Wisdom from the 42nd Page

The Corporate Blogging Book

On the forty-second page of “The Corporate Blogging Book: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know to Get It Right” author Debbie Weil wrote (emphasis added):

A blog published on a company Web site is going to have a team or at least several people behind it. These folks may be allied with your Web content staff or your communications team or your marketing department. But it's most likely going to be more than one person in a bigger organization. In addition, you're going to have a content strategy, both for creating the blog and for keeping it going. Yes, you'll try for passion and spontaneity in your blog. But it will be planned. And that's OK.

"I've never really found the time to blog, so to speak. For me blogging isn't about sitting down on a regular basis and dreaming up something to say. It's more about indignation, frustration, pride and beliefs. I always have my BlackBerry with me. When I'm feeling inspired I jot something down. I've always been this way."

—Bob Lutz, General Motors¹⁰

Another time concern about blogging is that it's a distraction to employees. According to an analysis by Advertising Age, U.S. workers annually are wasting the equivalent of 551,000 years reading blogs. AdAge.com calculated that 35 million workers (one in four) visited blogs in 2005 and spent 3.5 hours or 9 percent of the work week reading them.¹¹

But the same concern could be expressed about employees spending too much time on email or surfing the Web. And blogs are, of course, just Web sites. So where do you draw the line? How do you separate blogging—reading or writing them—from the other forms of online communication and information gathering that are part of every knowledge worker's modus operandi?

You don't. Blogging can and should be lumped in with email, Instant Messaging, chat rooms, discussion boards, forums—in other words, the kinds of online communications your employees are already engaged in.

More information about “The Corporate Blogging Book: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know to Get It Right” (and the book itself) is available from:

• Powell's Books
• Amazon.com
• Barnes & Noble

(Portfolio, August 2006. Hardcover, 218 pages. ISBN: 1591841259; EAN: 9781591841258.)

The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It

On the forty-second page of “The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It” co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School Jonathan Zittrain wrote (emphasis & hyperlinks added):

to be operated at a distance, and to receive and run software sent from a distance. They were powered on and attached to the network continuously, even when not in active use by their owners. Moreover, many administrators of these machines were lazy about installing available fixes to known software vulnerabilities, and often utterly predictable in choosing passwords to protect entry to their computer accounts.³⁷ Since the endpoint computers infected by the worm were run and managed by disparate groups who answered to no single authority for their use, there was no way to secure them all against attack.³⁸

A comparison with its proprietary network and information appliance counterparts, then, reveals the central security dilemma of yesterday's Internet that remains with us today: the proprietary networks did not have the Cap'n Crunch problem, and the Internet and its connected machines do. On the Internet, the channels of communication are also channels of control.³⁹ There is no appealing fix of the sort AT&T undertook for its phone network. If one applies the post—Cap'n Crunch rule and eliminates the ability to control PCs via the Internet—or the ability of the attached computers to initiate or accept such control—one has eliminated the network's generative quality. Such an action would not merely be inconvenient, it would be incapacitating. Today we need merely to click to install new code from afar, whether to watch a video newscast embedded within a Web page or to install whole new applications like word processors or satellite image browsers. That quality is essential to the way in which we use the Internet.

It is thus not surprising that there was little impetus to institute changes in the network in response to the Morris worm scare, even though Internet-connected computers suffered from a fundamental security vulnerability. The decentralized, nonproprietary ownership of the Internet and the computers it linked made it difficult to implement any structural revisions to the way it functioned, and more important, it was simply not clear what curative changes could be made that did not entail drastic, wholesale, purpose-altering changes to the very fabric of the Internet. Such changes would be so wildly out of proportion with the perceived level of threat that the records of postworm discussion lack any indication that they were even considered.

As the next chapter will explore, generative systems are powerful and valuable, not only because they foster the production of useful things like Web browsers, auction sites, and free encyclopedias, but also because they can allow an extraordinary number of people to express themselves in speech, art, or code and to work with other people in ways previously not possible. These characteristics can make generative systems very successful even though they lack cen[tral]

More information about “The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It” (and the book itself) is available from:

• Amazon.com
• Barnes & Noble
• Powell's Books

An Army of Davids

On the forty-second page of “An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths” author, prolific blogger, & law professor Glenn Reynolds wrote (emphasis & hyperlink added):

my former students has written an interesting law review article on this subject.⁹) But that's where the people are, meaning that First Amendement guarantees of the right to protest downtown are increasingly meaningless when nobody goes downtown. Indeed here in Knoxville the antiwar protects, such as they were, were held on the sidewalk in front of West Town Mall when the protest organizers realized that a weekend protest downtown would be the proverbial tree falling unheard in the forest. Malls often have such offensive characteristics as omnipresent security cameras coupled with draconian bans on picture taking. It's not like Singapore, exactly, but it's not your old-fashioned downtown square either.

But there's a lesson too. One reason why people go to malls instead of downtown is that they feel safe. Part of this is physical safety. Though that's partly an illusion. Mall crime doesn't get reported much—all those advertisers make it easy to persuade local media to keep it quiet—but there's lots more of it than you'd think. Makes sense: criminals go where the money is, and a mugger would starve to death in most downtowns.

But more important than the desire for physical safety, I think is the desire to go un-hassled by unpleasant people. Vagrants (relatively safe from prosecution in light of Supreme Court decions), panhandlers, and accosters of pedestrians ranging from Bible-thumping street preachers to various political activists are free to express themselves in downtowns, thanks to the expansive First Amendment jurisprudence of the past half-century. But, except in a few states where the state constitution has been interpreted to treat malls as public space, they're barred from these spaces. And, in a curious coincidence, that's where people tend to go. (How do people really feel about this? I've observed that in the movie

More information about “An Army of Davids” (and the book itself) is available from:

• Powell's Books
• Amazon.com
• Barnes & Noble

Database Nation

On the forty-second page of “Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century” author Simson Garfinkel wrote (emphasis & hyperlinks added):

Perhaps most importantly, fingerprints are permanent. I learned this firsthand when I took a chemistry course at Bryn Mawr College. I was performing a series of experiments with anhydrous acetic acid. After a few weeks, I noticed that the tips of my fingers had become smooth; the acid had actually etched away my fingerprints. But within a month after finishing the experiments, my fingerprints were back, exactly as they had been before and no worse for their absence.

The reason for this permanence is that the fingerprint pattern is determined by the very bottom layers of the epidermis. The only way to change an individual's fingerprints is to remote the skin entirely and to replace it with new skin from elsewhere on the body. This painful and disfiguring operation was employed by a few gangsters in the 1930s, but hasn't found much use since.

Despite the fact that humans have long known that each person's fingerprints are unique, it wasn't until the late nineteenth century that scientists turned their attention to the possibility of using fingerprints for identification. Henry Faulds (1843-1930) published a letter in an 1880 edition of the scientific journal Nature. In his letter, Faulds noted that he occasionally left fingerprints on objects and conjectured that a criminal might leave similar monographs in oil at the scene of a crime. Should a suspect be apprehended, Faulds, reasoned, it should be possible to compare that suspect's fingerprints with the prints left behind and see if they matched.

The value of fingerprints for crime-fighting, then, wasn't just that they were unique, but that they were left behind. And unlike Bertillion's system, it wasn't necessary to measure the fingerprints of an entire populace in order to make use of the system: you could simply compare latent prints with the prints of a suspect.

W. J. Herschel, an English official stationed in India, saw Fauld's letter and wrote to Nature that he had been using a similar crime-fighting technique for nearly 20 years. But whereas Faulds had thought that fingerprints would be useful only for establishing the identity of criminals, Herschel envisioned a much grander scheme of using fingerprints as a general-purpose system to establish identity and prevent impersonations. (Clearly, racism was operating here as well: Herschel charged with maintaining order in a colony, couldn't tell the people apart without fingerprinting them.) Five years later, a photographer in San Francisco named Tabor noticed his own fingerprint made by an inky hand on a piece of paper. After carrying out some experiments, he suggested that fingerprints could be used as a means of registering Chinese immigrants, who presumably all looked the same to the people who were running San Francisco at the time. A similar proposal was made in 1885 in Cincinnati for putting fingerprints on railroad tickets.⁷

This book is available for purchase from:

• Amazon.com
• Barnes & Noble
• Powell's Books

The Weblog Handbook

On the forty-second page of “The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog” author Rebecca Blood wrote (emphasis & hyperlinks added):

So, let's start at the very beginning. You will need a place to host your weblog and a way to update it. When you look at any website, your computer is looking at specially coded files that reside on a computer that is configured to publish webpages to the world. Your "host" will be one of these computers (sometimes called a server). From this computer your weblog will be viewable by anyone who knows the URL (Uniform Resource Locator), or what you may commonly refer to as the "Web address." Whichever term you use, it is the string of characters that you see in the top window of your Web browser, and it looks something like this: http://www.rebeccablood.net.

A few weblog management tools offer free hosting. Because all the details will be taken care of for you, one of these services is often the best choice for a beginning weblogger. These services have some drawbacks: Because they are free to anyone who signs up, the service may be slow and there may be outages (times when their hosting servers malfunction, preventing you from reading and/or updating your website). These services go through cycles as they become popular, their equipment becomes overloaded, they upgrade their machines, and then eventually become overloaded again. That said, to my knowledge these services all work very hard to provide good services for their users, and many webloggers have no desire to host their weblogs elsewhere.

All of these services have a link on the home page that will take you to a sign-up form. All of them require a user name and password, and maybe an email address. All of them will provide easy-to-follow directions for creating your new weblog. Spend a weekend or several weeknights signing up for a few of these services so that you can see what they offer and exactly how they work. Use Google to search for ["free weblog"] and [weblog "free hosting"] (omit the brackets and keep the quotation marks) to find the services that currently offer free weblog hosting.

This book is available for purchase from:

• Amazon.com
• Powell's Books
• Barnes & Noble

The Cluetrain Manifesto

On the forty-second page of “The Clue Train Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual” authors Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger collaboratively wrote (emphasis added):

Most of us don't mid doing this. In fact, we actually sort of enjoy doing it. It's like playing grownup. And having extremist political banners hung in cubicles or having to listen to someone talk about his spiritual commitments or sex life would simply be distracting. Disturbingly, actually.

And yet...we feel resentment. Find someone who likes being managed, who feels fully at home in his or her professional self. Our longing for the Web is rooted in the deep resentment we feel towards being managed.

However much we long for the Web is how much we hate our job.

Our Voice

Just about all the concessions we make to work in a well-run, non-disturbing, secure, predictably successful, managed environment have to do with giving up our voice.

Nothing is more intimately a part of who we are than our voice. It expresses what we think and feel. It is an amalgam of the voluntary and involuntary. It gives style and shape to content. It subtends the most public and the most private. It is what we withhold at the moments of greatest significance.

Our voice is our strongest, most direct expression of who we are. Our voice is expressed in our words, our tone, our body language, our visible enthusiasms.

Our business voice—in a managed environment—is virtually the same as everyone else's. For example, we learn to write memos in The Standard Style and to participate in committee meetings in The Appropriate Fashion. (Of course, we are also finely attuned to minute differences in expression and can often tell memos apart the way birdwatchers spot the differences between a lark sparrow and a song sparrow.)

In fifty years, our corporate lives will seem no different than those of the 1950s. Whether we are Ward Cleavers or Dilberts, we all reported to work in look-alike rooms, wearing uniforms, speaking civilly, playing our parts at committee meetings. The fact that earth tones and Rockports have replaced gray flannel and wingtips isn't going to separate us from our crewcut fathers.

This book is available for purchase from:

• Powell's Books
• Amazon.com
• Barnes & Noble