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Let’s get this out of the way right off the bat — I am not the sharpest tool in the shed. Not the brightest light on the tree. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer. You get the picture. I’m certainly not as smart as Nick Carr, as I have pointed out before. That said, however, I do have an English degree — and I still can’t figure out what the heck Steve Gillmor is talking about in his recent column about… well, whatever it’s about.

It’s not just me. Even Nick “I went to Harvard” Carr can barely figure it out. It has something to do with Nick and a recent podcast, and the current fetish for not including links in blog posts — which as my M-lister pal Kent Newsome has noted, is a load of elitist hogwash. For whatever it’s worth, Kent can’t make head nor tails of what Steve is on about in his column either.

For one thing, it’s all wrapped up in Steve’s patented “GestureBank” metaphorology, or whatever the hell it is. You know, like this stuff:

“Clicking on a link does not pay the author; it pays the signaller (in this case the aggregator, publisher, or arbitrager of the link’s “value.”) The author of the content is paid in link credits, which tether him or her to the tyranny of the mediocrity of broadcast economics.”

Riiiiiiiiight. There’s plenty more where that came from too, about “negative gesturing at its root level,” and something about tipping your waitress and how the tip reflects… well, something (Valleywag has some fun with Steve’s inscrutability here). And in there somewhere is a bit of response to people like Kent who have rejected the “no linking” policy Steve seems to be pushing. Steve says he secretly agrees that links are good karma, but they tie people to the current model, and he’s looking way down the road at some GestureBank future that the rest of us can’t see. Best of luck with that, Steve.

I’m going to stick with Kent — links are a sign that you don’t know it all, that ideas come from somewhere and go somewhere, and that they flow through blogs and comments and other places and ultimately create value somewhere. Whether they tie me to some blog-publishing feudal system is beyond my capacity to say. Like I said, I’m an English major. All I know is, I hope Steve is getting paid by the word.

And you are the nail. Every day there are new signs of how traditional media — newspapers, radio, television — are morphing and shifting and changing, as content finds new routes to the consumer, like water finding the easiest path as it flows downhill. Fox announces a deal to sell shows via iTunes, Warner Brothers announces a deal to use BitTorrent to offer downloads, newspapers watch their subscription levels continue to plummet as online readership rises. Media owners everywhere are trying to figure out how to adapt to the changing environment, which is where the Jell-O and the wall and the nail come in.

Warner Brothers may get some applause for going the BitTorrent download route, but the files are likely going to be all buggered up with DRM — a comment over at BoingBoing says Warner is already using a similar system (not BitTorrent) in Germany and the files are lower quality than a DVD but cost just as much and don’t have any extra features. How is that a good deal? Sharing a movie gets you credits, but you reportedly have to share an entire movie about 40 times before you get enough credits for a free one. As TechDirt points out, the studios are “offloading the cost of the bandwidth onto the buyers, but giving them no benefit in return.” Not smart.

As for newspapers, debate is still all over the map about how to offer content online — and I should know, because we’ve had (and are having) plenty of that kind of debate at globeandmail.com. Is the subscription model working? Does it make sense to combine that with a partial “pay wall” as the Globe does and the New York Times recently started doing — or should content be free and advertising carry the freight? Does Google actually help, or is it stealing content in some way as the European Newspaper Publishers contend (that last one is the reddest herring I’ve probably ever seen, as I’ve mentioned before).

As Mark has mentioned in his post, and Rob in his, these are just the kinds of questions that our conference was set up to try and tackle (tickets are still available, but time is running out). Notice I didn’t say “answer.” But at least we can have a go at nailing some of that Jell-O to the wall.

Courtesy of Umair at Bubblegeneration.com, I found something called Wikiocracy, which appears to be an attempt to apply the “open-source information” principles of Wikipedia to the various laws and statutes that form our society (or in this case, U.S. society), including the Constitution. This is an idea that I find kind of intriguing, especially since we are looking at how Web 2.0 affects politics and society as part of our mesh conference on May 15th and 16th. I wrote a bit about that here.

Given the kinds of errors that have crept into Wikipedia in the past, and the varrious controversies over people editing their own entries or being blocked from editing entries, I’m sure a lot of people would argue that the idea of a Wikipedia of politics or democracy would make no sense whatsoever. And yet, democracy in its purest sense is supposed to be representative of its citizens — and not just its smart or well-informed citizens. If everyone had the chance to write the laws, what would they look like? Would the numbskulls take over, as Nick Carr has suggested?

An initial look at Wikiocracy isn’t likely to fill anyone with confidence in that respect. One of the more recent changes proposed altering the U.S. Constitution to create a 58th Amendment, being the “Establishment of a solely Taters Based Economy.” It included a section which reads “The United States shall establish the Office of Taters through which it will promote its chief and only export, Taters, better known as potatoes,” and a link to an external site which features nothing but a looping video clip of Sam Gamgee’s character from Lord of the Rings saying the word “potatoes” over and over. The voice of the people? Perhaps not. Still, an interesting experiment nevertheless.

Normally I would post this kind of thing over at my “fun” blog, because it doesn’t really have a lot to do with Web 2.0 or any of that kind of stuff, but I thought what the heck — it’s the weekend, so let’s loosen up and have some (non Web-related) fun. One of the coolest things I’ve seen in a while is the performance art put on by French theatre troupe Royal de Luxe, and they’ve brought their latest show to London this weekend, entitled “The Sultan’s Elephant.” The BBC has a whole pile of photos and videos, in some cases provided by cellphone camera owners and other “citizen journalists” (see, there’s some Web 2.0 to this after all).

It’s loosely based on the work of Jules Verne, and was performed in France last year. It involves two gigantic wooden puppets, one a girl about 35 feet tall and one an elephant with a fully-articulated trunk that is just as tall and about 50 feet long. They are operated by a team of puppeteers dressed in period costumes, who in some cases are pulling ropes through enormous pulleys and in other cases are sitting on a giant metal superstructure that surrounds the puppet. The photos really have to be seen to be believed.

Not to blow my own horn too much, but I did an email interview with Marshall Kirkpatrick of NetSquared.org the other day and I wanted to point to it. It’s called “The New Online Conversation,” and Marshall and I basically just talked about what the Web offers and how traditional media are (or aren’t) responding to it. Some nice pictures too — although I’m not really sure what the upside-down cat picture has to do with the conversation 🙂 In any case, it’s there if anyone wants to read it. NetSquared.org is a project started by TechSoup.com aimed at helping non-profit groups make the most of the Web. Marshall has also interviewed Lifehacker’s Gina Trapani and Louis Suarez-Potts of OpenOffice.

I wrote something a while ago about how the mesh gang — myself, Stuart “Chairman Mao” MacDonald, Rob “Rob” Hyndman, Mark Evans and Mike McDerment — had come up with something a bit different for our conference in beautiful downtown Toronto May 15th and 16th (still a few tickets left, head over there now, etc. etc.) — namely, the 15 Minutes of Fame. Well, now it’s time to reveal the winners of our litle contest.

The idea was to take some time at mesh — 5 minutes per person, in three slots the first day and three slots the second (hence the whole 15 minute thing, get it?) — to profile some of the young startups and people with ideas that make Web 2.0 such an interesting place to be, by giving them the stage to talk about their projects or companies. We asked for submissions, and we got a lot of pretty great ones. It was definitely hard to pick just six, but we did, and they will be at mesh in all their nervous glory, front and center.

Just to give you a taste, they include:

• Gary “The Kid” King — or King Gary, as he likes to call himself — who wrote us early on to ask why only university students were allowed to buy cheaper tickets, since he is in high school but is already running his own Web 2.0 design firm. Come on down, Gary, we said.
• Elissa Gjertson of AreYouFrank.com will be telling us about her company’s plans to use social media to help organizations of all kinds figure out what people are saying about them and how best to respond — all of which is totally up the mesh alley.
• Parv and Daniel of Favorville.com, which has set up an online swap shop that lets people trade things they can do for things that they need done.
• Colin How of Pixpo.com, whose photo, video and music-sharing software is being launched later this month with much fanfare, and who will tell us why his version of sharing media is better than all the other ones out there (right Colin?)

Want to hear more? Come and mesh with us.

Update:

Our friend Tara “Miss Rogue” Hunt, who will be doing a special interactive keynote/thingamajig at mesh about online marketing, has a very flattering post about mesh and the gang. Thanks, Tara — now we’re all blushing.

Some things you wouldn’t think you would have to explain to people — and yet, every day new examples appear: tags on an inflatable water toy that say “Not to be used as a rescue device,” or a label on a chainsaw that says “Do not stop chain with hand.” Today’s contribution comes from Maine, where if there was a warning sticker on the wall at Warren Kremer Paino Advertising it would read: “Don’t sue a blogger just because he doesn’t like your work.”

That’s exactly what happened late last week, when the firm sued a Maine blogger named Lance Dutson for what it claimed was “copyright infringement, defamation, trade libel and injurious falsehood.” Dutson, who also does some web design and advertising work, complained about the ad campaign that WKPA did for the state of Maine, referring to the agency at one point as “some big company in New York with no ties to the state, pissing away tax money.” More about the lawsuit can be found here.

First of all, let’s forget about the idea that this is about copyright infringement (for posting some of the agency’s work) or about defamation or any of that bollocks, although my pal Scott Karp is quite right to point out that this lawsuit is a warning shot across the bow of all bloggers. If you want to be treated as journalists in some sense, that includes dealing with the risk of libel and defamation lawsuits. Still, this lawsuit is clearly about WKPA (which of course makes me think of WKRP, being of a certain age) getting its nose bent about some criticism.

As Steve Rubel points out, suing a critical blogger is a particularly thick-headed thing to do. How could this possibly work out worse for the firm? It must have gotten legal advice from the RIAA’s lawyers, who came up with the brilliant idea of suing music fans across America, including high-school honour students, retired veterans and people without computers. Compared to that, WKPA’s strategy actually looks smart — but that’s about the only angle from which it appears anything less than moronic.

Now, instead of searches for the company’s name on Google producing a list of links with Lance’s website high up — which the firm said it was afraid of — it will produce a far larger list of critical links, all of which are about what an ass the firm is. Nice work there, WKRP.

Update:

The agency has withdrawn the lawsuit.

(Warning: This post contains commentary about Dave Winer. By reading further, you have agreed — both implicitly and explicitly — to read about the often mind-numbing machinations involving the “Father of RSS” and those who have chosen to use their programming powers for evil instead of good. You hereby waive any right to complain later about the fact that it has given you a headache — ed.)

I wasn’t going to write anything about the latest development in the Dave Winer and Rogers Cadenhead saga, because I’ve probably wasted enough electrons already on that topic a few times in the past, but I couldn’t resist after reading a post Rogers did on the legal settlement that he and Dave managed to hash out after Dave sued him.

Part of the reason I couldn’t resist is that I find the whole thing fascinating in a strange way (Kent Newsome also seems unable to resist) because Dave is such a legend in the programming community, and yet still seems to spend a lot of time lashing out at people over slights (either perceived or real), culminating in the lawsuit against Rogers — a guy who has spent more time than he would probably like to admit defending Dave. This comment by Rogers is brilliant:

“I originally hoped one of us would buy the other out and launch the application, but we found a much stronger basis for agreement in a mutual desire to stop working together as quickly as possible.”

And later on, after noting that the publicity from the blogosphere undoubtedly helped his case, Rogers says:

“I’m not going to close the book on this debacle with any Panglossian happy talk about how it all worked out for the best. This was a completely unnecessary sphincter-fusing legal dispute that could have been settled amicably months ago without benefit of counsel.”

Well said, Rogers. Happy to hear that it’s over.

I wrote an item for my globeandmail blog that I thought I’d reproduce here, because some people who might be interested in it might not see it there:

It’s been a busy couple of days for small Canadian tech companies: a photo and video-sharing service called Pixpo.com, which is based in Victoria and has been around for a while now, and Ottawa-based telecom startup Iotum.com. Pixpo has released a new version of its media-sharing software — which has a couple of key differences compared with other similar services — while Iotum has announced a partnership with PhoneGnome.com, a company that sells a voice-over-Internet appliance for consumers.

Pixpo, which was founded by Colin How, allows users to share their photos, music and video without having to upload it to an external website or server, as most services such as YouTube.com and Flickr.com do. Pixpo’s software allows users to connect directly to the content on your PC, and provides a nice-looking interface so they can browse through thumbnails of your photos or watch video clips with the built-in media player. Mr. How said in an email that the service uses a modified “peer-to-peer” network with a series of servers that can cache or store popular content.

Iotum, meanwhile — run by blogger Alec Saunders — has announced a deal to bundle its Relevance Engine software with VOIP devices sold by PhoneGnome. Iotum’s product uses smart filtering to determine which phone calls should be put through to a user based on the time of the call and who it is coming from, and can also determine where to send the call based on previous behaviour patterns or rules set by the user. PhoneGnome — which was started by one of the founders of Earthlink — sells a box that users can simply plug a regular phone into that provides VOIP calling, but allows them to keep their regular phone number.

Rob Hyndman recently tagged me with the “three things” meme — which is not to be confused with the “four things” meme that got Mark Cuban so worked up a little while ago (clearly the new medication is not working, Mark — I would go back to the old stuff).

The three things are supposed to be things that you would like to see occur in your lifetime, and Rob mentioned stuff like organized religion supporting contraception, while Sutha (who tagged Rob) mentioned real democracy and education for all. But being a contrary bugger by nature, my instinct is to avoid the easy stuff like ending hunger or allowing women to be ordained in the Catholic Church — both of which I would really like to see, by the way.

So here are my three wished-for things:

1) A real director’s cut version of Blade Runner (see the info under “director’s cut” at Wikipedia for more on this saga)

2) The return of the comic “Calvin and Hobbes”

3) The end of the designated-hitter rule in baseball

And now I am tagging Stuart, and Mark and Kent.

One of the concepts we’re trying to tackle as part of mesh (May 15th and 16th in beautiful downtown Toronto, get your tickets before it’s too late, etc. etc.) is the idea that Web 2.0 and blogs and all that they represent are fundamentally rewriting the rules for the marketing business — regardless of whether you are marketing a company, a product, a person, an idea or a political party.

As marketing whiz Seth Godin has written in his book Flipping the Funnel, which you can download from his website if you’re interested, one of the most effective ways to market something is to make contact with people on some kind of personal level and create a relationship, a dialogue — a conversation. As he puts it, “turn strangers into friends, turn friends into customers. And then, do the most important job: Turn your customers into salespeople.”

That (or at least the first part of it anyway) is something we — Mark, Mike, Rob, Stuart and myself — have done with mesh, more or less without even thinking about it. And the power of Web 2.0 has been a big part of the success we have had so far, in marketing a brand-new conference almost completely through word-of-mouth and the blogosphere. Less than a month after we launched the conference, we were halfway toward our ticket goal (we’ve still got a few left, so tell all your friends — heck, tell your enemies too).

Rob has his take on it here, Stuart has written about it as well and so have Mike and Mark. Stowe Boyd, who is coming to mesh, has also posted something, and so has Mitch Twist.

Flip the funnel and turn it into a megaphone, Seth says. Empower your customers or your users or your community and they will tell you what you need to hear, Tara says. Jump on board the Web 2.0 cluetrain.

If you haven’t been following the Canadian music industry (shame on you) then you might not know that a group of recording artists recently split off from the Canadian Record Industry Association or CRIA — which is pretty much controlled by the four major record labels for their own purposes — and formed their own group called the Canadian Music Creators Coalition. This is something that law professor and blogger Michael Geist has spent a lot of time on, if you want to catch up.

Today, the group had a press conference at the venerable Horseshoe Tavern, and Barenaked Ladies frontman and blogger Steven Page wrote a great op-ed piece that was in the National Post, Canada’s other national newspaper. For fans of Canadian music, the group of artists supporting the new coalition includes Avril Lavigne, Sarah McLachlan, Chantal Kreviazuk, Sum 41, Billy Talent, Broken Social Scene and Sloan.

Here’s an excerpt of Steven’s excellent op-ed:

“We believe that suing our fans is destructive and hypocritical. We do not want to sue music fans, and we do not want to distort the law to coerce fans into conforming to a rigid digital market artificially constructed by the major labels.”

and another:

We believe that the use of digital locks… are risky and counterproductive. We do not support using digital locks to increase the labels’ control over the distribution, use and enjoyment of music, nor do we support laws that prohibit circumvention of such technological measures, including Canadian accession to the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Internet Treaties. These treaties are designed to give control to major labels and take choices away from artists and consumers.

Music to our ears, Steven. More coverage at IPDemocracy and BoingBoing, as well as the aforementioned Dr. Geist.

It’s not really ironic — unless you use the broad Alanis Morrissette definition of that word — but it’s at least an interesting coincidence that just a day or two after Nick Carr lamented the fact that the Web is powered by numbskulls, someone would write what I think is an excellent overview of why the Wikipedia approach to synthesizing knowledge is a worthwhile one to pursue, despite the potential for being overrun by Mr. Carr’s numbskulls. And it’s an even more interesting coincidence that the writer in question happens to work for the same newspaper I do, the Globe and Mail.

I don’t like to write about the Globe here on my personal blog, because it’s inevitably going to be seen as navel-gazing and/or pimping for the boss, but I do make exceptions — especially when it’s about Web 2.0 and social media and that sort of thing. In this case, I think the paper’s recent editorial on the topic of Wikipedia was damn good, and I would have linked to it if someone else wrote it, so I don’t see why I shouldn’t just because it appeared in the Globe.

What’s even more impressive is that it comes from the editorial board, which many see (rightly or wrongly) as the last bastion of conservative (small “c”) thought about such newfangled gizmos as the Internet, Web 2.0, wikis and so forth. And yes, I realize that it’s also somewhat ironic that the editorial I’m linking to is behind the pay wall, but hey — everyone is trying to find their way in this new media world, and different models are being experimented with, for better or worse. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

Here’s a taste of what the editorial says:

A camel is a horse designed by a committee. That old saw nicely expresses the skepticism most of us feel about collaborative thinking. We have far more respect for the individual genius — Shakespeare, Newton, Einstein — who thinks great thoughts in splendid isolation. But the rise of the Internet and the brainstorming it enables should make us rethink that old prejudice. “Are many minds better than a few?” suggested a recent headline in the Economist. Quite possibly, yes.

It goes on to give a capsule history of the Wikipedia, and what it attempts to do, as well as some of the controversies that have arisen, including the Siegenthaler affair. And then it states:

The Wikipedia model is not perfect, but its success has implications that go far beyond how people conduct research. It puts a question mark over the whole idea that information must move from credentialed producer to passive consumer. That presents established companies and organizations with a big challenge.

That is the point, in a nutshell — a point that the Globe’s editorial writers link more or less explicitly to the concept of democracy itself, just as I did in a response to Seth Finkelstein on my recent “numbskulls” post (see below). As Winston Churchill once said, democracy is the worst form of government — except, of course, for all the others.

Nick Carr, the great shit-disturber that he is, has a post up about what he sees as Web 2.0’s biggest problem: in a word, it’s “numbskulls.” Or rather, the high proportion of numbskulls — meaning either stupid people or those with more opinions than actual knowledge — when compared with people who actually know something or have whatever skills are necessary (the capacity for critical thought, a command of English grammar, etc.). As usual, Nick isn’t afraid to come off as an elitist. In fact, I think he kind of gets a kick out of it.

His point is that projects such as Wikipedia.org aren’t as good as they could be primarily because the people who have the time to devote to them aren’t necessarily the best people to be doing so, because they don’t have the skills or the knowledge — and the people who do have the skills or the knowledge are too busy, or not interested, or get outnumbered by the numbskulls. Here’s a classic Carr riff:

“Wikis and other Web 2.0 platforms for the creation of content are often described in purely egalitarian terms – as the products of communities of equals – [but] that’s just a utopian fantasy… No matter how vast, a community of mediocrities will never be able to produce anything better than mediocre work.”

And then a little later, he paints a picture of Wikipedia.org as a tiny band of smart people (most of whom attended Harvard, no doubt) holding back the wave of human stupidity that threatens to wash over them:

“When you look deeply into Wikipedia, beyond the shiny surface of “community,” you see that the encyclopedia is actually as much, or more, a product of conflict than of collaboration: It’s an endless struggle by a few talented contributors to clean up the mess left by the numbskull horde.”

As usual, Nick has a point underneath all that elitism, and it comes into sharper focus if you read a post by Andrew McAfee that Nick links to. McAfee’s point, as he puts it, is that “there’s also a long tail among people, and it relates not to willingness to consume (i.e. demand) but rather to willingness to produce.” Ross Mayfield makes a similar point about the numbers of people who are willing to contribute to Web 2.0-type ventures, in a post about the “power law of participation.” Ross has also posted a response to Nick, which is here.

So how do you get more people to contribute — or fewer numbskulls? In a response to a comment I posted on his blog, Nick says that he wasn’t suggesting en elite group should pick who contributes and who doesn’t, although I think it’s fair to infer that from what he has written. In any case, how do you guard against the numbskulls? In a post of his own, Umair Haque seems to be arguing much the same thing I would, which is that Wikipedia-type models are self-regulating to some extent, although they probably need “super-users” to guard against vandalism.

Unfortunately, Nick, when you open yourself up to a conversation, sometimes numbskulls show up. Comes with the territory. And as Andrew McAfee argues, the benefits of doing so outweigh the risks, even in a corporate environment. But to make it work, a company’s management has to really want it to, and has to be willing to accept the bad with the good.

As a lead-up to mesh in May, the Gang of Five — that is me, Rob Hyndman, Mark Evans, Mike McDerment and Stuart “call me Chairman Mao” MacDonald — have been talking a lot (not surprisingly) about the themes we want to look at, and crawling the blogosphere for evidence of how Web 2.0 and blogs are — or aren’t — affecting media, marketing, business and society/politics.

We decided to look at that last one in part because of the effect that bloggers had on the coverage of the Iraq war, on the election of George Bush and even on events such as the Jayson Blair affair at the New York Times — but also because of the effect that bloggers like Michael Geist and Ed “Captain’s Quarters” Morrissey and Joey DeVilla had on the Canadian election, when they helped destabilize and possibly derail the candidacy of Sarmite Bulte, the record labels’ best friend.

But we want to talk about more than that during the panels on the Web and politics/society at mesh in May. Could blogs and other Web-based technologies help non-profit groups and disadvantaged groups gain more of a voice, and thus help affect policy? And even broader than that, what are the implications of “open source” tools such as Wikipedia.org on human society — do they make it better or just reflect the worst elements of human nature? Mark wonders what Jane Jacobs could have done with a blog, and Rob asks whether they turn the blogosphere into an echo chamber. Stuart has some thoughts as well.

There’s plenty of material there for an entire conference, let alone a few panels and keynotes. Hopefully we’ll be able to pack enough of it into the time we have, and get plenty of participation and comments from attendees. If you have any thoughts or links, you can post them here or head over to the mesh wiki and throw them onto a page, or tag them with our del.icio.us links (described at the wiki).