Got an inadvertent up-close view into the reality of the internet experience for millions of people today, when I received a fairly typical spam message from a smoking cessation program. But rather than the usual spam-feeding mechanisms used by spammers, they had sent their message out through a Mailman listserve, to which I and thousands of others had been subscribed against our will.

For mysterious/bizarre reasons, the spammer had changed the default Reply-To header from “reply to sender” to “reply to list,” which meant that every screaming unsub request* was re-broadcast to thousands. Apparently not realizing it was a listserve, dozens of recipients thought the unsub requests were directed to them. The thread quickly snowballed into a cavalcade of confusion and name-calling — the blind leading the blind in a flurry of misunderstanding.

*Nevermind the fact that unsub instructions were clearly written at the bottom of each message, people tried the old stand-bys — write in all caps and scream in the message body to be released from the madness… or else!!!

Something perverse in me made me stay subbed for much of the day, just to see how this little Lord of the Flies experiment would play out. Notes: Thousands of people have no idea that responding to a listserve will broadcast your response to all recipients. Repeated “But I don’t even smoke!” messages reveal an apparently deep-seated belief that spam is somehow targeted at individuals rather than carpet-bombed. Each recipient seemed to think that each unsub demand was directed to them - which reveals how many people have never been on a listserve before, have absolutely no idea what they’re experiencing. Everyone threatens to rat the spammer out to their own ISP (”If you don’t stop, I’ll tell AOL on you!”). Even after hundreds of repetitions, people are not able to infer that all replies are being refelected to all — which made me wonder how people get through the day to begin with.

Pasted below - a dozen or so examples of today’s madness.
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Resurrected from archives of yore: Web Design Horror Stories from circa dot-com-boom times. Mostly a chronicle of painful developer/client interactions, e.g.

early club design client:
“more fonts. use more fonts!”
“ummm… how many do you want?”
“how many do you have?”

Interesting how many designers are balking/laughing at clients’ requesting things deemed impossible or incredibly difficult at the time, which are now easy or commonplace. Seems like a lot of the frustration comes from geeks having already become web-comfortable, with sales and marketing types struggling to replicate print and TV experiences online.

The best one that I ever heard from a potential client: “You know that game Sim City? Can you make my web site do that?”

At a playground under the BART tracks, Amy and Miles came across dozens of pieces of honeycomb and hundreds of dead bees, a beehive fallen from high above (apparently after having been sprayed). Amy was marveling at how perfect the hexagons were, such a feat of nature.

Miles: “These bees are so talented, they could make honeycomb for the circus. [Pause]. If they weren’t so dead.”

…

Lately Miles has been announcing that his poop looks like various letters of the alphabet. Last night he yelled from the bathroom “I made the letter T!” Amy asked him if he thought he could poop his way through the whole alphabet.

Miles bragged: “I’m such a talented pooper, I could poop for the circus!”

While you were busy not paying attention, the world changed: “Buyers of digital music are purchasing singles over albums by a margin of 19 to 1.” That stat could be a smidge misleading, since an album may consist of, say, 12 songs, and only get counted as a single purchase, but still, “Individual songs account for roughly two-thirds of all music sales volume in the United States.”

We all know that the theory was that digital downloads would let people only purchase the songs they liked, rather than the entire album, but I had no idea the tide had shifted this far already. Me, I’ve bought exactly one single from iTMS in the past few years - a track from Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers, which I needed for a performance piece we were prepping for a friend’s wedding.
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After the space shuttle Columbia burned up in the atmosphere, all media was focused on the loss. We barely heard about the three astronauts stranded on the International Space Station, who not only lost seven close friends in the disaster, but also their ride home.

… without gravity, your tears don’t fall, so these great shimmering pools of water filled his eyes and he’d have to knock them away and his tears are all around him in the weightlessness … and then immediately thereafter they begin to realize, “Well, I guess we’ve lost our ride home.”

Facing the prospect of spending two years aboard the station, they ultimately went home aboard a 40-year-old Russian Soyuz pod, which was strapped to the outside of the ISS like a lifeboat. After a harrowing voyage in which rockets misfired by half a second, throwing them hundreds of miles off course, they landed in the deep tundra of Kazhakstan (home of Borat!). Presumed dead and lost by the rest of humanity, they had hours to meditate and rejoice in the green grass of planet earth before being discovered.

The fascinating story is told by Christopher Jones, NASA’s Director for Solar System Exploration, to Moira Gunn for Tech Nation. The bit about levitating tears is about 10′30″ in.

Discovery’s Planet Earth series is so beautiful, I think it make my head a-splode. Just speechless. One second of footage of an orca striking a seal, blown out in time on high-speed cam to 47 seconds, like nothing you’ve ever seen. Birds of Paradise dancing so surreal they can’t be from this planet. Hyenas tracking impalas with a group intelligence like ESP. Throw away everything you thought you knew about nature programming. This raises the bar so high…

Jonathan Letham, author of the amazing Fortress of Solitude (one of very few novels I’ve read in the past decade), has come up with an interesting mechanism for handling the film rights to his latest book. Rights will go to the filmmaker who presents the best proposal. That person will pay Lethem two percent of the film’s budget, and will allow the rights to the novel to return to the public domain after five years.

It’s an arrangement that strikes a balance between guaranteeing some income for the content creator while simultaneously steering clear of the usual Disney-fied 75-year copyright stranglehold. The work becomes at once a vehicle for profit and a brick in the public conversation. “It’s based on the recognition that all works of art are, in a sense, a collaboration between artists and the culture at large.”

What Lethem is recognizing here is that the copyright debate doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing, that there’s a huge middle ground that can satisfy everyone.

It becomes one of those issues like, “If you don’t favor wiretapping in the U.S., you must be for the terrorists.” What I’m seeking to explore is that incredibly fertile middle ground where people control some rights and gain meaningful benefits from those controls, and yet contribute to a healthy public domain and systematically relinquish, or have relinquished for them, meaningless controls on culture that impoverish the public domain.

Some good riffing on how Led Zeppelin takes an uncopyrighted foundation (the blues), adds to it, and slaps copyright on it. Same for Brian Eno / David Byrne with their audio montage stuff. Taking it farther, if the blues was a patented form, Zep could never have existed. Loved these quotes:

“…participating in culture by making stuff is inherently a gift transaction and a commodity transaction.”

“If you make stuff, it is not yours to command its destiny in the world.”

Licensing models like Lethem’s don’t help for the 99% of artists who never see the light of day. But I like to hope that creative approaches to licensing like this one will become more common as artists acknowledge that what they do both borrows from and adds to the public dialog, and that all media needs to be quotable / reusable.

Miles and I made a rocketship a few weekends ago. It was all his idea - he saw a pile of cardboard on the curb and said “Daddy let’s make a rocket!” Outta nowhere. Lots of cutting and taping and gluing and painting (yes, much of the paint ended up on his legs and on the deck). Had to go online to remind myself how to make a cone (just cut out 1/4 pie from a disc and it’ll curve up nicely). A brave knight’s helmet will service in a pinch as a space helmet. Great weekend project. Of course it’s been sitting in the garage since that day…. but it’s the fun of making that matters.

Yesterday was his “four and a half-est birthday,” which called for the making of a cake covered in green frosting grass. Make make make. That’s all we do around here lately. And I love that. He still talks about last year’s Maker Faire, and we’re pumped to go again this May.

Gearing up for another big week at the J-School, as we compress our semester-long multimedia training program into a single week for mid-career journalists from around the country. As always, lunches and evenings are filled with great speakers, which we’ll be webcasting live. If you’re in the Berkeley area, the conversations are open to the public - come on by!

Featured speakers are Joe Howry, Anthony Plascencia, Colleen Cason, Tom Kisken, Ventura County Star; Lisa Stone, Blog Her; Kevin Sites, Yahoo!; Sean Connelley and Katy Newton, Oakland Tribune; Rob Curley, Washingtonpost. Newsweek Interactive; Matt McAlister, Yahoo!

The Kevin Sites presentation last year was riveting, and Curley is a must-see for anyone interested in pushing old-school media properties in new directions.

A few blocks from my hotel in Austin, Tears of Joy hot sauce shack - literally hundreds of kinds of jalapeno/habanero-based fluids. Trying to choose a few to take home is nearly impossible - you can taste about a dozen of them in advance, but for the rest, it’s pretty much a matter of judging a sauce by its cover. And there are a lot of tantalizing covers. Ended up having eight flavahs shipped home, and dived in last night.

So far orange pulp habanero is the stand-out favorite, pumpkin chipotle running a close second. But hard to argue with good old Cholula. Now the challenge is to get through all eight bottles before next year’s south-by.

MIT invention transforms ambient sounds into music. Dig those lovely jack hammers!

Thanks John Kevin Fabiani

Kentucky Fried Fish for Lent? The KFC corporation has contacted the Vatican, asking the Pope to bless its new Fish Snacker sandwich, thinking it will be popular among Catholics during Lent. If His Miter-ness grants the blessing, it will bind one of the world’s largest religions to one of the world’s largest fast food establishments, in an unholy union straight outta Compton. And the beginning of a trend that will result in churches handing out fast food menus during service, with sanctified items specially marked with circles and arrows and Google Maps mashups with driving directions to participating franchises. Corporate kickbacks could generate enough revenue to replace tithing.

Interesting slideshow from aish.com demonstrating examples of photographic fraud (either Photoshop work or placement of props) in the mainstream media. These examples are mostly stacked against Israel, but the problem is becoming endemic in photojournalism.

Thanks Ken Light

Back in the 70s, you could hardly walk into a strip mall or pizza joint without encountering a “biorhythm machine.” The theory is that we all have these cyclical waves running through our lives for physical, emotional, and intellectual well-being. The waves start at birth, and, running on slightly different frequencies, go through periods of both synchronous harmony and chaotic intersection. As a 10-year-old, I was obsessed with these things, and would drop a quarter every time I saw one, walking home with a freshly minted sheet of green/white striped printer paper sporting a dot-matrix layout of my life cycles for the next few months.

Lately feeling like I’d reached an all-time low - exhausted, sick, stressed, imbalanced, under-excercised, just out of sorts in every way. Then it hit me - my biorhythms must be off! Haven’t seen one of those machines around for years, but knew there had to be a software version out there somewhere. Struck gold with the Bedrock BioRhythms Dashboard widget. Tapped in my birthday and was treated to - horrors! - stark evidence that biorhythms are total bull. Something is wrong - this can’t be my chart! My waveforms are peaking right now, should be top of my game. But reality is the opposite. How can I never have realized this as a child? How could I have been so naive? How could my parents have allowed me to go on wasting my money like that?

Guess this explains why you never see the machines around anymore.

Man, what a rip.

Our clothers dryer crapped out last week, and the washer’s not doing so well either. Repairs expensive, time to replace them both. Home Depot offering a honkin’ pile of rebates, and has the unit Consumer Reports likes. Once there, learned that if we open a Home Depot credit card, we could get an additional 10% off. No penalties, what’s not to like?

Read recently that financial institutions cannot legally require you to provide a social security number, so decided to see what would happen if I entered all zeroes in that field. The application was spit back in seconds. Explained my position to the employee, who rang up credit central at HD. The guy I talked to wasted no time in invoking … wait for it … The Patriot Act in defense of the requirement. He didn’t have specifics, but claimed that the act required them to store this information, and that a separate taxpayer ID would not suffice.

I was incredulous. Either Home Depot is hiding behind the war on terror for capitalistic reasons, or the Patriotic Act is more frightening than I thought. I suspected the latter, but realized I wasn’t going to get anywhere in this round, so, with a four-year-old growing quickly impatient, forked over my SS# and took the discount. Tonight did a bit of research and found this at askquestions.org:

If you’d just like to open a bank account or engage in another banking transaction, can a bank force you to provide your social security number? How about fingerprinting you? Are either of these strictly required by law? Not exactly – although if you do not wish to provide your social security number you will have to obtain an alternate taxpayer identification number.

So if their reading of the act is correct, Home Depot was not within their rights to require this information. A little late now, but am curious just how hard a person would have to fight to get Home Depot credit approval without a valid social.

Guitar solos are self-indulgent. The bridge is always boring. Verses are repetitive. Everyone knows four minutes is way too long for a song. What we really want is the hook - the essence. Give me a meaty riff, and ditch the rest. Radio SASS (Short Attention Span System) “creative editing” to the rescue.

Short Attention Span System takes the playlist and musically condenses songs to their essence. Through time compression, you get the memorable heart of each song, with an average length of aproximately two minutes with NO self indulgent guitar solos, NO long intros, NO repetition of choruses again and again. Radio returns to the snappy song length of the 1960s.

In other words, everything long is bad. Because time is an inconvenience, and self-absorbed artists with no respect for your fast-paced lifestyle are wasting it. Ummm… ewwww? So what happens to Hot Rats? Cosmic Charlie? Fool in the Rain? Mothership Connection? Born Under Punches?

But look on the bright side — nobody cares!

Radio SASS starts out with the memorable beginning, followed by the best verses, best chorus and then wraps it up just as you remember … Will listeners object? The answer is no. Several focus groups conducted by Harker Research show that most people don’t even notice.

Also interesting here is the name of the service: “Short Attention Span System.” Since saying that someone has a short attention span is generally considered a bit derogatory, this represents a sea change. SASS must think that people are not only aware of the fact that they have short attention spans, but also don’t think of that as a bad thing. The marketing here is aimed at the heart of what has traditionally been considered a human weakness, or a negative aspect of media snack culture. Kind of like selling potato chips under the name “Obesity Chips.”

And, oh yeah - the new protocol is patented. You can patent butchery?

Images from in and around Austin, TX at SXSW 2007. Segway tour, gee-tars, parties, state capitol, glowing beer, hairy-est rainstorm ever, robots made fuzzy by phone cam.

Index of SXSW panel coverage on this site.

Will Wright Keynote Speech

Amazing, amazing keynote. Half an hour exploring concepts of linear and interactive narrative, followed by half hour demo of evolutionary / generative computer game Spore.

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Loose notes from SXSW 2007 panel: Combinatorial Media as Self-Expression

Sean Uberoi Kelly, eTonal
Lili Cheng, Microsoft Research
Alice Marwick, New York University
Rick Webb, Archenemy

Discussion about the zillion ways multiple media are being mashed up and re-presented, or being presented in formats that make it super-easy for consumers to remix. Implications for creativity, copyright, fun.

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Loose notes from SXSW 2007 panel The Future of the Book: Dead or Alive?

Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive
Terri Ducay, Cheskin
Eileen Gittins, Blurb
Peter Merholz, Adaptive Path

What is happening to the traditional publishing industry? How long before there’s no room in the economy for paper books? And what happened to the push for e-book readers in the 90s - why haven’t they taken off? Just in time publishing is taking off, and there’s still room for blockbuster books, but what about all of the barely profitable middle ground books?

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Loose notes from SXSW 2007 panel: Open Content, Remix Culture and the Sharing Economy: Rights, Ownership and Getting Paid

Eric Steuer, Creative Commons
Glenn Otis Brown, YouTube
John Buckman, Magnatune
Laurie Racine, Eyespot and DotSub
Max Schorr, GOOD Magazine

What is the business model of the Creative Commons? How is the rise of open content and alternative licensing models playing out in terms of authors getting paid?

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Loose notes from SXSW 2007 keynote interview with veteran journalist Dan Rather.

Rather has been hitting these key points for a while now, starting to sound familiar, but still his experience and wisdom are powerful. Interview was awkward. Interviewer Jane Hamsher was no match for him — seemed amateurish.

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Loose notes from SXSW 2007 panel Why Marketers Need To Work With People Media

Tony Conrad, Sphere
John Battelle, Federated Media Publishing
Toni Schneider Automattic Inc

Discussion of new ways to monetize the blogosphere, to measure attention streams rather than just page impressions (especially as things like Ajax are making CPM metrics less reliable). Relationship between marketers and the blogosphere.

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Loose notes from SXSW 2007 panel The Future of the Online Magazine.

Rufus Griscom CEO, Nerve Media
Sean Mills The Onion
Ricky Van Veen Editor, CollegeHumor.com
Laurel Touby CEO & Founder, mediabistro.com
Joan Walsh Editor in Chief, Salon.com

This is the kind of panel we host at the J-School often; was surprised to see it so widely attended at this geek conf. The focus ended up being not so much on the future as on the present, but still interesting.

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Loose notes from SXSW 2007 session: The 4-Hour Work Week with Timothy Ferriss, author, The 4-Hour Work Week

If you work a 9-5, your boss isn’t going to let you get away with a 4-hour work week no matter how productive you become. But this session was packed with great advice for trimming inessential, repetitive and drop-able stuff from your daily schedule. Ferriss actually has accomplished the 4-hour week. Doubtful that you or I can, but some great advice for streamlining here. Room packed with people who, like me, feel like they can never get out from behind the 8-ball.

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