Posts by Tim

Google buys a defunct paper mill, which it’s turning into a data center. I can’t help but think of the missed opportunities:

1. Google Blank: DIY Search and Document Creation.
2. Okay, that was too cute. How about Google Paper Services for Enterprise? Google sells you its Apps suite, tech support, AND the paper you print your documents on. And everything you photocopy ends up in a Google search engine.
3. Google File: (im)personal archive services.
4. Google is going to print its own money.
5. New team-building exercise: all Google employees to collaborate on a five-act play with at least 500 speaking parts.
6. Google Airplanes.
7. Googlegami.
8. Google Trading Cards: collect all your top searches!
9. Google Direct Mail: We store your documents, email, and contacts, AND will send your letters for you!

So many possibilities.

It turns out that there is more money in the inner city than we thought:

In its 2004 report on the city of Cleveland, Social Compact detected a residential population that was 24 percent higher than 2000 Census figures indicated. In studying the new immigrant hub of Santa Ana, Calif., for a 2006 report on that city’s disadvantaged communities, Social Compact found an average household income 40 percent larger than that captured in the 2000 Census — a discrepancy Social Compact says can be partially explained by a thriving informal economy many traditional economic models don’t capture.

In an interview with Miller-McCune.com, Social Compact CEO John Talmage attributed the difference in the numbers to his organization’s mining of data from a variety of sources — including tax rolls, utility accounts and credit companies — rather than relying on computer models based on incomplete or unreliable data. The approach tends to emphasize the economic opportunity — rather than the poverty and deficiency — to be found in low-income neighborhoods.

America’s inner cities, according to ICIC’s Web site, represent $122 billion worth of retail purchasing power.

Read more…

Dan Visel at if:book, in a post titled “Wikipedia Before Wikipedia,” looks at the Trictionary, a grass-roots trilingual dictionary (English, Spanish, and Chinese) created between 1978 and 1981 by high school students on New York’s Lower East Side.

Here’s some text (from Tom MacArthur’s 1986 book Worlds of Reference):

The compilation was done, as The New Yorker reports (10 May 1982) “by the spare-time energy of some 150 young people from the neighborhood,” aged between 10 and 15, two afternoons a week over three years. New York is the multilingual city par excellence, in which, as the report points out, “some of its citizens live in a kind of linguistic isolation, islanded in their languages”. The Trictionary was an effort to do something about that kind of isolation and separateness.

Read more…

From The Atlantic Monthly:

Can we not devise a system of liberal education which shall find its foundations in the best things of the here and now? Literature and art are all about us; science and faith offer their daily contributions; history is in the making to-day; industry pours forth its wares; and children, no less than adults, are sharing in the dynamic activities of contemporary social life. Not in the things of the past, but in those of the present, should liberal education find its beginnings as well as its results. Fortified by the resources, interest, and insight thus obtained, it can be made to embrace areas of culture and power which are relatively remote and abstract.

David Snedden, “What Of Liberal Education?,” January 1912.

Read more…

So, this morning, during the Snarkmasters’ sequifortnightly transcontinental gathering over email, coffee, cold pad thai, and cinnamon swirls, the conversation turned to Walt Whitman, and I was reminded of the really quite lovely American Experience documentary on Whitman that was broadcast around a year ago.

Well, as it happens, the whole thing is available to watch online, including this marvelous segment about Whitman’s experience as a young newspaperman in antebellum New York City.

I love Ed Folsom’s account of Whitman’s experience of “urban affection”:

Whitman feels the power of the city of strangers. He’s looking at a city of strangers and how something we might now call urban affection begins to develop. How do you come to care for people that you have never seen before and that you may never see again?

Every day we encounter people, eyes make contact, we brush by people, physically come into contact with them, and may never see them again.

But Whitman’s notebooks at this time are filled with images, just jottings, of these people, what they’re doing, what they look like, what their names are. ‘What is this person doing? What’s the activity that defines this person?

“If I were doing that activity that person would be me. If I were wandering the other way, rather than this way, that person could be me. That could be me. That could be me. What is it that separates any of us?’

Folsom co-edits The Walt Whitman Archive, a fantastic resource with complete e-texts, photographic images of all of the alternate editions, biographies, scholarly essays, you name it.

The only real downside to the online presentation of the Whitman Documentary (and it’s a real downer) is 1) there’s no way to watch the whole documentary straight through and 2) the videos can only be displayed as teeny-tiny Quicktime/WMA pop-ups. Come on, PBS! Broadcast TV has finally figured out how to rock the computer screen in fullscreen HD — so has YouTube, Comedy Central, and, um, everybody. The people demand that their public digital television be done up right.

Many of you have probably read John Siracusa’s insightful, entertaining, and long anecdotal history of e-books at Ars Technica. Still, with Amazon set to make a big Kindle-related announcement early next week, it seems like a good time to highlight this sample:

In 2003, Apple started selling music for the iPod through its iTunes music store. Apple sold audio books as well, through a partnership with Audible. Perhaps unknowingly, Apple had just positioned itself perfectly for e-book domination.

It was all happening right before our eyes. First the device, already far past the minimum threshold for screen size and legibility, and rapidly gaining market penetration. Then the digital distribution channel, accessed via a desktop application used by every iPod owner. Then the deals with content owners

So, if you’re anywhere near Facebook these days, chances are good that you’ve seen the “25 Things” meme. The descriptions and titles vary, but the basic idea is that you have to write twenty-five things about yourself (no restrictions on what they are or how you use them) and then tag twenty-five of your friends. Once tagged, you’re expected to write your own list and tag your friend back.

My little corner of Facebook has generally been resistant to these kind of digital chain letters. But this one took off. Why?

Working hypothesis: Facebook and its ilk are all about self-disclosure and keeping tabs on your friends. But they all generally proceed according to fixed categories — favorite music, movies, books, usw. — or through the structures of particular applications, groups, or wall-to-wall communication. The fact that the twenty-five things prompt doesn‘t define what you write about, that it asks you to be creative within a very broad (but finite) constraint, is an irresistable invitation. And invariably, nobody uses their twenty-five things post to say, “I love Animal Collective.” It’s all about filling in the gaps in the schema.

Likewise, the meme actually forces you to identify twenty-five friends whom you’d like to tag in the post. You’re restrained by having to tag the person who tagged you, but otherwise, you have to do what Facebook and its ilk virtually never ask you to do — to CHOOSE among your friends the subset whom you’d most like to know more about. Effectively, it asks you to designate superfriends.

So, in the context of a social network where you’re able to know a lot of small things about a lot of people, we have an emergent structure that allows you to know a little bit more about a little bit fewer people. Because what your friends write about is still minutiae — little stories from childhood, their favorite meal, a secret phobia — but it’s slightly more unexpected, slightly more meaningful minutiae. And through that, it gets at just a little slice of what has made social networking surprisingly fun in the first place.

It reminds me a little bit of the early days of Friendster — when you needed to be invited by a friend, where “wall entries” were “testimonials” where you could unabashedly praise your friends or make up bizarre, impossible stories — personal and public, sincere and self-ironized all at once.

Howard Weaver brings it:

People who wish some billionaire would endow newsrooms so they don’t have to change — you know who you are — have the musty smell of the mausoleum all about them. They move through twilight, walking stiffly toward a setting sun. They will find no pot of gold there.

Yet the digitalistas who suggest those newsrooms can be readily duplicated or replaced act like willful children, unmindful that substance, craft and capacity matter in the real world, that no group of 10,000 monkeys has ever written Shakespeare, that 98 of the 100 most important pieces of public service journalism last year flowed from professionals in the newsrooms they recklessly disregard.

This is a fool’s game. It’s time for grown-ups to intervene, to end the debate and move beyond the empty calories of nostalgia and the masturbatory fantasies of a theory-based future. A long-deceased, much missed colleague often referred to people with mature judgment and a steady hand by saying, “She knows where babies come from.” Those are the folks we need on the case now.

Really, what else is there to say? Howard’s style here reminds me of Ezra Pound at his caustic, humanistic best. And yes, that’s a compliment.

Dan Visel at if:book has a super entry/exhibition on postal art from Ray Johnson to Ben Greenman:

Johnson ran what he called the New York Correspondence School; he used the word correspondence not simply for its reference to communication but for the way he made associations with words and graphic elements in his collages… Membership was seemingly capricious and full of contradictions: members included institutions and the dead; the school committed suicide publicly at least once; and it was at best the most constant member of a baffling parade of clubs and organizations that Johnson ran, including, at random, Buddha University, the Deadpan Club, the Odilon Redon Fan Club, the Nancy Sinatra Fan Club…

“The whole idea of the Correspondence School,” Johnson told Richard Bernstein in an interview with Andy Warhol’s Interview in August, 1972 “is to receive and dispense with these bits of information, because they all refer to something else. It’s just a way of having a conversation or exchange, a kind of social intercourse.” Emblematic of Johnson’s work might be his Book about Death, begun in 1963, which consisted of thirteen printed pages of collaged images and text, which were mailed individually to Clive Phillpot, chief librarian at the Museum of Modern Art, and others. (A few pages are reproduced below.) The Book about Death was discorporate, as befits a book about death; more than being unbound, Johnson made sure that none of his readers received a complete set of the pages of the book. The book could only be assembled and read in toto by the correspondents working in concert: it was a book that demanded active participation in its reading. The content as well as the form of the Book about Death request active participation: the names of his correspondents feature prominently in it, but understanding of what Johnson was doing with those names requires some knowledge of the people who had those names.

One of my favorite recent literature/history/theory books is Bernhard Siegert’s Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System. Visel doesn’t quite say this, but it’s clear that despite Johnson’s humanist intents, he was using the technology of the mails in a way that was pretty resolutely anti-nostalgic. (In his fake-manifesto “Personism,” Frank O’Hara says that he once realized while he was writing a poem for someone that he could just as easily pick up the telephone and call them — you might say that Johnson realized he could just as easily send them a cheap postcard.)

Greenman, on the other hand, with his de luxe edition “book” collecting accordioned pamphlets and postcards, is working in a different register, where similar gestures connote a backwards-looking resistance to both electronic communication and industrial book design. But (and here Visel is spot on) both foreground the notion that literature doesn’t just have a reader but a recipient — a correspondent, so to speak — whose contact with the author begins with (but isn’t necessarily limited to) buying or reading or thinking about or talking about the book.

The Keynesian theory of government stimulus rests on the idea that economies in recessions don’t suffer from a real loss of wealth (like a famine that wipes out your crop) but an excess of economic capacity (when your crop rots in the silo because you can’t get it to the market). Keynes contrasted the two ideas by referring to “a crisis of poverty” versus “a crisis of abundance.” Money spent by the government, in addition to creating new real wealth in the form of infrastructure or whatever, works by utilizing this unused capacity — especially the human capital, by putting people to work.

But underutilized capacity isn’t just people who are out of work — it’s the goods rotting in our warehouses. The recent GDP dip was saved from staggering free-fall only by a quirk in the way these goods are measured:

The actual decline in the gross domestic product — at a 3.8 percent annual rate — fell short of the 5 to 6 percent that most economists had expected for the fourth quarter. But that was because consumption collapsed so quickly that goods piled up in inventory, unsold but counted as part of the nation