mimic the html documents and file structure of my art collection site within Posterous. And the exported files included a CSS file!

It took me some fussing to fix a few links, but I was able to set up the right file hierarchy on S3, and now host my own art collection site, spiffed out in the distinctive Posterous style of presentation.

That was thrilling!

I've since messed around with the formatting of each exported page, but have been careful to preserve the file structure as Posterous exported it. When I set up my next homemade site that has a .css file, I'll likely use my former Posterous site as a model.

Analysis packaged like news

There's something deceptive about yesterday's Washington Post story, "Tech, telecom giants take sides as FCC proposes large public WiFi networks."

What's deceptive is a news-like lead-in, when the piece is actually a considered analysis of potential indirect consequences of FCC proposals that have been in play for months, or longer.

Here's the lead paragraph of the story by Cecelia Kang:

"The federal government wants to create super WiFi networks across the nation, so powerful and broad in reach that consumers could use them to make calls or surf the Internet without paying a cellphone bill every month."

Breathtaking lead. I read that yesterday and hopped over to fcc.gov, figuring there must be a release, study, proposal, some reference to a plan that, if implemented, would suddenly make moot so many local debates about municipalities offering free wi-fi.

But there's nothing on the FCC site to correspond to the point Kang's story drives.

Twenty-four hours later, it's clearer that the item is not news at all.

As currently presented on the Washington Post site, the story is accompanied by a video. If you click the video, a less misleading headline shows up:  "FCC offers path to free Internet access." Gone, here, is the implication that the federal government means to set up national wi-fi networks. Added, too, is fairer warning that the piece is analytic.

Photo: Lance Nishihira / Flickr.

EDGAR survey

Today's brief post is by way of follow-up to a post last month touching on the merits and limits of the SEC's online storehouse of company filings, EDGAR.

I visited EDGAR this morning in search of any endorsement contract that any company might have filed, as a material contract, between it and Lance Armstrong. Thought it might be interesting to see what kind of rep and indemnity provisions such a deal might involve, now that the stories are flying about insurance companies and sponsors that want their money back and/or damages.

No luck on that search.

But the session prompted a request that I take a survey to rate the utility of the EDGAR site. And I did so. Pictured is an excerpt of the ratings I submitted.

Actually, the survey may have been seeking feedback on http://sec.gov more generally, though I answered it pretty much with EDGAR in mind. Which is fair: EDGAR is its own thing, having to do with disclosures.

EDGAR is necessarily backward looking, whereas the utility of the rest of the sec.gov domain is forward looking, to be consulted for clues on changing policy.

But the feedback for either "site" is the same: highly useful; very poorly organized.

It should be possible for searching to be as easy and as satisfying as that of Google Scholar. Instead, for EDGAR, you have to have the skills of an experience paralegal to use it effectively. And for the SEC site linking to policy initiative and proposed rules, you have to be lucky or bookmark important pages when you trip over them.

To be fair, there is some full text search capability on EDGAR that I should try to make more use of.

But it's hard not to expect that the information at http://sec.gov, backward and forward looking both, be as accessible as Google makes the wider web.

DIY book reviews

The NYTimes reports that Amazon is changing out how it filters book reviews.

The changes seem to be directed at curbing reviews that are posted by family and friends. Amazon knows a lot about how people are related, broadly speaking. So I'll bet their new filters are effective.

But some reviewers and those reviewed are upset to find previously posted reviews no longer on Amazon's site.

The objections ring hollow to me.

I'm not shy about suggesting that a private network can become so important to public discourse, it should be run as a public commons. For instance, I've advocated in the past that the Gates Foundation should buy Twitter and run it as a global utility.

But Amazon has always been a store and has always been understood as such. The social aspects of the site - telling you what you might like to buy - are all centered around making additional sales. That Amazon does so in a way that makes shopping easier, without seeming to "hard sell," speaks well of how the company strikes the balance.

Getting rid of shill reviews is likely a decision being made in the interest of keeping the right tone on the site and maximizing sales.

People who want to be sure to avoid the loss of their reviews should post them elsewhere.

The situation reminds me of something Eric Goldman said on his and Venkat Balasubramani's blog the other day: "There's only one way for users to truly control the fate of their online digital assets, and that's to host all of their content on their own website."

Some smart, influential people already post book reviews on their own website. Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and the aforementioned Gates Foundation, does this.

I post book reviews under the "books" category on this blog, and also on the system the Seattle Public Library uses. (Here's a sample, a thread on the new Ian McEwan novel, Sweet Tooth, which I also posted about, twice, on this blog.)

A problem, of course, with having reviews disaggregated across the web is that they can be hard to find. But this need not be that case, not for long. An interim solution might be some kind of River 2 aggregator, pulling RSS feeds of individual book review sites or pages from across the web.

Image: Wikimedia.

What I like about the WSJ's "The Accelerators" content

If you haven't seen it yet, check out what the Wall Street Journal has going on online with a series they are calling "The Accelerators."

It looks like the WSJ is commissioning well written, punchy and thematic content from well-known entrepreneurs, angels and VCs, about the startup experience.

What I like most about it is that it is, first and foremost, content. Not pictures, not tiles, not embedded mulitmedia, nothing to pin or swipe or stick in your virtual ear. I don't know about you, but I've lost my tolerance for such bullshit. The window dressing either gets in the way of the actual entertainment value of content (the very best way to be entertained as a reader is to be engaged), or else is a sign that in fact no one is really home and there is no content there.

Editorial care is obviously given to the headlines. The headlines are easily tweeted and supply the surveyer with the theme of the given post.

The posts I've read so far are short, punchy, with voice, and worth reading.

How to organize content that is not book content, not magazine content, that is tough, and I don't think we as a culture have figured it out. The Accelerators seems to commit to organizing the building library by author (as pictured here). I think that works and is reader-friendly, particularly as most of the audience for a service like this is going to be familiar with many of the names. And as you trip across a voice you find engaging and valuable, you can easily scan for additional posts from that person.