My friend Bret Pettichord got the following spam. It makes me so proud! (sniff sniff):

Subject: She's got natural you know what, fake thick lips and has starred in several movies
Date:Wed, 9 Jun 2004 01:04:19 -0400 (EDT)

dtgvBrgvvkejqtf0eqo Does it help to try to keep these two senses of links distinct? If not, then I'm more confused than I

dtgvBrgvvkejqtf0eqodtgvBrgvvkejqtf0eqo dtgvBrgvvkejqtf0eqo Um, where is the post I posted here earlier today? Anyway, I thought I had psoted an advance notice, taken from Scott Rosenberg's weblog, of a Salon dual-review of two books, one of which is Small Pieces. But that post doesn't seem to be here. Maybe I fucked it up. But the article is up now, lead story on salon.com -- an excerpt: But the same people who got the Internet business so wrong got the Internet story wrong, too. IPOs and e-commerce and "network effect" growth rates were dazzling ephemera. But while magazine editors' eyes were transfixed by the business's convulsions, big things were happening under their noses: E-mail was transforming the workplace and the social landscape. Personal Web sites became "advertisements for myself" for the masses. "Communities of interest" -- devotees of certain obscure handicrafts; critics of certain large companies; followers of certain public policy debates -- formed and splintered and reformed in numbers too great to compile. New galaxies of communication coalesced, far off the familiar big-media grid. It's this story that's addressed by "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" -- an odd but wonderful series of essays by David Weinberger about how profoundly the Net is changing our lives. "Bamboozled at the Revolution" is trade-magazine reporting; "Small Pieces" is armchair philosophy. Still, you can learn far more about why and how the media lost their way online from Weinberger's musings on the nature of Web reality than from Motavalli's chronicles of boardroom chaos. Sorry if I've blurred a couple of different senses of links that should be kept distinct. On one level, we posit links as connections between people - as Kevin and David and I had in mind in speaking of connotation, affinity, etc. These occur via voice, interpretive inferences from collections of links, etc.. I think Alex Golub zoomed in on this in his piece about SPLJ. What struck me then, and comes into play here now, is that this all lies in the area of interpreting links - the hermeneutics of links. There is also the rudimentary functionality of links - what Ward calls the grammar - having to do with the the simple on/off way they work and how we use them. On the level of the current state of the code, we either 1) link or 2) do not link. If there is a link, we either 1. click, or 2. do not click. (More accurately, we have a few other "options" - we can run the mouse over and get an idea of where we would go if we clicked, and we can click and open a new screen (addition), rather than replace what is on the screen with a completely different screenful'o'content (substitution). I do both of these quite a bit.)

None of us were called for jury duty this morning, so I'm off for three years.

Too bad, because I was in the mood to make the wicked feel my wrath.

Off to jury duty this morning.

I recognize it as a civic duty, but that doesn't mean I want to do it. I've got a bunch of uncivic things I'd rather do instead (like live up to my obligations to my clients, work on a book, blog, play Zuma...).

Howard Rheingold (Smart Mobs) gave an informal lunchtime talk at the Berkman Center. Dave Winer recorded it and has posted the mp3. It was, of course, a terrific session; I am a huge fan. Howard isn't optimistic ("Who can be these days?") but he is hopeful. He's working on establishing an inter-disciplinary study of cooperation.

According to my dream last night, there truly are objects that bring good luck to their possessors. Unfortunately, the pool of objects changes rapidly, so that whether any particular object brings one luck is itself a matter of luck.

I'm spending the day blogging the Boston Globe's Ideas Conference. Over the course of two days, we're promised 32 ideas...

Our old Philips TiVo box (hacked so it has an extra HD in it) is showing every sign of imminent disk meltdown. Playback frequently freezes, requiring a hard boot.

Any Tivo or Linux hackers out there who know how to get the TiVo software to do some disk maintenance, blocking bad sectors, etc.?

Dear Rob,

I heard your talk at Esther Dyson's PC Forum about the importance of getting the defaults right, so it's with rueful irony that I spent five minutes this morning trying to figure out how to keep your product, the Real player, from auto-loading every time I start Windows.

I must have pressed some well-disguised button in my previous session because when I restarted XP this morning, the first thing to load was your AOL-wannabe entertainment center. "All" it takes to keep it from auto-starting is: Go to Tools-> Options and then Auto services->Message Center->Configure Message Center. Then uncheck everything. And even then I'm not at all sure I turned off "Launch at start up" because there's no box with a label like that. I may have only turned off the Message Center and I don't kinow what the Message Center is although I'm sure Real doesn't have enough to say to me that it requires its own special messaging client.

I use Real because there are streams encoded only for the Real player. I don't want Real at the center of my entertainment universe. I don't even want Real in the middle of my screen.

So, Rob, please get the defaults right. And no matter how right you get the defaults, please make it dead easy for us to change them. The whole experience makes your product look sleazy.

PS: Please don't tell me that Real has hijacked my file associations. Again.

Your pal,

I am now getting 2,000+ spams a day.

There are 1,440 minutes in a day

The rate of incoming spams is therefore getting close to the interval it takes me to check my email and dispose of a single spam: By the time I'm done checking, more spam has arrived. That is the point at which the spam droplets form a continuous stream.

In response to Jeneane's observation that I've been slighting women, and at the risk of being slightly obsessive, here's a list of every mention I've made of a blog since May 1.

1 Wireless blog starts - all men
2 I'm going to blog a conference — Neutral
3 Democratic Convention blog — All guys so far
4 AP writes up Joi Ito, male blogger
5 Halley interviews Andre — female blogger
6 Tool for turning your blog into a book — I credit a guy for the link
7 BlogCritics mention — mixed gender blog
8 Cluetrain writeup — Passing reference to Steve Johnson with a link to his blog.
9 Sudan blog — group blog, no indication of genders
10 Response to a blog entry by a guy at Worthwhile, a mixed-gender group blog
11 Link to BuzzMachine's list of people blogging a political conference — BuzzMachine is a male blogger
12 List of the bloggers sitting next to me at a conference - 4 male bloggers
13 Plea for money for RageBoy, male blogger
14 Joi wants to know where to go next - male blogger
15 Link to the blog of a political author — Male
16 Gay supreme court justice — link to AKMA, male blogger
17 Storage prices falling — link to a male blogger who tracks prices
18 Link to a woman who maintains a blog for her 2nd grade class
19 Link to my own blog over at Worthwhile, a mixed-gender blog
20 The Berg murder as PR event — Link to a woman blogger's comment
21 Link to Frank Paynter's reaction to a blog of mine

What this list tells me is that in the period covered, not only aren't there many women bloggers, there aren't many substantial discussions of blogs at all: I only responded substantially to a single blog, lightly disagreeing with David Batstone at Worthwhile. It seems I wasn't very engaged in the blogosphere.

In fact, listing the blog-mentions doesn't accurately represent what I've been blogging about, another sign of disengagement from the blogosphere. I wrote a whole bunch of entries celbrating gay marriage, a bigger bunch of entries about various aspects of the Abu Ghraib horrors, many entries on political issues (including assorted snipes at the current administration), scattered entries about spam remedies, a handful of semi-nerdy tech entries, and a couple of days of blogging from a political conference. By a rough count, about 27 of the 88 entries in this period were responses to items in the mainstream media. While that isn't so many more than the 21 blog mentions, the responses to mainstream items tended to be longer and far more substantial. In short, for the past few weeks I've been in "conversation" with the mainstream media much more than with other bloggers.

But, why the gender imbalance? And, for that matter, why the racial imbalance? The answer has to be complex, like asking why I have so few African-American friends: Well, in part it's because my neighborhood is too white and the conferences I hang out tend to be too white (for which there are complex reasons), and in part it's because I've been complacent, and there's undoubtedly an element of unconscious racism in it. Likewise, women have been under-represented in Joho for reasons just as complex.

Jeneane writes in a comment:

funny, but the cast of characters you mention here made me read down your blog with a keen eye for finding a woman to see what they/we might be up to in the making news department. I read lots of posts down into May. Didn't see one.

What this says to me, you being the ultimate fair and balanced blogger, and that is said sincerely, is that we women are just not flying above the blog noise radar these days.

This isn't so much a comment to you, David, but more to me, reinforcing what I've been feeling and why I haven't felt like writing anything meaningful lateley. I'm not sure what's going on, but it's getting creepy. Too much noise from the homogeny of voices, who are all starting to rather resemble one another. It's like people looking like their pets.

Either that, or I gotta get out more.

(Jeneane blogs more about the joy ebbing from her blogging.)

Well, that's a damn interesting observation.

Just to get the facts out and on the table, I went through my entries back through May 1. I did blog Halley's interview with Andre Durand a few days ago, but that's a "Some of my best friends are [whatever]" sort of excuse. And the Berkman brief was mainly written by a woman (or, at least that's who I dealt with when I provided my own comments on it), although my blog entry makes no mention of that because, well, it would have been more than odd to say "And, imagine, it was written by a woman!" When I reprinted an e e cummings poem, I credited Zephyr Teachout with pointing it out to me. I blogged a blog run by a 2nd grade class, led by a woman teacher. I blogged Heather's reaction to the Berg murder. I blogged a paper on semantic latent indexing, the lead author of which is a woman. That's it. Not a proud record.

Part of the explanation of Jeneane's dispiriting observation is that I have, it turns out, been blogging much more in response to the mainstream media than to other blogs. And much of the news that I cared about in the past 5 weeks was made by men killing other men, men running for president against other men, and men marrying men (and women marrying women). So, the sexism of interests is definitely at work. The fact is that I have spent less time over the past few weeks reading blogs than I have in the past: Work has been busy, the news has been dramatic, I've been slacking. If one were to analyze the number of blogs I've blogged about, the percentage of them written by women would be shameful but above zero.

So, I guess after browsing through 5 weeks of blogs, I want to dispute the severity of Jeneane's judgment but not the importance of her observation: Women's blogs are not impinging on my attention the way they deserve to. And for this blindness I have no acute explanation.

I've just agreed to be the official blogger of for the first day of Boston.com's Ideas Boston 2004 conference. The redoubtable Scott Kirsner will be blogging the second day. The blog should show up on Boston.com somewhere.

The DNC has started a convention blog. Matt Stoller, who likes to ask funny-disarming questions at conferences, is one of the bloggers, which is a very good sign.

The blog is looking for a name. Any suggestions? Other than "Conventional Wisdom," of course.

I woke up this morning from a vivid dream. Someone had been talking about a philosopher who liked to fast before he thought. Not for me, I replied, or else, Rene a la Carte would have written "I think, therefore I yam."

Remember all the problems I've had with electrical equipment? We've had a new panel put in, the electric company ran a new line from the pole, I've had two new 20 amp circuits run to my office, but my equipment still blows up.

The mega-UPS I use reports every time there is an outage. I have had 20 in the past 24 weeks, for a total down time of 3 minutes. But want to hear something interesting? The past three outages have all occurred at 7:49:26 AM, two on a Tuesday and one on a Wednesday.

When were org charts first used to depict a business' management structure? Anyone have any leads? All I could find on the Net was a link to a book by Stafford Beers that costs $115. While I wait for my local library to locate it, does anyone have any other sources/links?

I've been happily using PopFile to filter my spam in a Bayesian way. But it's inconvenient to train it because it's not integrated into my mail client (Outlook, ulp). I tried Outclass, but it was over-featured and under-explained. So, I'm trying out SpamBayes, another free Bayesian filter with seemingly good integration into Outlook. It doesn't filter into all the buckets that PopFile does, but it's easy to batch-train it against your existing junk and inbox folders.

Smoking gun: Time reports on a Pentagon email (from Douglas "Chicken Hawk" Feith) that says that Dick Cheney's office "coordinated" the awarding of a multi-billion dollar contract in Iraq for the company he formerly headed, Halliburton. (Reuters)

Holstered gun: The Boston Globe's Wayne Washington reports that Bush no longer mentions the prescription drug bill he rammed through Congress:

A Globe survey of Bush's and Vice President Dick Cheney's remarks indicate 22 mentions in December and January, four in February, five in March, one in April, and three in May.

The reason seems clear: The Medicare expansion, once viewed as a crucial link between Bush and seniors, is now a subject of intense scorn among many seniors.

The Boston Globe writes up the local band Jim's Big Ego because it encourages people to share the band's files. In September, they released an album under a Creative Commons license and it's been their biggest seller. In fact, Creative Commons and the band are holding a contest to find the most creative remix of their paean to mixing, "Mix Tape." One of the band members, Jim Infantino, talks about "community-based art patronage": "When you as a band act in good faith, you invite your fans to act in good faith."

I love all this, but I so don't believe that patronage — a fancy name for a tip jar — is going to be the way we keep our artists alive. There will be some successes that way, but I think we need a more structured way of paying, such as the EFF's suggestion that online music adopt an ASCAP/BMI model. But I ain't no stinking economist so, thankfully, I don't have to pretend to have a real opinion about this.

At 3pm, I bought my daughter a Samsung-Napster MP3 player. Deciding among the indiscernibles, the Napster's ability to broadcast to an FM channel for wireless car connectivity sold me.

At 7:30pm, I returned the Napster and got a Rio Karma.

I had a bad feeling about the Napster from the moment I started installing the software. It kept adding layers and layers of cruft, forcing me to upgrade my Windows Media Player, bundling in a CD burner, forcing me to register at Napster.com...window after window of incomprehensible files and DLLs until I wanted to scream that it ought to take its over-educated, over-engineered supercilious ass to the mountains and take up goat herding. And, sure enough, although Windows recognized the Napster device, the Napster software didn't. After four hours of trying, I gave up.

The Rio is a thing of beauty. Baddaboom, it installed. Baddabing, it let me download MP3s into it. Now that's the way software should work!

A growing percentage of the 2,000+ spams I'm receiving every day come to false names at my domain, evident.com. Here's a VBA script for Outlook that searches the selected entries in a folder and moves bogus ones sent to that domain into a folder of your choice. To use it, create a folder to receive the putative spam; I'm calling it YOUR_SPAM_FOLDER in the script, but you should change it to whatver yours is called. Also, replace "domain.com" with the domain of your mail, and be sure to specify the addresses to domain.com that you want to accept. (And watch out for bad wraps in the code below.)

Public Sub CheckForBadEvidents()

Dim ToWhom As String
Dim objNS As NameSpace
Dim objInbox As MAPIFolder
Dim objSpamFolder As MAPIFolder


Set objNS = Application.GetNamespace("MAPI")
Set objInbox = objNS.GetDefaultFolder(olFolderInbox)
Set objSpamFolder = objInbox.Folders("YOUR_SPAM_FOLDER")
   Dim objApp As Application
Dim objSelection As Selection
    Set objApp = CreateObject("Outlook.Application")
    Set objSel = objApp.ActiveExplorer.Selection
Dim objItem As Object


' check to make sure the folder is there
If objSpamFolder Is Nothing Then
 MsgBox ("Folder not found")
 Exit Sub
End If

 x = 0 ' count the number of hits, for fun

 For Each objItem In objSel
     If objItem.Class = 43 Then ' if mail msg

   ' get the To line
    ToWhom = objItem.to
   ' If it's to evident.com but not 
   ' to a recognized address...
   If InStr(ToWhom, "@domain.com") > 0 And _
      (ToWhom <> "yourname@domain.com" And _
      ToWhom <> "anothername@domain.com" And _
      ToWhom <> "etc_and_whatever@domain.com") _
      Then
      
    ' move it
    objItem.Move objSpamFolder
    x = x + 1
    End If
 End If
Next

MsgBox "Moved to YOUR_SPAM_FOLDER "    & x & _
   " msgs with ill-formed evident.com addresses."

end Sub

At the Personal Democracy Forum on Monday, Mathew Gross told me about LJBook, a tool that turns your blog into a printable PDF book. Then Stephen Fraser of LuLu.com sent me an email recommending LJBook; Lulu publishes and sells anyone's book. So I gave LJBook a try. It works. And it's free.

Over at Blogcritics.org I've just posted my guess about how the season ends. (Don't worry, not only am I just making stuff up, but I'm pretty much batting 0 with my previous predictions.) Hint: I hope you're not too emotionally attached to the bear.

I think it's been a good season. I love the ambiguity of Steve Buscemi's character. The episode featuring Meadow's boyfriend was difficult to watch, in the best sense, as was Adriana's big episode. My biggest disappointment, though, has been that I don't believe how the relationship with Carmella has developed; it feels like it's being pushed in that direction not by the characters but by the writers. (I'm trying not to give anything away for those who haven't caught up with their TiVo yet.) For me, The Sopranos remains the best acted and funniest show on TV, maybe ever.

I have a question that does require giving away an event in the penultimate episode. Here goes: [SPOILER ALERT]

Giles Turnbull writes in The Guardian on how that Cluetrain stuff worked out now that it's been five years since the site went up. Good article.

I'm always a bit awkward talking about Cluetrain. I think it was basically right about the value of the Net at a time when the media and most businesses were (IMO) insistently wrong. But, for example, the other day at a conference someone very sweetly thanked me, crediting Cluetrain as the inspiration for the company he'd founded. That's great to hear, but it also invokes my Flight or Polite instinct. Cluetrain tried to articulate ideas that were just below the surface (and occasionally above the surface) in the Web community, but now the co-authors sometimes get credit for the ideas.

The Passion of the Present is out to raise awareness of the Sudan:

In Darfur, a region in southern Sudan approximately the size of Texas, over a million people are threatened with torture and death at the hands of marauding militia and a complicit government. Imagine a militia that forces parents to choose whether their children will be burned alive or shot to death. Imagine that in the very same month the world remembers the genocides of Cambodia and Rwanda, the unfolding news of another in Sudan is barely heard and largely ignored.

The amount of spam I'm receiving seems to have stepped up significantly over the past few days, going from about 1,200 per day to about 2,000. I'm not seeing any particular pattern to the increase - they're not all coming from the same address, they're not all advertising remote control cars or Nigerian. beefsteak mines, nor has my address shown up on some high-traffic site, to the best of my knowledge. (Ironically, after Doc and I published World of Ends, my spam rate got a boost.)

Harvard's Berkman Center submitted a friend-of-the-court brief in the case of Capital Records, et al. v. Noor Alaujan:

The amici parties in the brief are individual members at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, acting not in the interest of any of the parties in the case but in the interest of helping the Court balance the competing claims of the Plaintiffs and Defendants.

This case requires balancing rights of copyright holders, who allege harms caused by the distribution of their songs on peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks, with protections for individual consumers accused of copying and distributing these songs on such networks. The briefing outlines some of the factual matters in the case, such as possible errors in the methods by which these users are identified, as well as more substantive legal issues such as potential fair use defenses and the question of whether merely storing files in shared folders violates Plaintiffs' rights of public distribution.

In this brief, amici parties urge the Courts to exercise caution in granting uniform remedies, given the diversity of possible factual and legal defenses that might be raised by individual users.