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The web responds to the untimely death of hacker-activist Aaron Swartz

The open web and freedom of information in general lost one of their most passionate proponents yesterday, with the death of early Reddit staffer and Demand Progress founder Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide on Friday, according to a family member. He was facing federal charges for hacking into the JSTOR academic database and downloading millions of research papers, but had also reportedly suffered from depression. He was 26 years old.

As the news of his death spread throughout the web and social networks like Twitter, there was an outpouring of grief and sorrow from some of his friends and those he had worked with on a number of projects — including the early development of the RSS syndication standard, the web.py software framework, the Creative Commons movement and the W3C web standards committee.

We’ve collected some of those comments and responses here (there’s also a Reddit thread and a Hacker News thread about his death, and Alexander Howard of O’Reilly Radar has collected some tweets and links of his own in a Storify post):

Update: Swartz’s family and his partner have released a statement about his death, in which they point the finger of blame directly at the U.S. Attorney’s office and say their prosecution played a role in Aaron’s suicide. The statement says:

“Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death.”

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the web, posted a message after he learned of the news, saying:

“Aaron dead. World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down. Parents all, we have lost a child. Let us weep.”

Cory Doctorow, author and BoingBoing co-founder, posted a long and heart-felt tribute to Swartz and a discussion of his struggles with depression, saying:

“Aaron accomplished some incredible things in his life. He was one of the early builders of Reddit (someone always turns up to point out that he was technically not a co-founder, but he was close enough as makes no damn), got bought by Wired/Conde Nast, engineered his own dismissal and got cashed out, and then became a full-time, uncompromising, reckless and delightful shit-disturber… we have all lost someone today who had more work to do, and who made the world a better place when he did it.”

Matt Haughey, the founder of Metafilter, posted a comment on his site about Aaron, whom he met while he was working on the Creative Commons project with Larry Lessig — and how at one programming event, Swartz had to come with his father because he was only 15:

“Aaron, I’m so sorry to see you go. You were an amazing person who did incredible work that helps us all out and I really wish you stayed for many more decades so you could continue making society a better place to be. I’ll really miss you.”

Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, posted a memorial entitled “Aaron Swartz, hero of the open world, dies” — and recalled working with the young man on Kahle’s Open Library project, which he helped to code:

“Aaron was steadfast in his dedication to building a better and open world. Selfless. Willing to cause change. He is among the best spirits of the Internet generation. I am crushed by his loss, but will continue to be enlightened by his work and dedication. May a hero and founder of our open world rest in peace.”

In 2007, Swartz wrote what many took to be a suicide note (thanks to Nik Cubrilovic for the link) after he had been fired by Conde Nast (which acquired Reddit in 2006), a note that eventually led Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian to call the police and break into Swartz’s apartment. The young programmer later explained that he wrote it while he was in pain due to a medical issue, but some friends took it as a sign that he was struggling with emotional problems as well.

In 2007, Philipp Lenssen of the blog Google Blogoscoped posted a long interview with Swartz about his development as a programmer, his work with Reddit and Creative Commons, getting fired by Conde Nast and a number of other topics:

“Seriously, though, the Web is what we make of it. We have a powerful, widely-deployed, largely uncontrolled communication network. It’s up to us to decide where to go next.”

John Gruber of the Apple blog Daring Fireball also posted a tribute, saying: “Aaron was a friend and a brilliant mind… he had an enormous intellect — again, a brilliant mind — but also an enormous capacity for empathy. He was a great person. I’m dumbfounded and heartbroken.”

Swartz was also involved in the fight against SOPA, the draconian anti-piracy law that Congress tried to pass last year — this is a video of him discussing the campaign against the bill, which was later shelved:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgh2dFngFsg&w=500&h=315]

Many of those who mourned Swartz’s passing wondered whether he knew how respected and loved he was by those who were close to him:

Some of Swartz’s supporters in his fight against the federal charges related to his JSTOR hacking questioned whether the threat of jail time might have accelerated his depression, but others said he didn’t seem that troubled by it. As we wrote last year, Swartz — who had hacked into a federal database in 2009 and download thousands of documents but never been prosecuted for it — gained access to a computer at Harvard and ran a program that downloaded a huge proportion of the research papers JSTOR sells to universities and other institutions.

Larry Lessig, who worked with Swartz on Creative Commons and other projects, has written a post saying what his young friend did with the JSTOR archive was wrong — although the principle may have been right — but that the government’s case against him was reprehensible and over-reaching in the extreme: “Here is where we need a better sense of justice, and shame. For the outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron. It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor’s behavior. From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way.”

https://twitter.com/declanm/status/290032735479808000

According to those who knew him, Swartz believed that it was wrong to charge so much for access to these papers, many of which were produced by academics for free, and in some cases with government funding (Maria Bustillos has a great overview of the case here). And even though JSTOR said it didn’t want to proceed with a case against him (and has since opened up its database — at least a little) the Department of Justice continued with its case, and Swartz faced a potential 35 years in prison.

Bradley Horowitz of Google, and formerly of Yahoo, remembered talking with Swartz about his plans to use Hangouts for journalistic purposes around the Occupy Wall Street movement:

“I was really heart-broken by this news… Thank you Aaron, for all you contributed to the world, and inspiring so many.”

https://twitter.com/sivavaid/status/290137149225959424

In this video conversation from 2008, Swartz talked about how he got started as a programmer with Economist blogger Will Wilkinson:

http://static.bloggingheads.tv/ramon/_live/players/player_v5.2-licensed.swf

Swartz had prepared a webpage in the event that he was “hit by a truck” as he put it:

“I ask that the contents of all my hard drives be made publicly available from aaronsw.com… please update the footer of this page with a link. Also email the relevant lists and set up an autoresponder for my email address to email people who write to me. Feel free to publish things people say about me on the site. Oh, and BTW, I’ll miss you all.”

Web pioneer and Harvard fellow Doc Searls wrote a memorial post for Swartz, along with a picture of him at a conference with Dave Winer — a conference Swartz had to be driven to by his mom, since he was only 15 — and said: “We haven’t just lost a good man, but the better world he was helping to make.”

Alex Macgillivray, general counsel at Twitter and former Google lawyer, said:

A comment on the discussion thread on the Y Combinator site Hacker News that appeared to be from Swartz’s mother said:

“Thank you all for your kind words and thoughts. Aaron has been depressed about his case/upcoming trial, but we had no idea what he was going through was this painful. Aaron was a terrific young man. He contributed a lot to the world in his short life and I regret the loss of all the things he had yet to accomplish. As you can imagine, we all miss him dearly. The grief is unfathomable.”

Microsoft research and sociologist Danah Boyd has written about the boy/man she knew for the past nine years, and how he could be both brilliant and frustrating — but she says the thing that makes her the angriest is how unreasonable his prosecution was: “He became a toy for a government set on showing their strength. And they bullied him and preyed on his weaknesses and sought to break him. And they did.”

David Weinberger of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society has a post on his blog in which he calls Aaron Swartz not a hacker but “a builder.” And Weinberger points (as many others have) to a post from Alex Stamos, an expert in information technology who was an expert witness in Swartz’s case, who argues that his downloading of JSTOR articles wasn’t a criminal hack: “I know a criminal hack when I see it, and Aaron’s downloading of journal articles from an unlocked closet is not an offense worth 35 years in jail.”

Micah Sifry of TechPresident remembers meeting Aaron in 2004, when he was 18, and being impressed with how dedicated he was: “I don’t know where he got the bug, but I understood it. If you have “change the world” disease, there is only one cure. And he tried mightily to change the world using every tool at his disposal.” And Dan Gillmor argues that we should remember Aaron by working for open society and against government abuses: “So amid my grief for Aaron, I’m angry — and committed to working for honorable enforcement of rational laws, and for values Aaron exemplified in his short life.”

https://twitter.com/dangillmor/status/290152893217124353

James Grimmelmann, a law professor at New York Law School who knew Swartz well, writes about some of the incredible things that he accomplished at such a young age: “Aaron was a friend, and more than that, he was one of my heroes. No one I have known better embodied the bumper-sticker motto to “be the change you wish to see in the world.” It is hard to believe he is gone.” And Glenn Greenwald writes at The Guardian about what he calls the “inspiring heroism” of Aaron Swartz — he didn’t just talk about internet freedom and civil liberties, Greenwald says, “He repeatedly sacrificed his own interests, even his liberty, in order to defend these values and challenge and subvert the most powerful factions that were their enemies. That’s what makes him, in my view, so consummately heroic.”

A number of academics have tried to honor Swartz’s commitment to open information by making their journal articles free to download. And Quinn Norton, who was Swartz’s girlfriend for a time, has written a heart-wrenching post about their time together here.

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The pros and cons of newspaper paywalls — a Storify conversation

Having a debate about the merits and/or disadvantages of newspaper paywalls is nothing new — one seems to break out whenever two or more journalists are in a room together — but not all of them involve a former Dow Jones chief executive, a former Wall Street Journal executive, a current Wall Street Journal managing editor, the president of BuzzFeed and the media reporters for Bloomberg and All Things Digital. Since I got involved in one that did on Sunday afternoon, I thought I would Storify it so others could eavesdrop in a digital sense.

The conversation didn’t actually solve the question of the merits of paywalls, because it’s not the kind of question that has a specific answer — it’s more about the tradeoffs involved, and the effects that subscription plans can have on a content business. But there were some interesting viewpoints expressed and some interesting facts debated, such as the news that charging readers hasn’t improved the advertising picture at the New York Times (something many paywall advocates argued that it would do). The Storify is here, and I also posted an edited version at GigaOM.

//storify.com/mathewi/the-pros-and-cons-of-paywalls.js[View the story “The pros and cons of paywalls” on Storify]

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Wikipedia, Instagram and real-time news

I realize that RSS feeds are kind of passé (sorry, Dave) and so some readers may have missed some of my recent posts over at GigaOM — so I have collected some of them here in case you want to catch up:

  • “Ruining the social web: How can we avoid the Bieber effect?” — Does every social network eventually become so large and noisy that it turns into a broadcast-style platform instead of something truly social? And is the desire for monetization and revenue part of what drives social platforms to look out for their own interests instead of users?

  • “What Wikipedia can tell us about the future of news” — Researcher Brian Keegan specializes in analysing the way that information flows through Wikipedia during a breaking news event, and recently compared the way that seven mass shootings — including the incident at Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut — were reported on the crowdsourced encyclopedia. He found some interesting patterns that media entities of all kinds might want to pay attention to.

  • “Who’s to blame for the Instagram debacle? Take a look in the mirror” — Instagram has come under fire — as other services based on user-generated content have — for changing its terms of service in a way that suggests it might experiment with advertising. But should that really be a surprise? What else should we expect from a free service?

  • “Like it or not, real-time crowdsourced news verification is here to stay” — Critics of the kind of real-time verification that National Public Radio editor Andy Carvin practices on Twitter during events like the Sandy Hook shootings say the process introduces too many errors and sows confusion — but the benefits of this approach arguably outweigh the disadvantages.

  • “Why an Apple-Foursquare partnership would make sense” — According to one report, Apple is considering a partnership with Foursquare that would involve using the location-based service’s data inside Apple’s maps. That would be a smart move for Apple at a time when its maps have come under heavy fire for a lack of features.

  • “It’s not Twitter — this is just the way the news works now” — The way that inaccurate news reports about a mass shooting in Connecticut filtered out through social media has brought up many of the same criticisms as Hurricane Sandy — that social media isn’t an appropriate forum for journalism. But this is simply the way news works now.
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The space shuttle, the future of media and a Twitter town hall

Inspired by my friend @om — who has collected some of his recent posts on his Om.is.me blog — I thought I would do the same and put together a list of some of the things I wrote during the past week, in case anyone missed something they might be interested in. So this week, among other things, I wrote about:

And yes, it seems that I like headlines with question marks in them 🙂

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The space shuttle: So flawed, yet so inspiring — so human

(Note: This was originally published at Gigaom)

As the U.S. space shuttle program comes to an end with today’s launch of the Atlantis, there’s been a lot of looking back at the modern space program, including our own collection of memories from a number of GigaOM staff. As I mentioned in that post, my memories of the shuttle come not just from watching the Challenger explode in 1986 but also from covering the launch of the shuttle Discovery in 2005, the first launch after the explosion of the Columbia shuttle two years earlier. What struck me most about that event was how jury-rigged and flawed things seemed, especially for a multibillion-program aimed at putting people into space — and yet, how inspiring it all was at the same time.

The so-called “Return to Flight” mission in 2005 (STS-114 in official terms), was a pretty big deal, even for NASA. After the Columbia blew up on re-entry over Texas, killing the entire crew, an investigation found that a small piece of foam had broken off the vehicle’s main propellant tank and then hit the edge of the left wing, damaging the protective shield that protected the wing during re-entry. NASA engineers said later they knew this had happened and that it could cause problems, but the agency didn’t mention it because there was nothing they could do at the time.

NASA spent two years working on the foam issue, and getting ready to go back into space, and I could tell just from walking around the Kennedy Space Center and listening to briefings before and during the mission that there was a huge amount riding on the mission (the space agency spent much of the time between launches working with the manufacturer of the Canadarm robot arm so the shuttle crew could use it to inspect the exterior of the shuttle after they were in space).

Everyone was very aware of how much was at stake, especially a couple of the astronauts I spoke with at the time — such as Canadian commander Chris Hadfield, who talked a lot about NASA’s duty to honor the memories of those who were killed in the Columbia disaster. And the pressure intensified when the launch was postponed after some faulty sensor problems in one of the external fuel tanks. (I wrote about the launch for the Globe and Mail newspaper, where I worked at the time — if you can’t get to that link, here’s a local copy).

The subtext to many of the discussions about the shuttle and future launches was the knowledge that the shuttle program was approaching the end of its life — and not just that, but the knowledge that despite all the billions that were poured into it, the shuttle never managed to fulfill the initial dreams that fuelled the program, even if it did contribute to the development of the space station.

Many of the science and space experts on hand for the launch (and even one or two astronauts, off the record), pointed out that the shuttle was essentially flawed from the beginning because it was a hybrid beast: not really a plane and not really a rocket, but a fusion of the two with all the associated problems of both (including no escape route for the crew). More than one person noted that the Russian space program — which went with the old-fashioned capsule and rocket method — had an almost spotless record of sending people into orbit, and was substantially cheaper as well.

But during the days I spent there between the original launch date and when the shuttle actually lifted off, that wasn’t what people talked about in the back halls and trailers around the Kennedy Space Center. What people like Cmdr. Hadfield talked about was the human elements of the program — the little jokes and tributes that the mission specialists on the ground would send out to the astronauts while they were in orbit, including playing the on-duty astronaut’s favorite song or national anthem as the shuttle passed over their home country; or the long hours spent lying on their backs waiting for the shuttle to launch and the off-color jokes they told to pass the time.

What struck me about these kinds of stories was the same thing that hit me when I got to the Kennedy Space Center and noticed the somewhat run-down looking nature of the facility — from the 1960s-era chairs and decor in the media building (black Bakelite rotary telephones!) to the battered rental trailers that still made up much of the Center’s administrative quarters, even in 2005. Far from being some kind of monolithic, glossy, Star Trek-style venture, the shuttle program seemed more like a startup in some ways: underfunded, making do with whatever it had, just a bunch of smart engineers and eager pilots engaged in trying to do something incredible.

Yes, the idea of the space shuttle never really panned out, and maybe it was a flawed idea to begin with. And it certainly had more than its share of problems, some of which were probably avoidable, and suffered from the usual military and government bureaucracy to boot. But it still managed to achieve something pretty inspiring — and when it came right down to it, it was the human beings at the center of it all who mattered most, not the billions of dollars in technology. That’s something worth remembering.

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You Can’t Play a New Media Game By Old Media Rules

If there’s one aspect of the media business that has been disrupted more completely than any other, it’s the whole idea of “breaking news.” Just as television devalued the old front-page newspaper scoop, the web has turned breaking news into something that lasts a matter of minutes — or even seconds — rather than hours. If your business is to break news, your job is becoming harder and harder every day, as legendary Deadline Hollywood blogger Nikki Finke is only the latest to discover. Finke’s company has accused a competing news site of stealing news stories, and seems to be trying to use the “hot news” doctrine of 1918 to bolster its case. But relying on laws from the turn of the century isn’t going to help make the web-based content business any easier, regardless of the merits of Finke’s complaint.

According to the cease-and-desist letter that Finke’s MMC Corp. sent to TheWrap — a blog run by former Washington Post staffer Sharon Waxman — that site has been “engaged in a continuous pattern of misappropriating content from Deadline.com, publishing that information on TheWrap.com, passing off that information as its own.” So far, the only response from TheWrap has been to post the entire letter, and to describe the criticism as “strangely worded,” since it notes that the allegations from Finke’s site don’t actually refer to any specific stories that have been copied or misappropriated. And while Finke criticizes sites that simply call a source to verify Deadline’s stories and then rewrite them, if this is illegal then virtually the entire traditional media industry is in danger of being sued at some point.

To add an extra layer of irony to the whole affair, Waxman herself complained last year about her site’s content being appropriated by Newser.com, the news aggregator run by Michael Wolff — and she sent a cease-and-desist letter making almost identical arguments to the ones that Deadline Hollywood is now making against TheWrap.

Please read the rest of this post at GigaOM

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Should We Be Keeping Score on Twitter? Klout Thinks So

As the race continues to find a reliable way of measuring influence in social networks and the “reputation graph,” Klout — one of the front-runners in that business, along with competitor PeerIndex — has launched an extension for Google’s Chrome browser that lets you see the Klout score of all the people you follow on Twitter when you go to the Twitter.com website. But is that a good thing? It certainly is if you like to keep score of how you stack up against your friends and followers — and plenty of people love to do just that, even if the score is based on something they don’t really understand. But at least for now, the Klout score is still somewhat of a blunt instrument, without enough knowledge about the people it is ranking to make it a must-have piece of the new reputation graph.

The company’s new Chrome extension, which came out of an internal hackathon, puts a big orange “K” symbol and a score right next to the name of the people in your stream on the Twitter website. You can achieve the same thing with other browsers as well, and if you use the Seesmic social-network platform you can also install an extension that adds the Klout rank to your Twitter stream. After I installed the Chrome extension, I caught myself — almost subconsciously — thinking as I watched the tweet-stream flow by: “Wow — he’s only a 61? I thought he would be more,” and “Holy cow, he’s a 72!” and so on. Human beings just love to keep score.

Please read the rest of this post at GigaOM

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It’s Facebook Vs. Twitter In the Race to Make the News Social

Facebook has disrupted or helped to re-engineer many businesses and markets, including the photo-sharing market and the social-gaming market. But one thing it hasn’t really focused on so far is the news business. Plenty of media companies use Facebook as a news-delivery platform, and many users (including Gawker founder Nick Denton, according to a recent interview) rely on it as a news source. But Facebook itself hasn’t done much to capitalize on that. That could change, however, judging by some comments from chief technology officer Bret Taylor in an interview with the BBC — and it could pit the social network against Twitter in the race to become a social news platform.

While Taylor — the former co-founder of the social network FriendFeed — didn’t provide much in the way of details during his interview, he did say that he sees disruption coming to a number of industries as a result of social platforms like Facebook, much like it has to gaming, and that one of those disrupted industries is likely to be media:

If we had to guess, it’s probably going to be orientated around media or news, because they are so social. When you watch a television show with your friend, it’s such an engaging social activity. We think that there’s a next generation of startups that are developing social versions of these applications, where what Zynga is to gaming, they will be to media and news, and we’re really excited about that.

Taylor’s comments seem to suggest that Facebook isn’t looking to do anything news-related itself, but is hoping that developers will come up with social-news applications that can run on top of the Facebook platform, the same way that Zynga’s games like Farmville or Cityville do. One example might be an app like Flipboard, which takes a person’s Facebook stream and makes it part of a social-news service, and another interesting experiment is an app called PostPost. Facebook is also clearly continuing to push the open-graph plugin strategy that has helped sites like The Huffington Post drive massive amounts of traffic and comments to the site, and offering improved commenting as a plugin for media outlets appears to be a focus as well.

(Please read the rest of this post at GigaOM)

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Ingram Family Christmas Letter for 2010

I’ve taken a little time off from deciphering classified U.S. diplomatic cables on the WikiLeaks website to bring you some news about the Ingram family — or my little branch of it anyway. As usual, I am going to leave out most of the disappointments and exaggerate the highlights until they are all out proportion, because that’s how I roll in these Christmas letters. As just one sign of what a great year it has been for the entire Ingram clan, I am typing these words on my iPad — one of the few times that I have been able to get it out of the clutches of one of my lovely daughters, who seem to believe that I got it for them to play Angry Birds or Fruit Ninja.

The year started as most of our recent years have: with a lovely New Year’s party up in the frozen north country near Buckhorn (yes, there really is such a place), at the Farm with Marc and Kris and several other friends and family members. We skated on the pond near the old farmhouse and played ice bocce, a challenging game involving frozen Tide bottles filled with water, and even did a little skating and hiking on the trails around the property, when the weather co-operated. Then it was back to the city and back to reality. Caitlin headed back to McMaster for the last part of her second year of nursing, and Meaghan went back to Grade 11 and her musical theatre obsession, and Zoe went back to finish off Grade 6 — the end of primary school.

At the same time, I made a life-changing decision. No, I didn’t decide to shave off my beard or convert to the Church of the Subgenius (already a member, I am happy to say). I left the Globe and Mail after 15 years working there in a variety of writing and editing roles — most recently as the paper’s first “community editor,” helping reporters and editors try to understand Twitter and Facebook and comments on news stories and how to handle all these new tools for “social media.” On January 18, I became a senior writer with a technology blog network based in San Francisco called GigaOM, named after founder Om Malik, who I got to know several years ago.

Leaving the Globe was hard, and not just because my mother doesn’t really know what to say now when people ask her what I do for a living. I worked with a lot of great people, and I enjoyed being part of a great media company, but it was time to move on, and if you like writing about technology and how it is changing the media and changing our lives — and I do — then the web is where you need to do it (I think this Internet thing is really going to take off). GigaOM is a great outfit with a terrific team of writers and editors, and visiting San Francisco every couple of months is pretty great too, even if it is rainy and cool a lot of the time (I did get to meet Craig Newmark of Craigslist though).

But enough about me. As we have most years, we visited Ottawa for Winterlude with Becky’s sister Barb and her family, as well as Becky’s brother Dave and his family. We skated the canal and stuffed our faces with beaver tails and poutine and maple taffy rolled up on a stick, and a great time was had by all. In March, we headed down to Florida with Meaghan and Zoe, and visited Becky’s mom Edie and her boyfriend Ron at Ron’s place on the east side of Florida — where we took in a baseball game — then headed over for some time on the west side near the Gulf, where Edie still has a place. Coming back to winter was hard, but by then spring was on its way.

In May, we took a fantastic trip to California with some friends, renting cars and driving up Highway 101 north of San Francisco through Sonoma wine country (where we stopped at a number of great wineries, both big and small) to a little town called Redway, where Kris’s family has a couple of cabins deep in a redwood forest, built by her grandfather. We spent a week there, hiking through the giant trees in Humboldt State Park, driving the winding mountain roads out to Shelter Cove on the “Lost Coast,” kayaking with some sea lions near the tiny town of Trinidad, and hiking through Fern Canyon — where they filmed part of Jurassic Park because it looks like the dawn of time. On the way back to San Francisco we stopped at a small airfield and went for rides in a glider as well as a restored open-cockpit bi-plane, which was incredibly fun. And we also did some typical San Francisco things, like climbing the Coit Tower and visiting Alcatraz.

May also saw the fifth annual Mesh conference, which drew a sell-out crowd to hear people like the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and author Joseph Menn talk about privacy online. The team at the excellent TVO show The Agenda even showed up at Mesh to film a panel on the topic — which I was a member of — and host Steve Paikin did a terrific job with it as usual. Mesh put on its first spin-off conference in November as well, called MeshMarketing, which was also a great success.

In June, we had Zoe’s graduation from Grade 6, which was a star-studded event that involved a team of hair-dressers known as sister Caitlin and her friends. And Meaghan went off to spend the entire summer at a camp near the Ingram summer homestead in the Ottawa Valley, where she was a counsellor and kitchen staff and had a fantastic time. At one point during the summer, she had her little sister Zoe and about six of Zoe’s cousins and friends there as well, and she was so professional that she only tormented them a tiny bit here and there. Caitlin spent the summer taking courses at McMaster, since jobs in nursing proved to be elusive.

Becky and I spent the summer working at the cottage, sitting out on the porch overlooking the lake, with a laptop set up on a table on wheels — and we picked the perfect summer to do it, since the temperatures were in the 30s for weeks at a time. The downside was that we were working, but the upside was that during breaks we could go for a swim, or take a paddle in the new canoe we bought (to replace the one that got crushed by the same tree that took out the corner of the cottage last year). And in August we had a great party at the Farm for Becky’s 50th, with cake and ice cream and champagne down by the pond and a wonderful crowd of friends and family.

The fall saw Meaghan move into Grade 12, where she has been working like a trouper on the school musical, getting up early and staying late on school days and weekends, along with working at her job at the deli at the local Metro (which did not survive the year, unfortunately). Zoe moved into Grade 6, and seemed to go from being a child to being quite the young lady almost overnight — although she continues to play hockey on both a house league and a select team, where she is a great defenceman and a sometime goalie. And Caitlin started her third year of nursing, and even managed to squeeze in some time to see her family now and then.

We visited The Farm to do the usual annual cutting down of harmless trees and had a giant bonfire. And I did a couple of quick trips to San Francisco — one in November where I dropped in on Twitter and a second one in December where I attended a party and some complete strangers I met decided to take a photo that looked like we had just dropped the hottest album of the year. The year ended with a fantastic retreat weekend at Blue Mountain near Collingwood organized as a working mini-vacation for the Mesh team and their families. We had a day of meetings but also some great food and skiing and swimming in the outdoor heated pools and hot tubs, topped off by a great Scandinavian spa day with a one-hour Swedish massage followed by a series of hot pools, cold plunges, steam rooms and saunas. A pretty fantastic end to the year.

We hope your year was just as good, and that all of your friends and loveds ones are happy and well, and that you get a chance to see them over the holidays. And if we haven’t seen you in a while, please know that you are in our thoughts and that we would love to get together sometime. Give us a ring or drop us a line at [email protected] or [email protected]. All the best.

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Top Twitter Trend for 2010: No, It Wasn’t Justin Bieber

The year isn’t quite over yet, but Twitter has already come out with the top trending topics for 2010, and surprisingly enough Justin Bieber — the guy who is so popular that Twitter had to modify the way it calculates trending topics — did not take the top slot. That went to the Gulf oil spill. Soccer and movies were also top discussion topics, relegating Mr. Bieber to the number eight spot on Twitter’s list (although he did get number one on the people-related trend list). The numbers came from Twitter’s analysis of more than 25 billion tweets sent during the year.

Trending topics have been a somewhat controversial issue for Twitter over the past week or so, with a number of users accusing the company of censoring its trends to keep WikiLeaks from being a top discussion topic. Twitter eventually posted an explanation of how it arrives at the top trends, noting that the feature is designed to show topics that are being discussed more than they have been previously — in other words, if Bieber discussion is hot and heavy for days at a time, then that becomes the benchmark and it will not become a trending topic until it goes above that level.

(Please read the rest of this post at GigaOM here).

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In Which I Appear on CNN — Sort Of

Jeff Jarvis was on Howard Kurtz’s show on CNN today talking about WikiLeaks and the need for government transparency (which he also wrote about at Huffington Post), and said some nice things towards the end of his interview about my recent piece at GigaOM on WikiLeaks — in which I argued that WikiLeaks is effectively a media entity, and deserves the protection of the First Amendment just as the New York Times and other mainstream publishers do. Thanks for the shoutout, Jeff (if you’re in a hurry, it comes right at the end — timestamp 9:40 or so).

http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/.element/apps/cvp/3.0/swf/cnn_416x234_embed.swf?context=embed&videoId=politics/2010/12/05/rs.media.wikileak.documents.cnn

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Marketers and Social Media: Cutting Through the Noise

Marketers of all kinds have been lured by the promise of social networking, and the ease with which they can set up Facebook pages and Twitter accounts for their companies and even their individual brands. But does any of that have a tangible effect on what they are trying to accomplish? According to a new report from Forrester Research, it often does not — primarily because Generation Y users are overwhelmed with Facebook friends and Twitter and MySpace accounts already, and it’s hard for marketing messages to cut through the clutter. Forrester’s advice? Make your content more interesting.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Luc Legay

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Reasons to Love the Internet: The Rain Dance

Maybe you’ve seen the video embedded here before, but for me the first time was today, when a friend (@rhh) re-tweeted a link from Ze Frank, and all the tweet said was “how great is this.” I am a big fan of Ze’s from way back, so I knew it would be a link to something wonderful — and so it was. It was a video of some street dancers in Oakland, standing on a street corner in the rain and doing a variety of hip hop called “turf dancing,” with a combination of flips and spins as well as moonwalking and styling.

I watched it with my daughters and they wanted to know more about it, so I tried to track down who the dancers were and why the video was shot. It seemed obvious that the videographer knew the dancers would be there, but it wasn’t a music video — and why do it on some non-descript street corner, in the pouring rain? The YouTube clip said that it was from Yak Films, so I checked out the company and found the video was called “RIP Rich D” and it featured a turf dancing troupe called Turf Feinz.

But why that street corner, and why in the rain? I finally found a few links that explained it: first a link from a blog pointed me to Kottke, which had a link to Snarkmarket (which I highly recommend). Turns out the video originally went viral in July, when it got posted to some blogs (I missed it somehow). The street corner was where the half-brother of one of the dancers in Turf Feinz was killed in a car accident a few days earlier. The group decided to go and do a tribute dance in his honour on the corner where he died, and allowed Yoram Savion of Yak Films to go and videotape them.

I knew the video had a magical quality of some kind, but I didn’t know why. Learning the story behind it made it even more touching. Just another reason why I love the Internet. If your bandwidth can handle it, I encourage you to watch it full screen.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQRRnAhmB58?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0&border=1&w=480&h=303]

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TVO’s The Agenda: The “Death of the Web”

I had the chance to be on a panel last Friday as part of TVO’s The Agenda, thanks to superstar producer and occasional blowgun-hunter Mike Miner (ask him about that last part, if you get the chance). Hosted by the reliably excellent Steve Paikin, the panel took a look at a number of recent topics, including the so-called “death of the web” — as predicted by Wired magazine’s trend-caller-in-chief, Chris Anderson — and the rise of the app economy.

Also on the panel were a pair of Jesses (one Jesse Hirsh, tech commentator, and one Jesse Brown, host of Search Engine) and Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, the guy who pretty much invented the term “net neutrality,” and as it turns out a transplanted Torontonian. I really enjoyed the panel, so I’ve embedded the video here — not so much because I am in it, but because I thought some great issues were raised around things like the open vs. closed debate when it comes to technology, and so on.

Tim in particular made some excellent points about relying on private enterprises like Google to fight for openness and negotiate with totalitarian states such as China.

http://www.tvo.org/video/tvoMain.swf