Scrapbook materials take up many aisles. It’s the rage. Scrapbooking appears to be a sort of assembly art, not that creative, it doesn’t seem to me. There are a lot of pre-made objects you can buy and then you assemble them, bringing your own taste or whimsy. I’m sure there must be a certain satisfaction in it. I’m also sure the craze couldn’t exist without products to buy.

Then as I wandered around, I noticed it’s not just scrapbooks. It seems like many—not saying most—crafts consist of buying things that somebody else made and putting them together. Can I buy a chain and a plastic teardrop crystal, put one on the other, and claim that I make jewelry?

I remember painting a preformed plaster cat at summer Bible school when I was about 8 and thinking “I didn’t make this.” But I think it’s getting worse. Is it part of the same trend as toys that entertain kids but don’t allow for much imagination or doing on the kid’s part?

The rubbery iPad case/folder is a little tippy for sitting the device upright, and you do want to take your iPad to bed to watch Netflix. I tried a beanbag pillow on my first day with my little prize a month ago, and darned if I’m not still using it.

One nice thing: you can rotate it to something other than a 90-degree angle. If you’re not a bed watcher or reader you won’t understand the sovereign importance of this feature.

Another discovery in the what-will-I-use-this-thing-for department: the iPad is perfect for reading long magazine articles online. I’ve found that I tend to abandon nice meaty stories if they go on for pages and pages; I’ve even been known to *gasp!* buy a print magazine if there’s a particular long article I want to luxuriate in. Not anymore.

Later: Brome made a stand with Legos.

Nice how MSNBC now lets you clip a clip to show just the part you’re talking about. And nice how they expose their text promo in the embed code so you can strip it off if you can read plain HTML.

Later: Bob Herbert on Saturday:

There is nothing new to us about this. Haven’t we just seen how the giant financial firms almost destroyed the American economy? Wasn’t it just a few weeks before this hideous Deepwater Horizon disaster that a devastating mine explosion in West Virginia — at a mine run by a company with its own hideous safety record — killed 29 coal miners and ripped the heart out of yet another hard-working local community?

And: Frank Rich on June 5:

BP’s recklessness is just the latest variation on a story we know by heart. The company’s heedless disregard of risk and lack of safeguards at Deepwater Horizon are all too reminiscent of the failures at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and A.I.G., where the richly rewarded top executives often didn’t even understand the toxic financial products that would pollute and nearly topple the nation’s economy. BP’s reliance on bought-off politicians and lax, industry-captured regulators at the M.M.S. mirrors Wall Street’s cozy relationship with its indulgent overseers at the S.E.C., Federal Reserve and New York Fed — not to mention Massey Energy’s dependence on somnolent supervision from the Mine Safety and Health Administration.

People want to hear big indignant statements from him about the Gulf oil gusher because we’re indignant about it and we want him to represent us. But it’s posturing; we know that and he knows it. If he’s like me, he rolls his eyes when he encounters posturing by other people and he would rather not do the thing he scorns.

What he will do, because he’s expected to, is rail against the delay and fret about the damage. A better approach would be what Dan Froomkin suggests: seize the moment to talk about regulation, but not just about oil. He could chance it and be brave, generalize it—tying in mining and the banks, maybe even the Citizens United case, not minding what opponents might say about bashing business. It’s been building to this point since the Reagan years and now big business has run fully amuck.

So I put an ad unit on my blog this morning, kept refreshing the page, looking at different posts and watched how it slowly learned what’s on my site. Probably cut-rate cr*** c*** and b**kr**y plans are shown regardless of the content because there are a lot of advertisers wanting to push that stuff out, but I had the added magnet of a long post about my experience with a particular company and another about f******** reform. Over the course of an hour they seemed to be acting as a beacon for more and more ads about youknowwhat even on unrelated single-post pages. Do you think that’s possible?

Now I’ve closed the posts. See if helps. I liked seeing the Washington Post banner on my blog. Why can’t more of the ads be like that? If they didn’t make you feel like such a slime merchant the ads would be even more used, don’t you think? Or don’t most small publishers care? I don’t know, but I care. See how long I can stand it. I’ll let you know.

Update: Credit-related ads are largely gone, a day later. Pleasant surprise. I’ll try reopening my February post about Capital One and see what happens.

Currently playing on the blog: one Flash post after another. I’m an iPad owner with just a two-week tenure (waited for the 3G), so I’ve been following this whole Flash-Apple thing—dubious two months ago, warming up, surprised to be so persuaded by Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash, yet still worried about non-video Flash. The “Well, you have H.264” argument doesn’t answer a concern for a few important applications of Flash.

Worried about what non-video Flash? Most of it I couldn’t care less about: HBO’s new all-Flash site, car dealer sites, Flash banner ads, maybe even widget platforms and embedded audio plugins. I do wonder how quickly other methods can replace e-learning courses and demonstrations like the nice stuff The New York Times makes to illuminate its stories. But especially e-learning, a market expected to reach $50 billion by 2014, as big as the market for home improvement for energy savings, though you don’t hear much about it from web/tech luminaries, let alone in presidential speeches.

I’m not deep in the online training game, but have some connection to it. As far as I’ve been able to determine in my world, nobody’s planning to make courses any other way. There might be an opportunity here for a company to really clean up with some type of vector something or other. In HTML5 canvas? I haven’t looked into which technologies are out there poised to replace what Flash can do. I figure e-learning types could be watching casual gaming programmers and follow their lead, but I don’t think most of them are. Even if they did pick up on methods used in gaming, it seems like it would have to take another few years before content authoring tools for non-programmers could become available.

Salesforce itself must expect status quo at least for a while. As I was reading the second post on the current blog index I wondered if the company did any online training, so I nosed around the site and spotted a recruitment ad for curriculum developer for Force.com. Rapid deployment software experience desired: Articulate Studio, Captivate, Camtasia—all Flash-based.

We may be entering a rather painful interregnum and I have to say it’s all very interesting. God, I love change.

Walternate strolled in, in the final minutes of the last episode. Two more eps to go in the season. About time. I’ve been channeling Sringer Bell‘s impatience.

P.S. Levi Johnston is a poor man’s Josh Jackson.

I signed up for the 3G plan: limited bandwidth, $14.95 for a rolling 30 days, no contract. It seems quite fast in suburban Chicago, even loading a movie on Netflix.

Netflix looks beautiful. I hadn’t really tried to predict what I might want to do with the device, except that I thought I would like curling up in bed to read books and watch movies. I’m not sure how I’ll prop it up. The case is nice for creating a school desk slant angle but you need something more like an easel to watch it. Right now I’m using a sort of beanbag pillow.

Public domain books in the iBook store are much nicer than the PD books made for Kindle.

I synced all of the audio in iTunes. Will I listen to audiobooks using it? I have no idea. It might be safer for driving, with the larger controls.

After specifying Gmail in the device settings, it accepted my user/pass, but the inbox never did fill up after several attempts.

It’s a little smaller than I imagined it would be.

I got the keyboard, not Bluetooth, the accessory that the iPad mounts on vertically. The keyboard has a nice touch. The ensemble looks extra sweet. I predict it will be used in many a home magazine or furniture ad.

After using it constantly for the first three hours following unboxing, I wanted to do something else. I can’t afford it, so I’m going to be biased toward loving it, but that doesn’t mean I won’t actually love it. I may already love it a little. We’ll just have to see what it’s good for—maybe something I can’t foresee. I want to make a web app for it to really learn how what its middle ground position in the universe of devices is all about.

—A member of the French parliament following Leon Blum’s election as prime minister in 1936.

(Of course Blum really was a socialist.)

Watching an older (1997) Ken Burns series on Thomas Jefferson, I cracked up at the description of the 1800 election, when the House of Representatives convened to break an electoral college tie, but then the House found itself in a tie.  It went on for days, and the congressmen ”had to send home for their nightcaps.” After 36 ballots, Jefferson edged out Aaron Burr.

The had to part is what got me giggling, along with picturing the current session’s members all snug in their nightcaps and powdering gowns, and on C-SPAN. Presumably you couldn’t spend the night away from your nightcap, and it would have to be your own cap.

If the GOP has the gall to threaten filibuster in the Senate on the reform bill, and the Dems have the guts to call them on it, we might see that midnight cap run. I suppose the 21st century version would be roomy new fleece hoodies for all, with promotional logos. Still better, Snuggies all around, red or blue. They’d look like two church choirs competing in a festival. Maybe Goldman Sachs would oblige.

Fox and MSNBC shows: you might think about swearing off basing your story lineups on “Can you believe what they tried to pull off today?” Yes, even Rachel Maddow, who I think is great and with whom I almost always agree, aren’t you getting to be a more thoughtful flip side of Sarah Palin? Smiling through the jibes, cheerfully sniping, looking for outrages—hoping for them, even?

Newspaper columnists and bloggers: try talking as much about your own agendas as you do about the other team’s positions. I’d like to hear more about what the camps really stand for, less about what they’re against. Crazy when you have to learn about party positions by reading the other side.

I might not succeed. I’m going to find another channel; I’m outlining some fiction about a small-town conservative politician who has some redeeming qualities. The obsession started during the presidential campaign and it’s hard to break free. Probably a good thing, though, if we could…

When you hook in through Facebook Connect, it shows you profile picture, too.

Arianna Huffington on This Week told George Will she hoped it would be rammed through, helping to blunt the negative intent.

If it’s arrogant to be the party in power and push through what you want, then hasn’t that pretty much been happening in democracy all along, certainly during the Bush years, and probably back to the Greeks?

Also, given the public’s contempt for congressional dillydallying, only the most dug-in naysayers are going to disparage a little healthy muscle. The rest of us are going to say “About time, you wienies.”  Really, Dems, it’s FINE to want what you want, don’t let them tell you it’s not. Don’t let them fake you back into the wimperers corner. [but… but… cloture… but elections… afraid…]

To itself.

On the next statement following the $0 balance they raised my interest rate by 8%. They thought they’d squeeze me a little before Feb. 22 when the new law goes into effect. I called to cancel. The customer service rep asked me why. I explained. She sighed: big breath exhalation. I’m guessing her sigh meant she had heard customers tell the same tale more than once already today.

Meanwhile, Capital One seems to be on a mission of its own—to discover whether there really is a need for small business loans. I don’t mean the kind where you take your hat in hand and sit down with a banker to go over your balance sheet and pay an interest rate a few points above the bank’s cost. I’m talking about the modern kind where they intice your small business to sign up for a credit card to get by and hopefully you fall behind on payments.

Last month I got three promos for such a card in one day, all addressed to a business name I haven’t used for 15 years.  They’re wasting a lot of marketing funds on dumb mailings like that. Wonder how they’re working out. It probably works with desperate little businesses.

Soon all they will have left is desperate business customers to go along with their desperate consumer customers. That doesn’t bode well for anybody, not even Captial One and its investors, not in the long term.

Ask your members of congress where they stand on the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

Here’s the Twitter reaction. Obama fans like the idea. The Right scoffs. (If you see this seven days from now, the search link will lead to an empty results page; Twitter doesn’t keep historical searches.)

Bonus: I found this in my searches this morning—a November 2009 accounting of Governor Palin’s fondness for the phrase by Chris Kelly, a writer for Bill Maher’s show who blogs at Huffington Post.

I’ve been listening. It seems to be used more by politicians on the far right. More interesting, talking points aren’t just for politicians anymore. When pols speak the tested words there’s an echo on the internet. Check out this feed of tweets mentioning “common sense” by users who employ the “TCOT” (top conservatives on Twitter) hashtag to filter their remarks.

Here’s what I wonder: if the left couldn’t just appropriate it. We’re for common sense, too!

Part of the Republicans’  message must be a dog whistle thing: the lunch pail crowd likes to to believe that intellectuals necessarily don’t have common sense, it’s one or the other. You’re an egghead or you have street smarts, never both. It can’t be both or the blue collar class loses a cherished mode of self-appreciation. “Well, that boss of mine might have a diploma on his wall but he don’t have a lick of common sense [like me].” That’s why you also hear “Ivy League” sprinkled into raps about policy—a sure way to send shivers of defensive disgust up the spines of Real Americans.

I think we could disarm a lot of these culture war weapons by just using them ourselves. It would neutralize the sting, but would be entirely fair. For instance, who says I can’t tout my own sort of “family values” just because I’m very liberal?

We can be angry and populist with the best of them, too. Why cede all those lovely, universally human terms and stances?

What good is fear without some nervous window time, and what good is window time if you don’t know which one to peer from? Here’s a public service for shaky citizens who worry about the Guantanamo Bay detainees coming to Illinois.

Map their route to you.

I have a prescription: rewatch The West Wing. It still holds up, and it’s still relevant. Let yourself retreat to fantasy for a few weeks, then rejoin the fray.

“Palin has devoted a dismayingly prominent chunk of her book to scapegoating communications aide Nicolle Wallace for supposedly forcing her to wear designer clothes.” Nov. 17, 2009, Boston Globe editorial.

Here’s Walsh’s thought, way down at the end, that prompted me to awaken from blog hibernation.

So while I’m not worried about President Palin, I remain worried about President Obama. I’m particularly concerned that his increasingly triangulating, anti-deficit administration will do the wrong thing, morally and politically, and move to the right, without understanding that some right-wing rage could be rechanneled by acknowledging its roots: That the economic system seems rigged for the have-a-lots v. the have-a-littles, and despite their promises, the Democrats haven’t done enough to change that. Palin can’t change any of that, but Obama can. There’s still time for him to do so, but the clock is ticking.

I agree that populist sentiment on the right could be rechanneled, but I wouldn’t leave it up to the president or the Democrats in Congress to take charge of the effort.

Liberal citizens could do more. We could not only rechannel populist mojo but reclaim it. What if progressives started showing up at the next round of town halls to agree with bits of the anger at the way things are going, but suggest other means to change it? To decry Wall Street dominance of the halls of power right along with our louder neighbors, but point to other ways out?

Cultural and ideological gulfs are so hard to bring oneself to bridge. Reminds me of a Therapy Sisters song. The Austin, TX-based female folk ensemble sings about how easy it is for feminists to claim identification with the suffering of third-world women, but not so easy to throw in with the bow heads (sorority members) across campus.

So many of the ideas he talks about—and has proven to be true—seem so basic that it’s hard to conceive of any opposing viewpoint. You just have to think that the newspaper and TV folks who make counterarguments are blinded by something other than reason—pining for the fjords, clinging to the past, incapable of seeing the world from more than one perspective.

Here is the silly Dev Null character he talks about playing on MSNBC’s The Site program 12 years ago.

I have been thinking for a while (and I’m not alone) that Twitter search has been consciously crippled for a good reason. That is, it’s good for Twitter, still publicly in search of a business model, but obviously trying models on for size. It’s not so good for users.

Here’s an example. I was interested in the inflated attendance counts for the 9/12 events and did a search on “ABC million” for Saturday and Sunday. (A FreedomWorks speaker pulled the figure of 2 million from someair, falsely or erroneously attributed it to ABC News, and word spread across Twitter like a swarm of gnats.)

So, the search proves useful, for the moment, and though the moment is what drives Twitter, you might want a record of the reaction, and your desire would be thwarted. Twitter search results go back only a week and a half at best and developers reserve the right to further limits based on traffic.

You could grab a feed of the search results, but it’s limited to the last 30 tweets. You can let the items pile up in your aggregator, but only starting at the point when you realize it’s a trend. History is important.

The ability to specify dates for a search is nice, but if it only goes back X days the utility is limited. Searching for a range of hours would be a great help, but it’s not available to users either. How would it help? Well, since Twitter is so “of the moment” the narrower the time span the more results you’ll get for a fuzzy query. Let’s say Rachel Maddow says something provocative and I’m not ambitious enough to construct a complicated query of a string of “Or’s.” If I could specify that I only want tweets tweeted from 9 until 10 p.m., most every tweet containing “Rachel” would be in reference to the show, and I’d gain the added benefit of seeing mostly viewers who are tweeting while watching.

So why don’t users have these superpowers? It could be because Twitter needs to curb features to keep from crashing, but it might be that we aren’t given the value-add precisely because it is so valuable.

Can’t you see the charts in the marketing reports? “Since the introduction of the X campaign, mentions of Product Y are up 23% over the previous month and up 67% over this month last year.” Historical trends are gold. Twitter has to be selling the data that could produce them, or they’re holding it back from us while they think about how they could sell it.

Am I an anti-business socialist? Not really, but this sort of behavior on Twitter’s part does bring to mind the traditional labor phrase, “on the backs of the workers.” Twitter users and the words we type are the Twitter product. We’re stakeholders, so if our aggregated facts, sentiments and opinions are on the block, we should get something back—not money, just utility.

As the Vanity Fair article and the resignation announcement played out and the critics weighed in, I let it all wash over me (OK, OK, I sought it out). Commentary on her debate prep was the stuff my imagination is made of. I can picture the grueling sessions now, with the aid of Todd Purdum’s nice descriptive gifts. Then up pops Mark McKinnon on the tube. He supported Obama, so he coached Palin on style points but not on policy.

So I construct this even more vivid picture of desperate, futile coaching and it feels like something I’ve seen before but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Then, finally, just now it hit me. She’s Lina Lamont, in Singin’ in the Rain, who will not achieve round tones in this lifetime, or at least not within a reasonable enough period of time to endure further coaching. 

As Purdum describes in the article, the campaign team members “worked their tails off to try to elect as vice president of the United States someone who, by mid-October, they believed for certain was nowhere near ready for the job, and might never be.”

The “might never be” part is what spooked Lina’s handlers in the movie. Having little time to bring out the Dancing Cavalier as a talkie with Lina’s annoying voice, they bailed on the voice, dubbing in the competent speaking and singing voice of the Debbie Reynolds character.

I caiiiiiint staiiiyiin ‘er.

Let me tell you just a couple of things about him.

He worked in the same bank from a time before I was born until after I became a parent, but I think he’d rather have been a woodworker. He’s so careful with his carpentry projects that you’d think he was making each piece for royalty, and sometimes it’s just a house for a sparrow family. I think he loves every second of the process while he’s working; he doesn’t just love the satisfaction of having made something.

He can make anything. When I was eight or nine he made me a tiny kite of balsa wood and tissue paper, not bigger than an index card. We had to fly it with thread instead of string, and I remember him explaining to me that the tail had to be made of quarter-inch strips of cloth, everything in scale. The idea of balance among parts of a thing really struck me, and stuck with me. It was beautiful. It flew in almost no wind.

Daddy’s always reading, always had a great library. I read Huxley’s The Doors of Perception as a teenager, and Jane Eyre as a pre-teen because they were in his library. I was able to take the Pygmalion script to My Fair Lady when I was 10 because it was on the shelf at home. I’ve liked literary adaptations ever since.

He’s funny, and a horrible tease.

He’s realistic, and I think he tried to teach me to be. I’m not sure it worked. When I was maybe six or seven I asked him if a family could be so hungry that one person would start to chew a piece of meat, then pass it along to another family member while there was still some flavor in it. Daddy informed me that if the first chewer were that hungry, there would be no passing along.

Happy Fathers Day, Daddy. Many more.

The Holocaust Museum shooting this week made me think about pretending from a different angle—from the vantage point of conservatives who deny the evidence of systemic failures all around us. A thread runs through the thinking of a lot of political conservatives:

- The angry lone nut shooter isn’t influenced by the angry right mob
- Bernie Madoff is a bad apple; there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with Wall Street
- Abu Ghraib minders were just bad apples

Systems failure is way too scary to contemplate. If patterns seem to emerge, the safest course of action is to look away so you can pretend it isn’t there. 

The Tea Partiers aren’t revolutionaries. Everything is just fine, or it would be if we could cycle back to 80s Reagan ideas, and deal with those pesky bad apples one on one.

We knew healthcare reform would face fierce opposition—and it’s begun. As we speak, the same people behind the notorious “swiftboat” ads of 2004 are already pumping millions of dollars into deceptive television ads. Their plan is simple: torpedo healthcare reform before it sees the light of day by scaring the public and distorting the President’s approach.

He doesn’t come right out and name the “same people”, though, and it reminds me of something I’ve been wanting to explore. Public discourse of special interests usually is very vague. Politicians are chickenshits about it—all but the most liberal. So are the media—all but the most liberal.

As an example of a media outlet that won’t come right out and say who’s working behind the scenes, take MSNBC. It’s playing to the current leftward mood in the air, and making some interesting choices for new programs, ramping up the rhetoric as the clock approaches midnight, like a pop radio station that rocks harder after 7 p.m. But you know what MSNBC could never afford to do? My pet pipedream format for telling what forces are really operating in the public sphere.

I see it as a TV news program, but it could be a blog or a magazine or a comic book or an on- or offline radio program. It’s organized around issues and interests and it tells the truth about businesses and other organizations who lobby for issues on all sides (sometimes there are more than two sides, contrary to all popular wisdom).

The format is really simple: This is the issue; these lobbies are for it because x; these lobbies are against it because y; these groups are silent because z. I think such a structure would tend to tease out truth.

It would be so refreshing. When have you ever known an interviewer to ask “Who’s lobbying you for this, and why do they say they want it, and why do you think they really want it?” Never happens. Is there a gentleman’s agreement that it would be just too gauche? I think there must be. You didn’t see Dick Durbin getting complimented on his courage when he said banking interests own the Senate. Rather the opposite; I sensed commentators looking the other way, nervously, as though Durbin had a tail of toilet paper spilling out from the back of his pants.

If the issue is energy, the oil companies don’t get to come on or send their surrogates to tell about their commitment to wind power, because they’re not very committed to it. That’s why MSNBC would never make this show. The network depends on energy and pharma advertisers with their messages calculated to persuade me how much they care about saving the planet and about people who can’t afford their prescriptions.

Instead of a format like my pipedream, we get vagueness all around. We’re fed an illusion of the inside story with tales of the maneuvers of elected officials and their staffs, but rarely hear details about the influence of special interests, only amorphous generalities. I’m hungry for some blunt talk. I’d watch or read, and so would others who’d like to know what actually happens in Washington and other centers of power.

(I wonder if many Obama supporters are still responding to donation pleas. I was moved to give my little bits during the campaign, but feel slightly put off by the appeals now.)

I listened to the interviews about it on the Democracy Now podcast during a morning commute this week. (Don’t you just love taking in your news on podcasts? You can stop them and let certain bits sink in, form your own thoughts, and dip back in for more.)

Two impressions formed as I was barreling up I-355:

• First, why in hell isn’t this all over the place? It’s got everything: an already-disgraced bailout recipient; wounded personnel from Iraq, the contractors’ corollary to the Walter Reed scandal; a real human-lives consequence of the healthcare crisis. Heck, the contracting company, KBR, is even a former subsidiary of Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s old firm. Why isn’t this one of the handful of stories cable news is running over and over?
• Second, I was interested in the provenance of the investigative journalism. There’s been a partnership between the website ProPublica and ABC’s 20/20 program to cover the story.

It could be that I’m uninformed or naive—always a very real possibility with me —but I couldn’t recall another such partnership. Pairing public interest internet outlets with mainstream media on certain big stories could be one answer to the big whining question that always arises out of discussions about the decline of newspapers: “Who’s going to do the important, time-consuming investigative legwork? [snort!] Bloggers?”

Well, yeah. Maybe. Remember that Talking Points Memo took the lead on the story of the U.S. attorneys who were fired for their politics. One of TPM’s sites is even named ”Muckraker.”

Doesn’t it make sense? A public interest blog has the will to dig, while a partnering MSM outlet lends its credibility imprimatur. A grassroots outfit can mobilize its volunteer following to paw through government documents, saving on expense, and it has a unique ability to whip up a fuss to make things happen.

You don’t always need a big budget or lawyers to make things happen. I’ve heard Carol Marin, a local Chicago TV journalist, argue in a couple different forums that only big media have been able to afford the lawyers it takes to shepherd through FOIA requests. She uses it as a counterargument against future reliance on internet journalism. I don’t buy it. Everything in news is going to change when newspapers go down; it’s already starting. We’ll find ways to get government documents for free—probably by raising a huge squawk about it—just as easily as we can now do live video remotes for free.

Maybe I’ll propose that Dave Winer and Jay Rosen kick this around on their Rebooting the News podcast. (By the way, happy birthday, Dave. Welcome to fiftyfourhood. Fiftyfournia? Fiftyfouratopia?)

I’m so full of admiration for Simon’s missions and his skill at storytelling that I feel a little sheepish for blurting earlier on Twitter that he’s a print guy ‘til the death. During the Moyers interview he refined my understanding of where he stands on what brought newspapers to their present condition.

A former Baltimore Sun reporter, he tells about taking the paper’s third buyout some years ago, and puts some context around the current debate about charging for internet content. He explains how constant budget cuts in the service of bigger profits devalued the newspaper product to the point where, when the internet threat finally did come along, the online product wasn’t worth enough to charge for it. 

The larger share of the interview concerns systemic failures in all kinds of institutions—what The Wire was all about. He’s right, you know, that just electing the right guy isn’t going to yank this empire out of its self-imolation. Barack Obama knows that, too. At least that’s what he kept telling us in the campaign, when he talked about change being everybody’s business.

Still, now that Obama’s in office, he’s more centrist than some of us pretended he might be, and he spins a narrative, because that’s the way things work. When Moyers and Simon talked about “juking the stats” as a common thread that runs through the trouble with various institutions like education and law enforcement, I was thinking the real problem is something related to spinning the stats, but broader than that.

Ayn Rand talked a lot about pretending in her novels, especially in Atlas Shrugged. That’s the theme that makes me return to her, despite some of her uglier and now old-fashioned ideas. (I guess you take what you like and leave the rest from any thinker—from Rand with her female characters who thrive on contemptuous treatment, or from Simon and his apparent dismissal of the idea that decent reporting can be published in most any mode. The internet isn’t inherently fluffy and derivative.)

But about pretending. Don’t you think it’s the root of many evils? We delude ourselves personally, all the time. Our leaders and institutions seem to spend a whole lot more effort on framing what they’ve done or will do than they spend in the actual doing. Then we help them. It starts dawning on Dagney Taggart, the railroad exec in Atlas Shrugged, that she’s been enabling the behavior she despises, and she finally comes right out and says “I’m not going to help you pretend.”

Time to be blunt. That was the beauty of The Wire. Raw truth. Can we take it?

I can’t wait for Simon’s new series about post-Katrina New Orleans.

mp3

The jingle is funny, and outrageous in the sense that it’s silly it even exists, and I like it. I like the weekly show, too, and generally listen to it.

Sometimes, though, the show is overall just a little cute and bouncy, so I’m glad we also have Bob McChesney‘s Media Matters. It’s produced from AM station WILL, an NPR affiliate owned by the University of Illinois, and there’s a podcast. McChesney has a frankly liberal agenda, and so do his guests, who take calls when the Sunday show is done live. The newest podcast usually doesn’t show up until Tuesday.

Check out Dave Winer’s and Jay Rosen’s fairly regular Sunday media talks, too. Both bloggers, Dave is an internet pioneer, while Jay is an NYU prof, so their take on the future of journalism is pretty unique.

The key uses: Internet consumption. The virtual keyboard will make data entry a pain other than for entering credentials, quick searches and maybe light emails. This machine isn’t for data entry. But it is for reading emails and the news, watching videos on Hulu, YouTube, etc., listening to streaming music on MySpace Music and imeem, and doing video chat via tokbox.

Music on MySpace? Not very enterprising. OK, he’s managing expectations. That’s cool.

Actually, a device like the CrunchPad could accomplish data entry in a really rudimentary way. Think checklists.

Vendors of business software for mobile devices try to protect their turf and warn prospects that the only workable solution for data input is a complicated Blackberry app that syncs with the corporate datastore; wifi isn’t available, they say—and you sure as hell can’t trust it. I don’t know. I’m not sure syncing will be the default in a few years and in a lot of cases it’s not required now.

I love the idea of the pad and have been following its development, even dreaming up scenarios in which my employer could marry its safety inspection checklists with the pad hardware as a bundled product. Enable the chucking of clipboards in an economical way, all online. 

Thinking the Kia hamster commercial was very cute—especially the cool passenger’s crisp little inverse nod of recognition to another hamster at a stop light—I took to Twitter to see if others reacted as I did. The Twitterati likes it mostly.

Strikes me it’s an incredibly objective view. If you’re a marketer, you reach out to consumers with a phone survey or recruit them for a focus group and you’ve attached a lot of importance to wanting to know. You look at blogs for a sense of the pulse and you have to figure the bloggers have attached a certain measure of importance to the act of writing about your product, or may even have some agenda. It takes some effort to publish a blog post. But a twitterer doesn’t make a big investment of time in blurting out a tweet. A collection of opinions tossed out in this way seems very real, honest.

Not a lot of controls, but it is very easy to make and publish. Not that the publishing part is anywhere near as populist as YouTube. Click on “Soapbox” in the embed. You go to an MSN video page that’s dominated by MSNBC videos. Soapbox user videos, the thing you thought you were clicking to see, are relatively hidden away behind a little link on the top nav. That seems to be changing with the new MSN video site. (See preview.) But the change doesn’t favor the creations of everyday folks; it seems to tilt from an emphasis on news to an emphasis on TV shows.

I guess they’re feeling their way. Microsoft is getting quite live and webby—in some quarters of that big place. Pretty soon now you won’t even see dialog boxes when you install stuff, like “You may now disconnect from the Internet.”

Couple days ago Sharepoint Designer was freed. First thing some IT folks thought about? Lock it down in enterprises. Can’t have that now. Everybody publishing? Shudder.

I’m sure it must be hard for Microsoft to balance all the interests. They can’t diss the protectionist IT cops who are their customers for servers and Office, but at the same time they have to listen to the reality out there.

Control vs. contribute. I haven’t looked at it lately but there used to be a similarly interesting balancing act performed by Adobe in marketing Contribute on their site. As I recall it, there was practically no summary of the product on the microsite home. You forked immediately to pages for IT or publisher and each audience got a different story. Editors were told they could do anything! IT guys were assured they didn’t have to let anybody do anything. 

It’s nice. No surprise there, as it’s been adapted by Andrew Davies (newest Bleak House, Middlemarch, 1995 Pride and Prejudice).

Good time for it, too, with its threads of ruinous debt and government bureaucracy, all packaged up to satisfy a need to find amusement in despair. 

It’s undergone I-don’t-know-how-many redesigns since my day, but I never mind. Time moves on and I’m sure I’d hate the looks of my 1997 idea of cool if I had a look at it now. In fact, I don’t even want to check the wayback machine for fear of a cringe attack.

I did spot one little bit of my snarky copy that was either preserved or overlooked on the license plate lobbying page:

Funny to think about web development back then. If anything interactive was needed for the site, I was all about CGI/Perl, and flat text files were the only databases I thought I needed. And we got by; it was fine for the time.

While I’m loathe to visit a newsstand anymore I almost did pick up the new issue for a little better reading experience of Matt Taibbi’s The Big Takeover. A skim shows it would be worth the effort for a more energetic person. A tidbit: he reveals that AIG, by forming a savings and loan, was able to choose to be regulated by a laisse-faire regulatory agency in no way able to watch over it. If we’re going to focus on a narrow piece of the story, like the bonuses, why not that piece instead? It seems pretty important.

But I can’t get with reading long articles online. I tried to print it out but was short on ink.^* I want it read to me like an audio book. RS, why don’t you give it a try as a podcast? Not every story, maybe not every feature. Just a selection of nice long meaty articles that people like me might want to luxuriate in.

Would I pay? Maybe. A little.