Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Is doom rolling toward the Internet as we know it?

For Mark Cuban the threat is our insatiable need for more and more bandwidth:

Sure, new bandwidth is being added on networks every day. But guess what, our ability to consume bandwidth is growing far, far faster than the speed at which it is being added… The bigger and more powerful our PCs become, the more specialized processors that are enabled with internet connectivity, the more bandwidth we all consume.

Meanwhile, in Jakob Nielsen’s nightmares, so much Internet revenue gets picked up by giant search engines that there’s nothing left for the people who create web content:

There’s no doubt that search engines provide a valuable service to users. The issue here is what search engines do to the companies they feed on — the companies that fund the creation of original information. Search engines mainly build their business on other websites’ content. The traditional analysis has been that search engines amply return the favor by directing traffic to these sites. While there’s still some truth to that, the scenario is changing…Paid search confiscates too much of a website’s value.

Are you starting to flash on one of those Jolt-Cola nightmares where your web-powered Indiana Jones persona starts getting chased by a huge Katamari Damacy* rolling ball?

The truth is, lots of people have created real value all over the huge gift economy of “The Internet as we know it.” And lots of other people are working for changes that will let them roll up that value into their own pockets.

I’m glad that two such different web-giants are having such similar nightmares.

When I was working for Feedster, I drank all their Koolaid. I played with every feature and got excited about all the new ways that other people dreamed up to use it. Reading what Robert Scoble and Dave Winer have to say about product “evangelism,” I’m wondering if I should try to change my style.

Robert Scoble speaks out for low-key, rational evangelism:

[Guy Kawasaki] looks at the products he’s evangelizing as a “cause.” I don’t look at the world that way….But, go even further. I really don’t want religious customers. I want skeptical, educated, pragmatic customers.

Dave Winer adds:

Scoble’s method works better. I’m tired of hearing about your religion. I’m not that way. I think computers are tools, not causes. My use of the computer, that’s a cause.

Now I’m working for Ookles.com. Love the people, love the product, excited about the company. Well, I wouldn’t be working for them if it wasn’t so. But Ookles is not a cause, not a religion, not something that my friends all “have to” believe in. It’s an unexplored tech opportunity that I’m looking forward to becoming an expert on playing with.

But if, once the whole thing starts playing out in public forums–if you see me guykawasaki-ing in a way that make you uncomfortable, please let me know. And let’s still be friends. I mean, Feedster was far from perfect but every complaint we got helped us make the product better.

“Hey, Larry and Sergey, can you please return our evil where it belongs?”

“Life is a fountain.” For some reason, this catch-phrase always brings me comfort. It comes from a long shaggy-dog tale I once heard:

A man sold all his possessions and left his family to travel the world, because he wanted to know the meaning of life. After many years of seeking, and near despair, his last hope was a guru who lived high up on a very dangerous mountain. Up the mountain our seeker went, through a thunderstorm, tired and desperate and hungry–his food was all gone, he injured one foot but struggled on with a cane out of a tree branch. Finally, on top of the mountain, there sat the guru, surrounded by tame animals, with bright sunlight breaking through a hole in the clouds to shine all around him.

The seeker staggered forward. “O holy guru, I have given up everything to seek the truth, but it will all be worthwhile if you can answer my question: What is the meaning of life?”

The guru smiled and said, “My son, here is the answer you seek: Life is a fountain.”

After a long pause, the seeker shook his head. “A fountain? I have come thousands of miles to hear your words–my possessions are all gone, I’m starving, I’ll probably die on this mountain–and all you have to say is, life is a fountain?”

The guru trembled. “You mean…it’s not a fountain?”

And, I have to admit, I like the tale even better now that I’ve read these variants by philosopher Robert Nozick:

A man goes to India, consults a sage in a cave and asks him the meaning of life. In three sentences, the sage tells him, the man thanks him and leaves. There are several variants of this story also: In the first, the man lives meaningfully ever after; in the second he makes the sentences public so that everyone then knows the meaning of life; in the third, he sets the sentences to rock music, making his fortune and enabling everyone to whistle the meaning of life; and in the fourth variant, his plane crashes as he is flying off from his meeting with the sage. In the fifth version, the person listening to me tell this story eagerly asks what sentences the sage spoke. And in the sixth version, I tell him.

Anyway, thanks to Jeanne Kane who just sent me email saying how much she enjoyed “It reduces to a problem previously solved”–one of my favorite catch-phrases, which popped up in my podcast with Dave Winer. Jeanne, here’s another favorite, hope you can use it!

Heh. So on top of the usual holiday madness including a brand-new “baby” with Frank, I got Scott Johnson’s hilarious and impossible invitation to Ookles.

Ookles, in case you’re confused, is a project to develop a product (which won’t be named Ookles), something we’ve all sworn on our grandmothers not to describe yet.

Except to say that it’s great, which of course it is. Still, it’s just a little bit tough to blog Ookles.

Okay, how about this? Ookles (to me) is like that secret treehouse you helped to build when you were maybe ten. (Only this time nobody will fall out and fracture his coccyx. At least, not once Scott and Mike and Colin get a few more bits of it nailed together.)

And showing people how to work its rope ladder and secret compartments (once it gets built) is something I’m really, really looking forward to.

But figuring out how to blog about Ookles was hard enough that I kept on putting it off–until
Adam Kalsey scooped the story today.

See you all in the treehouse–soon I hope…

The hypothetical deal James Tobin could still make to spill the beans in exchange for a lighter sentence shouldn’t be called a plea bargain.

During the trial, his lawyers were very cocky and I think they persuaded him that the jury would find him not guilty–no reason, they probably told him, to think of a plea bargain.

The lawyers’ current strategy to keep Tobin from flipping is appealing his conviction. I don’t think that appeal will succeed in anything except tying Tobin up in courts for the next few years. I’ll be curious to see which of the many ludicrous objections they threw at the judge they actually try to use.

BTW, Judge Steve McAuliffe was appointed to the federal bench by Bush Senior in 1992, six years after the death of his wife Christa McAuliffe in the Challenger disaster. Interestingly, another of the NH Bush Senior appointees, Judge DiClerico, recently made headlines and infuriated the current Bushies by declaring the NH parental notification law unconstitutional.

If Tobin were smart enough to realize that his RNC-paid attorneys are working for the RNC and not for him, he would run, not walk, to the prosecutor’s office and cut a deal tomorrow. Then the prosecutor would ask the judge to go easy on sentencing, and I think the judge would comply if Tobin has anything useful to spill.

(Sentencing is March 21, IIRC.)

At the trial of James Tobin, defense attorney Dane Butswinkas objected strongly to letting telemarketer Allen Raymond testify about his work for James Treffinger’s NJ Senate Campaign.

The following discussion took place “at side bar, ” out of hearing of the jury but part of the official case transcript for December 7, 2005 (morning session), which I quote:

[Page 81]
4 MR. BUTSWINKAS: Your Honor, I just want to
5 make sure we’re not going to get into examples of prior
6 bad acts. We’ve received no 404(b) notice. It is not
7 relevant to truthfulness.
8 THE COURT: What’s the relevance?
9 MR. MARSH [US Attorney from the Public Integrity Section of the DOJ]: It’s relevant because it
10 establishes Mr. Raymond’s position in the community as a
11 player. Specifically, he was involved in something in
12 New Jersey which was an aggressive ad. He was
13 interviewed by the federal government, was never charged
14 with a crime, was never implicated in a crime, but it
15 resulted in him having to give an interview and resulted
16 ultimately in grand jury indictment unrelated to him.
17 THE COURT [Judge Steven McAuliffe]: The point of all this is what?
18 MR. MARSH: To bring it out.
19 THE COURT: If the point is to bring it out,
20 the answer is no.
21 MR. MARSH: Also to establish at the time
22 prior to when Mr. Raymond gets solicited by Mr. Tobin in
23 the fall, this incident in New Jersey has already
24 happened, is already public, and it’s something we
25 believe circumstantially Mr. Tobin would have known at
[Page 82]
1 the time that he makes the reference to Mr. McGee.
2 MR. BUTSWINKAS: There is no proof of that.
3 THE COURT: No, no, no, no. Are you kidding?
4 You mean because Raymond is involved in something, Tobin
5 necessarily knew about it?
6 MR. LEVCHUK [the lead US Attorney on the case]: It’s publicly known, the
7 aggressive hard hitting, in other words, that kind of
8 person.
9 THE COURT: Why does this jury need to know
10 that?
11 MR. LEVCHUK: Because it explains why the
12 referral to this guy [Allen Raymond] rather than somebody else. It
13 tends to make that the more likely than not route.

Just one more reason why I’m reluctant to describe the Washington-based, RNC-paid lawyers on the defense bench as “Mr. Tobin’s lawyers.” In Mr. Tobin’s interest, they should on many occasions have taken a different path–beginning with counselling him (as McGee’s and Raymond’s lawyers had counselled them) to take a plea deal from the US Attorney.

And so are the cellphone records of everyone else, says the Chicago Sun-Times, which quotes $160 as the price for full phone records of an FBI agent.

Well, this is an uh-oh moment for whistleblowers–but good news for stalkers, your boss, and politcal smear-mongers.

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) .. has called for legislation to criminalize phone record theft and use…”Though this problem is all too common, federal law is too narrow to include this type of crime,” Schumer said last year in a prepared statement.”

Aldo Castañeda and I had an interesting talk at last week’s Dave Winer blogdinner about the huge buzz around digital identity. My view: “emerging transparency” is a huge unstoppable freight train headed our way.

I just didn’t know it was moving this fast.

The Tom DeLay scoop in today’s LA Times suggests that Tom DeLay could exorcise scary threats from the Federal Government:

“Delay and two others helped put the brakes on a federal probe of a businessman…The effort to help Hurwitz began in 1999 when DeLay wrote a letter to the chairman of the FDIC denouncing the investigation of Hurwitz as a “form of harassment and deceit on the part of government employees.” When the FDIC persisted, Doolittle and Pombo — both considered proteges of DeLay — …inserted many of the sensitive documents into the Congressional Record, making them public and accessible to Hurwitz’s lawyers, a move that FDIC officials said damaged the government’s ability to pursue the banker.

So, if you were wondering why James Tobin, when Justice Department lawyers were closing in, in June of 2004, might be advised to send a fast $2,000 to Tom DeLay…

And the only thing that finally ended the stonewalling, that finally brought James Tobin’s name out of the Justice Department’s top-secret super-duper double-good-old-boys background and into the public eye, was a lawsuit the frustrated NH Democrats finally filed on October 14, 2004.

But, as Josh Marshall points out today, NH Republicans just filed a countersuit, claiming that the Democrats had no reason at all to sue them, none whatsoever, except to interfere with the GOP’s “constitutionally protected election activities.”

I don’t know about you, but I find this whole thing pretty spooky.

“…or I should say, numerous friends who have had bot flies. They don’t all have them now.”

Our biologist daughter Amity aka Mickey aka Micks has numerous friends who live exciting biologist kinds of lifestyles. She just came home from a party where one of the guests had returned from Peru with a bot fly larva growing inside his foot.

“There are lots of ways to get rid of a bot fly larva. For instance, you can tape a piece of meat to your foot. The larva comes out to eat the meat, and you whip it away very fast. Or you can enclose the body part in a bag, and fill it with smoke…”

Amity and her husband Colin, also a biologist, are headed off tomorrow to New Zealand for three weeks, tourguiding (part of the time) for the Harvard Museum of Natural History. I expect them to come home with lots of new friends, and lots of new stories.

But no bot fly larvae, at least, I very much hope not.