To orient myself to Santa Rosa when we arrived two years ago I attended a couple of city council meetings. At one of them I heard a man introduce himself in a way that got my attention. “I’m Matt Martin,” he said, “and I get to be the executive director of Social Advocates for Youth.” I interpreted that as: “It is my privilege to be the director of SAY.” Last week at a different local event I heard the same thing from another SAY employee. “I’m Ken Quinto and I get to be associate director of development for SAY.” I asked Ken if I was interpreting that figure of speech correctly and he said I was.

Well, I get to be director of partnership and integration for Hypothes.is and also a blogger. Former privileges include: evangelist for Microsoft, pioneering blogger for InfoWorld, freelance web developer and consultant, podcaster for ITConversations, columnist for various tech publications, writer and editor and web developer for BYTE. In all these roles I’ve gotten to explore technological landscapes, tackle interesting problems, connect with people who want to solve them, and write about what I learn.

Once, and for a long time, the writing was my primary work product. When blogging took off in the early 2000s I became fascinated with Dave Winer’s notion that narrating your work — a practice more recently called observable work and working out loud — made sense for everyone, not just writers who got paid to write. I advocated strongly for that practice. But my advice came from a place of privilege. Unlike most people, I was getting paid to write.

I still get to tackle interesting problems and connect with people who want to solve them. But times have changed. For me (and many others) that writing won’t bring the attention or the money that it once did. It’s been hard — really hard — to let go of that. But I’m still the writer I always was. And the practice of work narration that I once advocated from a position of privilege still matters now that I’ve lost that privilege.

The way forward, I think, is to practice what I long preached. I can narrate a piece of work, summarize what I’ve learned, and invite fellow travelers to validate or revise my conclusions. The topics will often be narrow and will appeal to a small audiences. Writing about assistive technology, for example, won’t make pageview counters spin. But it doesn’t have to. It only needs to reach the people who care about the topic, connect me to them, and help us advance the work.

Doing that kind of writing isn’t my day job anymore, and maybe never will be again. But I get to do it if I want to. That is a privilege available to nearly everyone.

On a visit to the Berlin Zoo last month, I watched primates interact with a cleverly-designed game called a poke box. It’s a plexiglas enclosure with shelves. Rows of holes in the enclosure give access to the shelves. Each shelf has a single hole, offset from the holes above and below. The machine drips pellets of food onto the top shelf. The primates, using sticks they’ve stripped and prepared, reach through the holes and tease the pellets through the holes in the shelves, performing one delicate maneuver after another, finally reaching through a slot in the bottom of the enclosure to claim the prize.

How would I perform in a game like that? My hunch: not much better or worse than a group of bonobos I spent a long time watching.

“This so-called behavioural enrichment,” the Zoo says, “is an important area in animal management.” The poke box is undoubtedly enriching the lives of those primates. But they are still prisoners.

My dad was a volunteer at the Philadelphia Zoo. I saw, growing up, how that zoo tried to create more naturalistic settings for its animals. The most successful I can recall was the hummingbird house. Its tiny inhabitants roamed freely in a large open space that looked and felt like a tropical rain forest.

I don’t know if those birds really lived something like a normal life, but it seems at least plausible. I can’t say the same for most of the animals I’ve seen in zoos. Conditions may have improved over the years, but I’m not sure I’ll ever again pay to watch the prisoners perform “enriched” behaviors in “naturalistic” settings.

If my children were still young, that’d be a hard call to make. A visit to the zoo is one of the great experiences of childhood. If there weren’t zoos, how could we replace that experience?

Maybe we don’t need to jail animals. Maybe we just need to improve our ability to observe them in situ. There’s still plenty of open space that is, or could be, conserved. And we’re getting really good at surveillance! Let’s put our new skill to a different use. Fly cameras over areas of wildlife parks inaccessible to tourist vehicles. Enable online visitors to adopt and follow individual animals and their groups. Make it possible for anyone to have the sort of experience Jane Goodall did. The drone cameras sound creepy, but unlike the vehicles that carry tourists through those parks, the drones will keep getting smaller and more unobtrusive.

Could it happen? I’m not holding my breath. So for now I’ll focus on the wildlife I can see right here in Sonoma County. This spring we discovered the Ninth Street Rookery, less than a mile from our house. Each of the two large eucalyptus trees there is home to about a hundred nests in which black-crowned night herons and various species of egret — great, cattle, snowy — raise a cacophony as they raise their young. We visited a couple of times; it’s wonderful. Although, come to think of it, if it were a channel on cams.allaboutbirds.org I could watch and learn a lot more about the lives of these animals. And so could you.

In 2001 I was among a community of early bloggers who came together around Dave Winer’s Radio UserLand, a tool for both publishing and aggregating blogs. To the world at large, blogging was rightly understood to be a new and exciting way for people to publish their writing online. Those of us exploring the new medium found it to be, also, a social network that was naturally immune to spam. We all had our own inviolate spaces for web writing. No moderation was needed because there were no comments. And yet rich discourse emerged. How? The web enabled us to link to one anothers’ posts, and RSS enabled us to monitor one anothers’ feeds. That was enough to sustain vibrant and civil conversation.

Things stayed civil because the system aligned incentives correctly. “You own your words,” Dave said, “and you speak in your own space on the web.” If you said something nasty about someone else you weren’t saying it in their space, or in some neutral space, you were saying it directly in your own space, one that represented you to the world.

Earlier systems, such as UseNet and Web forums, lacked this blend of mutual consent and accountability. So do modern ones such as Facebook and Twitter. The quality of discourse on Radio UserLand was, for a while, like nothing I’ve experienced before or since.

The blogosphere grew. Blog comments appeared. Google killed the dominant blog reader. Twitter and Facebook appeared. Now we can be sovereigns of our own online spaces, and we can be connected to others, but it seems that we can’t be both at the same time and in the same way.

What brings all this back is the kerfuffle, last week, that some of us who are building web annotation tools are calling TateGate. (Tate: annotate.) You can read about it on my company’s blog and elsewhere, but it boils down to a set of hard questions. Is it both legal and ethical to:

1. Write your words on my blog in an annotation overlay visible only to you in your browser?

2. Share the overlay with others in a private group space?

3. Share the overlay on the open web?

The answer to 1 is almost certainly yes. The original 1996 CSS spec, for example, recommended that browsers enable users to override publisher-defined style sheets. CSS recognized that the needs of publishers and readers are in dynamic tension. Publishers decide how they want readers to see their pages, but readers can decide differently. In 2005 a Firefox extension called Greasemonkey began empowering users to make functional as well as stylistic changes: adding a Delete button to Gmail, reporting book availability in local libraries on Amazon pages. If a site has ever successfully challenged the right of a user to alter a page locally, in the browser, I haven’t heard of it; neither have knowledgeable friends and acquaintances I’ve asked about this.

When the overlay is shared at wider scopes things get more complicated. The nexus of stakeholders includes publishers, readers, and annotators. Let’s explore that nexus in two different cases.

Climate news

In this case, climate scientists team up to annotate a news site’s story on climate change. The annotation layer is shared on the open web, visible to anyone who acquires the tool needed to view it. The scientists believe they are providing a public service. Readers who value the scientists’ assessment can opt in to view their annotations. Readers who don’t care what the scientists think don’t have to view the annotations. Publishers may be more or less comfortable with the existence of the opt-in annotation layer, depending on their regard for the scientists and their willingness to embrace independent scrutiny.

Before you decide what you think about this, consider an alternative. Climate skeptics team up to offer a competing annotation layer that offers a very different take on the story. Publishers, annotators, and readers still find themselves in the same kind of dynamic tension, but it will feel different to you in a way that depends on your beliefs about climate change.

Either way it’s likely that you’ll find this model generally sound. Many will agree that public information should be subject to analysis, that analysis should take advantage of the best tools, and that commentary anchored to words and phrases in source texts is a highly effective.

“TateGate”

In this case, a news site annotates a personal blog. The blogger believes that she owns her words, she moderates all comments to ensure that’s so, and she feels violated when she learns about a hostile overlay available to anyone who can discover it. The annotators are using a tool that doesn’t enable sharing the overlay in a private group, so we don’t know how the option to restrict the overlay’s availability might have have mattered. The annotation layer is available in two ways: as a proxied URL available in any unmodified browser, and as a browser extension that users install and activate. The proxy could in principle have been turned off for this blog, but it wasn’t, so we don’t know whether things would have played out differently if a user-installed browser extension were the only way to view the annotations.

These variables may affect how you think about this case. Your beliefs about what constitutes fair use, appropriation, and harassment certainly will. And there are still more variables. A site can, for example, choose to invite Hypothesis annotators by embedding our client. We envision, but have yet to offer, layers in which groups self-moderate annotations that all viewers can read but not write. And we envision that publishers might choose to make only certain of those channels discoverable in the annotation layer they choose to embed. That restriction would, however, not apply to users who bring their own independent annotation client to the page.

We at Hypothesis are soliciting a range of views on this thicket of thorny issues, and we are considering how to evolve tools and policies that will address them. Here I’m not speaking for my employer, though, I am just reflecting on the tension between wanting to own our words and wanting to share them with the world.

The closest modern equivalent to the Radio UserLand model is one that indie web folks call POSSE, which stands for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere. POSSE encourages me to comment on your site by writing a post on my site and notifying yours about it. You can choose to accept my contribution or not. If you do accept it, there’s a sense in which it is not a statement that lives on your site but rather one that lives on mine and is reflected to yours. Both parties negotiate a zone of ambiguity between what’s on my site and what’s on your site.

Web annotation seems less ambiguous. When I highlight your words and link mine to them, in an overlay on your page, it seems more as if mine are appearing on your site. Is that an unavoidable perception? I don’t know. Maybe there’s a role for a CSS-like mechanism that enables publishers, annotators, and readers to negotiate where and how annotations are displayed. It’s worth considering.

Here’s what I do know: I’m lucky to be involved in a project that raises these issues and challenges us to consider them carefully.

My short 2009 review¹ of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline includes this Kevin Kelly quote that continues to resonate for me:

Kevin Kelly calls the book “a short course on how to change your mind intelligently” — in this case, about cities, nuclear power, and genetic and planetary engineering. These are all things that Steward Brand once regarded with suspicion but now sees as crucial tools for a sustainable world.

In Changeable minds I wrote about a touchstone question that I now sometimes ask people:

What’s something you believed deeply, for a long time, and then changed your mind about?

It’s a hard question for any of us to answer, but as Dave Gray and Wael Ghonim have recently reminded me, it matters more and more that we try. Here’s a useful picture I grabbed from Gray’s screencast on what he calls liminal thinking:

The idea is that I’m standing in the bubble on the left, atop an unconscious pyramid of belief formation. You are standing in the bubble on the right, atop your own unconscious pyramid. And our two pyramids rest on different regions of an underlying reality. How can we engage in productive discourse?

Gray says it requires two tricky maneuvers. First I need to shine a light down into the unconscious fog, climb down my own “ladder of inference,” and reflect on how my own experience of reality informs my own beliefs. Then, he says, I need to take that flashlight, walk over to your pyramid, and climb up your ladder of inference. “Liminal thinking,” he tweeted the other day, “is the art of creating change by understanding, shaping, and reframing beliefs.”

I’ll surely read his book when it comes out. But since I already agree with the principles and practices it espouses, I don’t expect a mind-changing outcome. It’s clear that Dave Gray and I stand on mostly-overlapping belief pyramids. What would motivate somebody not in that bubble to want to cross the chasm to a very different pyramid?

Wael Ghonim’s latest TED talk suggests an intriguing possibility. He’s now given two such talks. The first, in 2011, was a stirring tribute to social media’s role in fomenting the Arab Spring. (Ghonim created the pivotal We are all Khaled Said Facebook page.) In 2016 the Arab Spring seems a distant memory, and Ghonim entitled his latest talk Let’s design social media that drives real change. Here’s the key takeaway for me:

There’s a lot of debate today on how to combat online harassment and fight trolls. This is so important. No one could argue against that. But we need to also think about how to design social media experiences that promote civility and reward thoughtfulness. I know for a fact if I write a post that is more sensational, more one-sided, sometimes angry and aggressive, I get to have more people see that post. I will get more attention.

But what if we put more focus on quality? What is more important: the total number of readers of a post you write, or who are the people who have impact that read what you write? Couldn’t we just give people more incentives to engage in conversations, rather than just broadcasting opinions all the time? Or reward people for reading and responding to views that they disagree with? And also, make it socially acceptable that we change our minds, or probably even reward that?

I suspect that relatively few of us already are liminal thinkers, or are willing and able to learn and apply the principles and practices. Can we imagine, and build, a social media platform that encourages liminal thinking at scale? That’s an idea worth sharing.

Don’t miss the annotations — a website that reproduces every paragraph that includes citations, links to their sources, and adds updates.

Alas, the link to those annotations — in iCloud, at http://web.me.com/stewartbrand/DISCIPLINE_footnotes/Contents.html — has rotted. For me it’s another reminder to prioritize work on the archival capabilities we envision for Hypothesis. We want to archive both your annotations and (where possible) the documents they refer to.

When I read Katherine Zoepf’s article about emerging legal awareness among Saudi women, I found myself imagining a timeline of events. Then I realized I could create one pretty easily with Hypothesis:

To make this timeline I started by annotating the article in a particular way. All the dates of interest were in the 2000s, so I did an in-browser search for 20 which highlighted all the occurrences of 2004, 2008, 2011, etc. I selected those sentences and made Hypothesis annotations with the tags 20xx, Women, and Saudi Arabia. For dates in 2015, I repeated this exercise using search for names of months.

You can see the annotations in context here, and as extracts here. A light massage of that data yielded the timeline.

It’s a weirdly schizophrenic mix of despair and hope, abomination and progress. One the one hand, there’s still stoning.

On the other hand, there’s growing awareness of legal rights — if not yet a strong movement to expand them. And there’s dramatic new mobility thanks to Uber.

Will the better angels of our nature prevail? If we project this timeline into the future, I’m betting that we’ll see less witchcraft and stoning, more freedom and mobility.

We arrived in California in the fourth year of the drought. It didn’t rain often last winter but when it did it poured, and the Santa Rosa Creek — which had been trickling through our neighborhood — became a torrent. As I watched all that precious rainwater rushing away to the Russian River, and thence to the Pacific Ocean, I wondered: What’s California doing to capture that water? The answer so far seems to be: Not much.

The need for large-scale water storage has been long discussed, but (at least from my newcomer’s perspective) not seriously considered until the recent crisis. The picture worth a thousand words was of Governor Jerry Brown examining bare ground in the Sierra Nevada Mountains last March. That ground should have been covered with deep snow.

Here in Santa Rosa, a friend who runs Atlas Coffee has taken matters into his own hands. He acquired the 500-gallon storage tank shown here:

Since that photo was taken, he’s hooked it up to a pump. Rainwater flows off the roof, it’s pumped into the tank, and then it irrigates the plants. It’s a wonderful idea that I’m sure has occurred to other homeowners and businesspeople, but you don’t see many other implementations around town. And as El Niño approaches, other priorities will understandably loom larger. Hydro-engineering projects, even relatively simple ones like this, are daunting. And the problem really needs to be addressed at much larger scale.

On that larger scale we still tend to imagine hydro-engineering projects, bigger ones like raising the height of the Shasta Dam to the tune of $1.2 billion [High Country News]. That sounded plausible to me. Then, last night, I watched a PBS documentary on beavers. I’m a sucker for nature documentaries, and I’ve missed seeing beavers since moving to California, they were everywhere in New Hampshire, so it was fun to watch them in action. Then this segment grabbed me:

Here’s a bit more of the backstory. In the Susie Creek watershed near Elko, Nevada, the land’s been drying out since cattle began grazing it 200 years ago. Beavers, reintroduced recently, reversed that trend. In this post, the Resilient Design Institute’s Alex Wilson refers to the same clip I quoted above:

The excellent 2014 PBS Nature documentary Leave it to Beavers describes how beavers modify the landscape to retain moisture. It turns out that beavers don’t only create ponds by damming creeks, the excavate ponds deeper, allowing them to hold more water. Biologist Glynnis Hood, Ph.D., who has been studying beavers near Edmonton, Alberta, described how important a role beavers play in Alberta by holding water.

“In 2002 we had the worst drought on record,” she reported. “The only places where we had water in natural areas was where we had beaver, and farmers were actually seeking out neighbors who had beavers on their landscape to water their cattle. So with beavers back on the land, even during the worst drought on record, they were mitigating the effects of drought and keeping water on the landscape.”

That idea was echoed in the PBS documentary by hydrologist Suzanne Foudy, Ph.D., of the U.S. Forest Service in describing the impact new beaver arrivals have been having on Susie Creek in north-central Nevada, near Elko. “If the snowpack’s coming off earlier and ranchers want water,” she said, “then we’ve got to figure out a way to keep it on the landscape, because it’s no longer going to be stored as snow in the mountains.” She continued: “What beavers do in all these itty-bitty streams is they create these small savings accounts, these pockets where it’s stored — no longer as snow, but as surface and groundwater.”

I’ve always enjoyed watching beavers and thinking about their effects on my local environments. But I never realized that the species as a whole can provide a critical ecosystem service at large scale. Here’s hoping that California will recruit them to help us replace a dwindling snowpack with water stored on the land. And that, as a bonus, I’ll get to see them more often again.

The recent documentary film Slingshot, about Dean Kamen’s quest to deliver water purification systems to the billion of us who need them, touches only briefly on the invention for which Kamen is most widely recognized: Segway. Almost everyone’s heard of the self-balancing electric scooter, though far fewer can name its inventor. Despite Segway’s fame, conventional wisdom says it was a failure: an overhyped product that solved no important problem.

At one point in the film we see Kamen gliding around his property in New Hampshire, reflecting on the unsustainability of a civilization whose organizing structural principle has been the automobile. Looking back over my recent blog posts I can see it’s a topic that’s been much on my mind. This picture illustrates two very different options available to me when traveling between our home (1) in Santa Rosa’s West End and Luann’s studio (6) in the SOFA arts district downtown.

The yellow path traverses two structures that bisect the town: the 101 freeway and the Santa Rosa Plaza, our downtown mall. It’s a walkable journey — with difficulty — but not a cyclable one as the path of least resistance runs through the interior of the mall. You won’t enjoy the walk, though. It entails long periods of waiting at stop lights to cross roads that, depending on time of day, may carry much or very little vehicular traffic.

The green path, meanwhile, runs along the Prince Memorial Greenway. Begun in 1989, not long after the mall was built, the greenway both restored the ecologically damaged Santa Rosa Creek and opened up an ideal route for walking, cycling, and — though I’ve yet to see it there — Segwaying.

Some say that Segway was never destined to coexist with automobile-based infrastructure. It could only succeed in yet-to-be-built cities defined by an alternative pattern language that describes RING ROADS, LOCAL TRANSPORT AREAS, and PEDESTRIAN PATHS. That might be true. But while some of the 300 million Chinese expected to urbanize by 2030 [Forbes] may land in such cities, most of us inhabit legacy infrastructure that allocates large amounts of urban space to the temporary storage of automobiles, and equally large amounts to their roadways.

The pervasive fabric of concrete and pavement feels permanent, unchangeable. And yet I traverse it easily. Last month, walking along the creek within view of the 101 freeway, I saw a merlin taking a bath. Neither of us was bothered by traffic noise, the sonic barriers around the freeway at that point are highly effective. What would it take to weave more of these corridors into our cities and flow non-automotive traffic through them?

Stymied by that question, Dean Kamen asked a different one: What would it take to deliver reliable high-capacity low-power vapor compression distillers to the people who need them? Actually inventing and refining a reliable high-capacity low-power vapor compression distiller is necessary but not sufficient. You need to distribute that gear worldwide and support its ongoing use. Governments lack the expertise and capacity to do that. The Coca-Cola company not only has both but also, it turns out, a mandate to offset the water impact of its business. The effort to purify the world’s water is now a Coke / DEKA partnership.

It has been a long road for Slingshot but thanks to that partnership I now think Kamen’s vision for clean water can be realized in my lifetime. I’m less optimistic about living to see the realization of his vision for humane modes of local transportation. But I’m willing to be surprised. And I wonder what unsuspected distribution partner might help bring the change.

Here’s a glimpse of a capability I’ve long imagined:

It’s a picture of me browsing my December 1995 BYTE column, using the same browser — Netscape Navigator 4.0 — that I used when I wrote the column 20 years ago. You can try this yourself, for any archived website, using oldweb.today, a new project by the brilliant web archivist Ilya Kreymer. I’ve gotten to know Ilya by way of Hypothesis. We use his pywb proxy (hosted at via.hypothes.is) to inject our annotation software into web pages.

The rhizome.org blog has the scoop on oldweb.today’s lightweight emulation strategy. It’s a harbinger of things to come. Much of our cultural heritage — our words, our still and moving pictures, our sounds, our data — is born digital. Soon almost everything will be. It won’t be enough to archive our digital artifacts. We’ll also need to archive the software that accesses and renders them. And we’ll need systems that retrieve and animate that software so it, in turn, can retrieve and animate the data.

The enabling technologies are coming together quickly. Cloud-based computing keeps getting better and cheaper. The Docker revolution makes it radically easier to save and recreate complex software configurations. For the most part we benefit from this new infrastructure without noticing it or thinking about it, and that’s a good thing.

With oldweb.today, though, it’s hard not to notice or think about the infrastructure that delivers this magic into your browser. That’s a good thing too. It’s useful for everyone to have some awareness of what’s required to experience cultural artifacts with original fidelity, or to reliably reproduce scientific experiments. Ilya’s project isn’t only a great way to revisit the early web. It’s also a signpost on the road to these futures.

An article I read years ago, and wish I could find again, claimed that America’s first enclosed shopping malls were designed to evoke the space stations of the mid-twentieth-century sci-fi imagination. I don’t know if that’s true but they do share a common design: the long central axis, with attached pods bathed in artificial light and recirculated air.

Until we moved to Santa Rosa, I rarely visited an enclosed mall. There wasn’t (and still isn’t) one in Keene, NH, which suited me just fine. I’ve always been allergic to the experience that malls try to create.

Here, though, the Santa Rosa Plaza (5) is a obstacle I ofen encounter when I walk between our home (1) in the West End and Luann’s studio (6) in the SofA district.

There is, thankfully, an alternative. The Prince Memorial Greenway runs along both sides of Santa Rosa Creek (4). It takes you around or under both of the structures that so heinously divide our part of downtown from the main part: the 101 freeway and the mall.

I use the creek trail as often as I can. The areas under the freeway are brightened by vast painted and tiled murals. Wildlife sightings include fish, egrets, black-crowned night-herons and, one time, a merlin. I see some of my neighbors walking or biking along, and others — the homeless ones — encamped along the banks.

When I’m headed downtown, though, the path of least resistance is (1, 2, 3, 5, 7). As you can see it leads through the mall. Although 101 looks formidable, you can cross under it at many points visible in the photo: 3rd Street, 4th, 5th, and 6th. But there’s no getting around the mall! I’d have to detour south to 1st or north to 7th to avoid it.

So I end up walking through the mall a lot, along what would be 4th street if it still existed. I try to enjoy it, and if I pretend that I’m walking through a space station I almost can. But this space station has landed in the wrong place. It bisects downtown even more egregiously than the mighty 101 freeway. What the hell were they thinking?

Although we are country mice we do venture down to the city now and again, as we did Monday evening to meet friends for dinner. It is super uncool to arrive at a downtown San Francisco destination in a private automobile. Ambulation, Uber, skateboard, bike, even Segway would be better. But for us there isn’t a faster way to get there and back during non-commute hours so we drive. And when there’s no traffic that mostly makes sense. Mostly, of course, doesn’t include that final variable: parking.

We got to the restaurant at 7PM, pulled into Garage 1, and met the villain of our piece:

Villain: We close at 9.

Jon: OK. How much for 2 hours?

V: $25.

J: No sale.

A hundred feet south we enter Garage 2 and meet the saviour of the day:

Saviour: We close at 9.

Jon: OK. How much for 2 hours?

S: $15.

J: [thought bubble: Sold!]

S: But if you’re going to the restaurant, just park right there. [gestures at the prime spot in front of the restaurant’s entrance, marked ‘For Deliveries Only, No Parking’]

J: Thanks! [thought bubble: $0 < $15 < $25]

Not having been born yesterday I park there, and check in with the restauranteur:

Jon: That guy says I can park in front but I figured I’d check with you.

Restauranteur: Who the hell is that guy to say who parks in front of my restaurant?

J: That’s why I’m checking. So, it is OK?

R: Sure.

J: Thanks! [thought bubble: Go figure!]

In May 1906, Collier’s published Jack London’s The Story of an Eyewitness, his report on the devastation wrought by the San Francisco earthquake. Earle Labor’s recent biography of London explains how the writer was able to commute from his home in Glen Ellen, on the slope of Sonoma Mountain, to the burning city.

“EARTHQUAKE” is the opening entry in Charmian’s diary for Wednesday, April 18, 1906.

…

By six o’clock Jack and Charmian were on horseback, riding up the mountain to their new ranch. From that height they could plainly see the great columns of smoke rising over San Francisco and, to the north, Santa Rosa.

…

That afternoon they took the train to Santa Rosa. That smaller city has been hit as hard as San Francisco and was a mass of smoking rubble. From there they went to Oakland and took the ferry over to the inferno that San Francisco had become.

They took the train, in other words, from Santa Rosa where I live now, to Glen Ellen, to Sonoma, and finally to Oakland. That mode of transportation, once taken for granted, has been gone for decades.

Last week, walking to a coffee shop in Santa Rosa’s Railroad Square, I took this photo:

It’s the SMART (Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit) train on one of its first trial runs. I saw it again later in the week, as I was crawling down to San Francisco in a river of traffic on 101. There, in the marshlands of Novato, on a long-abandoned track, was the SMART train cruising along.

I know little about the politics of SMART, a flawed initiative that will not, anytime soon, restore the mobility that Jack and Charmian London enjoyed more than a hundred years ago. It’s a pale reflection of how BART planners in the 1950s imagined serving the North Bay:

When SMART is operational I’ll still need to drive down to San Francisco, or take the bus, and endure insane traffic delays if I have to travel during prime commute times. Sadly, the first phase of SMART won’t even reach the Larkspur ferry.

But one day next year Luann and I will be able to walk a few blocks to Railroad Square, get on a train, ride to Petaluma, enjoy its downtown for a few hours, and return home.

Jack and Charmian, if you’re reading this somehow, I know, it’s ridiculous, and I apologize. We really did screw things up, and this is a rather pathetic step the right direction. But at least it’s a start.

This page makes me smile:

It’s from a 1963 publication called Facts of Flight: Practical Information about Operation of Private Aircraft, which was available for 50 cents from the U.S Government Printing Office. Luann found it at a thrift shop the other day, and I can’t decide what’s most charming about it. The saturated colors remind me of the children’s books I began bringing home from our public library in that same year. The graphics, quaint at first glance, turn out to be stunningly effective. The explanation of the physics of flight, equally effective, is the same as the one I got from my father who had flown a PBY Catalina during World War Two.

This enjoyable and informative book is attributed to no author. It is simply “a manual prepared by the Flight Standards Service of the Federal Aviation Agency, to provide the private pilot with information essential to the safe operation of his aircraft.” I’m delighted to know that our government was once capable of writing an enjoyable and informative book. And I love the implicit message that any U.S. citizen could be an aviator in need of a pamphlet on atmospheric pressure, lift and drag, pitch, roll, and yaw, carburetor icing.

Two weeks ago I underwent surgery to replace both of my hip joints. I’d been having trouble since the summer of 2012, when running became painful and I found that I couldn’t mount my bicycle by swinging my leg over the seat. These were signs of what would be diagnosed, in April 2015, as moderate-to-severe osteoarthritis. It could have been diagnosed two years earlier, when I presented symptoms I identified as a groin pull and pain in my quads. But I was still able to be very active then and, after a round of physical therapy, regained much of the range of motion I’d lost the year before. Deep down I knew something was really wrong but I convinced my doctor and physical therapist that it was all muscular, that I’d be able to work through it, and that there was no need for an x-ray.

In reality the disease was progressing, and although I returned to cycling, hiking, and running, things never felt right. There were other signs. During my final season of firewood stacking, in the summer of 2013, I found myself sitting on a bench pitching logs. Around the same time I tried working at a standing desk but quickly abandoned that experiment. Stretching didn’t help because it couldn’t. Cartilage was eroding, bone spurs were deforming the balls of my femurs.

After our move to California last year, the signs became impossible to ignore. Halfway through a 12-mile hike at Point Reyes I had to admit I was in real trouble. I went to see Luann’s physical therapist, he leveled with me, and I just about took the poor guy’s head off. Being active is incredibly important to me, I’ve always feared loss of mobility, and I catastrophized the situation.

Conventional wisdom has been that you want to postpone surgery as long as possible. That would mean years of increasing pain and loss of function. I visited the surgeon who would ultimately fix me, Briant Smith, and learned two vital facts. First, the hardware has improved so much that there’s less incentive to delay surgery in order to avoid a repeat. Second, the anterior direct method is massively superior to earlier methods.

Direct anterior hip replacement is a minimally invasive surgical technique. This approach involves a 3 to 4 inch incision on the front of the hip that allows the joint to be replaced by moving muscles aside along their natural tissue planes, without detaching any tendons. This approach often results in quicker recovery, less pain, and more normal function after hip replacement. Because the tendons aren’t detached from the hip during direct anterior hip replacement, hip precautions are typically not necessary. This allows patients to return to normal daily activities shortly after surgery with a reduced risk of dislocation.

At that point I didn’t know when this would happen. Years? Months? Dr. Smith said: “When you can’t take it anymore, we’ll fix it.” A month later I was in San Francisco for a week-long series of events. The first morning I walked two miles, a distance that had been well within my tolerance until then, and was incapacitated. I hobbled through the week, unable to sleep, and pinged Dr. Smith. “Sometimes the progression is linear,” he said, “and sometimes you fall off a cliff.”

On my next visit we discussed tactics. Most bilateral hip replacements are done serially, so you’ve got one relatively good leg to stand on during recovery. In my case, both joints were about equally bad. Should I replace both at once? My primary doc didn’t recommend that. And Dr. Smith didn’t exactly recommend it either. But he let me know that it’s doable. “It’s a big wallop,” he said, and a slower recovery, but people in my cohort — athletic, mid-to-late fifties (I’m 58) — are having successful outcomes, and it’s great to get it over with in one go.

So I signed up for the twofer, and then had a few months to wait, research the topic, and talk to veterans of the bilateral procedure. People were reporting almost unbelievably good outcomes. One fellow I met told me that his post-surgical pain was so minor that he’d needed nothing stronger than Tylenol to control it.

And that’s exactly how it went for me. An hour after surgery I walked from the hospital bed to a recliner, using a walker for safety more than for support. The next day I walked 500 feet, not because I was pushing myself but because the physical therapist invited me to and was confident that I could do it safely. The day after that I walked 1000 feet, navigated some steps in the PT gym to ensure I’d be OK entering our house, and went home.

It really was a big wallop, and the energy that’s gone into healing hasn’t left much for higher-order brain function. I’m sleeping a lot, and only gradually getting up to speed with my work. But I’m gaining mobility, strength, and flexibility every day. I used the walker for a week, then graduated to hiking poles — again, more for security than for support. And despite having major carpentry work done to both sides of my skeleton — hammers, saws, dremels — the pain has been minimal, and I too have needed nothing stronger than Tylenol. It’s reasonable to expect that I’ll be hiking and cycling in a month or so, and doing those things pain-free for the first time in years. My range of motion is already better along some axes than it was two weeks ago, and should continue to improve. There’s residual numbness in the skin over my quads, and some puffiness around the incisions, but these effects are normal and should resolve. (No staples or stitches, if you were wondering, they use superglue now.)

What accounts for this astonishingly good outcome? It seems to be a combination of factors. Hip repair has always been more straightforward than knee or shoulder repair, and with the anterior direct method it’s radically better than it was. That’s a recent development, my surgeon only began using the technique five years ago. But the physical therapist and occupational therapist in the hospital told me that they’ve only been seeing outcomes like mine for about two years.

What changed? There’s some fancy gear involved. The Hana table, for example, enables precise positioning, but it’s been around for longer than two years. Maturation of surgical technique is clearly a key factor. When I asked Dr. Smith about this, he said: “Speed matters.” It only took three hours to upgrade both of my hips. I was reminded of Atul Gawande’s 2007 New Yorker story The Checklist, a precursor to The Checklist Manifesto. Part of that story follows a team in Austria that had tried unsuccessfully to resuscitate people who drowned or were buried in avalanches, then managed to save one person, and soon afterward several more.

One step went right after another. And, because of the speed with which they did it, she had a chance.

Another key factor, I suspect, is that surgeons are seeing more patients like me: active people in their fifties who want to stay active, and who are realizing that surgery — this one in particular — need not be postponed.

It’s still not a walk in the park. I’m moving slowly, and there’s a long road ahead. But two weeks ago, every step I took made things worse. Now every step I take makes things better. It’s miraculous, and I could not be more grateful. For most of human history my condition meant a lifetime of diminishing mobility and increasing pain that medicine could do nothing to help. Within my lifetime a fix became possible. In just the last two years it’s gotten incredibly good. I’m well aware that there’s plenty that can’t be fixed at all, never mind fixed so well. I know I’m a lucky guy to be here in 2015 and, crucially, to have health insurance. But I also think Dr. Smith is a lucky guy. Being able to improve lives in the way he has improved mine, day in and day out, has to be an amazing joy and privilege.

I’ve always felt weird about my interview with Jeff Bezos. Amazon’s PR people set it up as a follow-on to a keynote he gave, in 2006, about the suite of web services then coming online: cloud-based storage, computing, and human labor (i.e. Mechanical Turk). This was for InfoWorld, back when it was a magazine printed on paper. The PR folks were determined that we would put Bezos on the cover. We’d already written about all that stuff, so that wasn’t going to happen unless the keynote yielded something new and important.

Predictably it didn’t. But as they led me to the backstage room for the interview they kept pushing for the cover. And something must have snapped. Because when I pointed my camcorder at Amazon’s CEO and began talking, I became somebody I’d never been before and have never been since: the pushy reporter who is determined to frame a narrative, who steers the interview that way, and who interrupts all efforts on the subject’s part to answer questions not asked.

I’m not linking to the video because I still feel conflicted about it, but it’s on YouTube and I watched part of it recently in the wake of the New York Times story about Amazon’s workplace culture. Mechanical Turk was top of mind for me when I did that interview. I had been a customer of a Turk-based service called CastingWords, to which I had outsourced the transcription of several of my then-weekly podcasts. To prepare for the interview I signed up as a Turker and walked a mile in the shoes of a podcast transcriber. Here’s how I reported the experience at the time:

Podcasts are chopped up into six-minute segments. Last night, the segment I transcribed was worth $1.02, which will be credited to my Amazon.com account (and can then be transferred to a bank account) if my work passes several quality review checks. These checks are themselves implemented as HITs [human intelligence tasks].

…

My encounter with Turk Work wasn’t very satisfying. There was no context, no orderly progression, no sense of collaboration, no awareness of (or pride in) a finished product. If you’re running an MTurk-enabled business, you have to focus on throughput and efficiency. That drives you toward assembly-line tactics. But as Nathan McFarland noted in our conversation, you’d also like to reward excellence:

“We’d be willing to pay certain workers more and other workers less, but that’s not an option right now.”

So for now, that’s a hard constraint. Here’s another. From my perspective as a CastingWords customer, there are clearly some transcribers who have a better feel for my material than others. I don’t know who they are, though, or who’s transcribed which parts of various podcasts. If the goal is maximum throughput, that may be necessary. But that’s not my goal. Transcribing 620 minutes of audio for $260 in six days was darned impressive, but two months later I’m still only halfway through the final polishing, which I’m tackling in fits and starts. If this winds up being a long-term relationship, I’d rather identify the transcribers who do well on my stuff and give them whole tasks. And some transcribers would likely prefer that too. I sure would. Apart from the question of whether it’s in CastingWords’ interest to allow such relationships to form, the current MTurk architecture precludes the possibility.

I pressed Bezos hard on that point. Too hard, some thought at the time. Perhaps they were right. Perhaps it was none of my business to suggest that Mechanical Turk ought to optimize for worker satisfaction as well as for throughput.

My first encounter with a digital sweatshop was in 1993, in Bombay (as it was called then). I was visiting a software industrial park. In one company’s office I saw a room full of desks at which workers were digitizing maps of US telecommunication infrastructure. It seemed like dehumanizing work. Then I looked out the window at laborers carrying piles of bricks on their heads in 100-degree-Fahrenheit heat and realized that those map digitizers, in their air-conditioned office, had some of the best jobs in town.

I have no inside knowledge of Amazon’s blue-collar or white-collar workplace cultures, so I’m in no position to judge. Given that MTurk was a forerunner of the gig economy, though, here’s the follow-up question I wish I’d asked Jeff Bezos then and would still like to ask now. Do you believe that optimizing for customer satisfaction and worker satisfaction is a zero-sum game?

Our favorite local spot in Santa Rosa so far is The Toad in the Hole. It’s an English-style pub on the west end of downtown, an easy walk from our house. We like their brews, we like their Cornish pasty, and most of all we like their atmosphere. Sports bars aren’t really our thing, nor is soccer, but while soccer games are often playing on TV, they’re not intrusive and not usually a focus of attention.

Toad in the Hole wants to be a place where people come together to talk. The flip side of the menu reprints a 1946 George Orwell essay, The Moon Under Water, a fictionalized amalgam of the best features of all the pubs he knew and loved. At the center of the essay is this pivotal sentence:

“In the Moon Under Water it is always quiet enough to talk.”

I’m not any kind of audiophile but I’ve long been bothered by the awful acoustics in so many establishments. It’s hard to have a conversation in a room full of music and voices bouncing off hard surfaces. And while it’s easy to mitigate those sounds with baffles, that’s rarely done. One reason Toad in the Hole lives up to Orwell’s ideal is that it gets that right. It eluded me on our first few visits, but the other night I looked up and saw this:

You can see two acoustic baffles hangling from the ceiling. There are more like that all around the perimeter. It’s a subtle thing that most patrons may not notice. But it makes a huge difference!

It’s also a nice lesson in product design. Vanish into the woodwork, solve problems that people may not even recognize in a way they may not even notice, and let them just get on with what they care about.

The Hypothesis web annotation system is a browser-based application that talks to an annotation server, finds annotations for the current page (if any), highlights the selections to which the annotations refer, and dispays them in a sidebar alongside the page. We load a fair bit of JavaScript to do our job, and in the olden days we would simply have relied on bookmarklets to activate that code.

But times change, and bookmarklets are mostly dead. They’re not all dead yet. I expect I’ll still be able to use simple ones, like pinboard.in‘s, for a long time to come. But a new security regime limits the scope of what bookmarklets can do, and is forcing developers to create browser extensions instead — extensions that must be created and deployed differently for each browser.

So the realm of web applications that extend the browser is now becoming as balkanized as the realm of mobile apps. Developers target the dominant platform first — currently, that’s Chrome — and then port their extensions to other browsers as and when they can.

There’s another way to add behavior to a web page, though. You can send the page through an intermediate server (a proxy) that injects that behavior as the bookmarklet or extension would do. The Hypothesis proxy is via.hypothes.is, and you can use it to activate annotation for any web page — including this one — like so:

https://via.hypothes.is/blog.jonudell.net/2015/05/13/farewell-to-bookmarklets

The nice thing about this combo URL is that you can share the annotated page along with its annotation layer. Of course there are tradeoffs:

– Properly rewriting all the URLs in the proxied page is a tricky business.

– You can’t annotate pages behind paywalls (as you can with our bookmarklet and Chrome extension).

– You still need a way to activate the annotation layer for the current page. (You can use a bookmarklet to redirect to the proxy, but … sigh.)

The upshot is that we’re struggling to simplify the decision tree that Hypothesis users must traverse. You want to activate annotation for your current page? If in Chrome, install the extension, otherwise for Firefox or Safari or IE use the bookmarklet, unless the page enforces Content Security Policy, in which case use the proxy, unless the page is behind a paywall, in which case, sorry, you’re out of luck.

And that’s just for the desktop! Mobile browsers make things even crazier. I’m able to perform the gymnastics required to use the Hypothesis bookmarklet on my Windows Phone, on my iPhone, and (most acrobatically) on my Android tablet, and I really need to document those procedures, but it’s so depressing I’ve avoided doing so.

What seems most promising, for mobile browsers, is to add Hypothesis as an option that shows up when you ask to Share a web page. Activating annotation for the current page isn’t really Sharing, but the Share mechanism looks like the sanest way to redirect through the proxy, which in turn looks like the sanest way to activate the annotation layer in mobile browsers.

It looks reasonably straightforward to create an Android app that shows up when you Share a page and broadcasts the intent to view the proxied version of that page. Things look a bit more complex on iOS. Should there be a Safari-specific extension that redirects to the proxy? A system-wide Share extension that Chrome could also use? Both?

Of course activating Hypothesis on the mobile browser is only half the battle. As a sidebar-based app we manage pretty well on the desktop and large tablets, but are uncomfortable on smaller screens. If we’re routing through a proxy anyway, maybe the proxy should also do a Readability-style rewrite to simplify the page. We’re good at fuzzy anchoring and can anchor annotations to different representations of the “same” document.

There’s lots to do, and while bookmarklets will continue to help us do it, their era is over. Browsers are more standards-compliant than ever, which makes our mission to bring an annotation layer to the web easier than it would have been five or ten years ago. But browsers are now also less easily extensible and that’s a new challenge.

Here’s a picture of my last run.

I don’t mean last as in most recent. I mean last in my lifetime. What I thought was a groin pull a few years ago turns out to have been hip osteoarthritis.

So that sucks. It isn’t life-threatening. I am OK and will be better. It’s not breast cancer, or macular degeneration, or any number of worse things that friends and family have suffered through. I get that. But it’s going to be a hell of an adjustment for me. I’m an active person. I was always planning to be that guy who does mini-triathlons into his 80s. Turns out that wasn’t in the cards.

There’s a tendency to blame yourself. If only I hadn’t been a runner all those years. Or maybe if I hadn’t been a gymnast before that, and landed hard a bunch of times. But the orthopedic surgeon who will repair me, at some point, said no. It’s not your fault. Plenty of people run in their 80s. Some gene now being expressed says you’re not one of them.

I guess the strangest part of the experience is that I never located the problem in my hip. Or, actually, in both of them. Hip osteoarthritis can manifest as groin pain, so that’s what I told myself was happening — and only on the right side. Yeah, it shouldn’t go on for 3 years. Yeah, your quads shouldn’t hurt like hell after a run or a long hike. Yeah, you shouldn’t dramatically lose range of motion in your legs. Yeah, it shouldn’t keep you up at night.

But the brain is powerful. It enabled me to believe, for several years, that this was just one of those soft-tissue injuries I’ve worked through in the past. With stretching, and the right kind of exercise, I’d get through it, just like I always have.

Then I went to see Luann’s physical therapist and he leveled with me. This was 99% certain to be osteoarthritis. There was no other explanation for my symptoms. I feel bad for the PT because I went kinda ballistic on him. I knew he was right, and I started cursing like a sailor because I knew what it meant.

And suddenly things felt different. I began to visualize what was going on in my joints, and my subjective experience began to shift. A week later the orthopedic surgeon showed me the X-rays and that really clinched it. The balls in both of my ball-and-socket joints are deformed, it’ll get worse until I cry uncle and replace them. I’m feeling that now in a way I was denying for years.

The good news is that we live in a time when that’s possible. And that hips are way easier than knees. (Luann already replaced one, may face another.) And that we have health insurance. And that we’ve moved to a place where cycling — my best exercise at this point — is a year-round activity.

I don’t know if I’ll pull the trigger in a year, or two, or five. I’m guessing not longer than that. I took a 2-hour hike yesterday and I’m really feeling it today. That’ll only get worse. When they fix me I should be fine doing things like that.

But no more running, ever. I’ll adjust. But it’s hard to let go. And it’s hard to explain to Tuck. We brought him home in 2009, he was our first dog ever, and he got the job because he was the best of his siblings at running alongside me. Now he looks at me and wonders why we don’t do that anymore. Sorry, pal. Really wish we could.

I’m delighted to announce that I’ll start a new job tomorrow, as product manager for Hypothesis. We’re a small team chartered to build open annotation software for the web. We expect it will be useful in many domains, including education, science, journalism, and government.

Some of you who know me in one or another of those contexts will be hearing from me in coming weeks. I’ll want to know how you annotate the web now, what you need annotation software to be, and how we can work together to meet that need.

I’ve long imagined a standards-based annotation layer for the web. Now’s my chance to help make it real. Exciting! If you’d like to get involved, ping judell at hypothes.is.

I want cities to connect the dots between open government, web literacy, and citizen engagement. And I want to help the city I live in do that. For many years that city was Keene, NH, and while I can point to a few successes I can’t say that Keene is now a great model of the kinds of web-mediated engagement I envision.

Now that I live in Santa Rosa, I’ll try to help my new city connect those dots. The timing is fortuitous. In the wake of the 2013 Andy Lopez shooting Santa Rosa’s then-mayor Scott Bartley appointed an Open Government Task Force. The charter was:

…to develop a report that will inform the community about the current status of open and transparent government practice in the City of Santa Rosa; to review the exceptions, limitations and restrictions imposed by State or Federal law or Constitution; and to present options for improvement or additional best practices that the Mayor and City Council may wish to consider.

The final report, happily, takes a holistic view that encompasses not only government transparency but also citizen engagement. That’s the area in which I think I can help.

In The Church of One Tree: A civic parable I looked at how government and citizens interacted on a couple of issues, and explored some ways in which better web literacy could have improved those interactions.

Today the Press Democrat ran my editorial, Open government is a two-way street, which distills the pitch down to 600 words.

Can Santa Rosa become a city that thinks like the web? It seems genuinely to want that. If so, I’m here to help!

A couple of years ago I wrote about recovering from an injury. At the time I thought it started as a pulled muscle that cascaded when my determination to keep running and cycling led me to compensate with various misalignments. The physical therapists I saw at the time agreed, so when the acute phase died down we worked on restoring the range of motion I’d lost in my right leg. I recovered some, but not all, of that range, and eased back into hiking, and then running and cycling.

Things haven’t felt right since, though. I’ve never regained my full range of motion in that leg, and I’ve been feeling a lot of discomfort in both quads as well as in the right groin where the initial problem began.

When I talk about full range of motion I mean something different from what most people mean. Take a look at this young man doing front stalders on the horizontal bar. Think about the leg and hip flexibility required to do that. In high school and in college I used to do stalders. Since then I never lived near a gym where I could swing on a high bar, though it’s something I still dream about, could do, and would do if there were a gym that had the gear and would let me use it.

It’s natural to assume that only a young person can be that flexible. Not so. There have been a few role models in my life who have shown me what’s physically possible in later life, and one of them was Bob Stout. In 1952 he was a U.S. Olympic gymnast. In 1972, when I was getting into the sport as a 15-year-old, he worked out with my high-school team and showed us that a man then in his late forties could still hold an iron cross on rings (something I could never do), swing high bar, and demonstrate the full hip extension required for the stalder. As far as I know he was still doing those things when he died at age 56, of a heart attack, while jogging.

I am 58. Until recently I could also reach nearly that same hip extension. Then, after the incident a couple of years ago, my flexibility diminished by a lot. The hypothesis I hope will prove true is that I got myself into a vicious cycle. An injury made it hard to stretch, so I avoided stretching, which made stretching even harder. Ditto for squatting. I’ve been avoiding it because it was uncomfortable, that made it even more uncomfortable.

The hypothesis I am afraid will prove true was suggested by a physical therapist I saw last week. He thinks I have osteoarthritis of the hip. If he’s right, I’m looking at no more running, reduced hiking, lots of pain management in order to maintain activities like hiking and cycling, and joint replacement at some point. I guess the X-ray will tell the tale, and that won’t be for a few weeks. Meanwhile, it’s suddenly a high priority to maximize strength and flexibility. Whatever the state of my hip joint(s) turns out to be, those will be key assets.

I know how to maintain those assets. I don’t know what the limits of recovery are, once muscle has been allowed to atrophy and connective tissue to tighten. So, I’m doing that experiment now. I’ve seen noticeable improvements just in the past few days. I have no idea how far I’ll get, but I’m grateful to Bob Stout for his inspiring example.

Danielle Lee writes the Urban Scientist blog for Scientific American. In 2013 she wrote a post about an ugly incident in which she was invited to write for Biology Online, asked about payment, declined the offer when she learned there would be none, and was called a whore. Scientific American took down the post an hour after it was published, late on a Friday, and then restored it the following Monday after verifying DNLee’s claim. The Biology Online editor’s name-calling was horrific. But his email also included a lesser insult:

You will enjoy a great deal of exposure from our 1.6 million monthly visitors.

I heard the same thing from Wired a few years ago, when I was invited to write an online column. They weren’t paying. But I was otherwise employed, I missed writing for a wider audience than my blog attracts, and I bought the claim that appearances on Wired.com’s home page would yield useful visibility, feedback, and engagement.

It didn’t work out that way. That was the loneliest writing gig I’ve ever had. On-site comments were few and far between. And reaction elsewhere — on Twitter, in the blogosphere — was anemic as well. I felt like I was talking to myself in an empty room while, below in the engine room, machines were talking to other machines, spinning page counters unconnected to any real audience.

Now I’m writing for InfoWorld again, and it’s a much more pleasant experience. That’s partly because InfoWorld does pay contributors. It’s not a living. The world has changed since I left InfoWorld 8 years ago, when there was still a print magazine. But there’s a real exchange of value.

As important to me, if not more important, is the connection to an audience. With InfoWorld I’m feeling that connection again. I can see conversations forming around my columns and features, and those conversations lead me to new ideas. That’s a dynamic I cherish.

Could I still earn a fulltime living writing about technology? Probably not, and I’m sometimes wistful about that. It’s something I do really well; arguably it’s my strongest talent. But the world’s supply of creative talent far exceeds the commercial demand for it. The vast majority of writers, artists, and musicians need day jobs. That can be a good thing. In my writerly niche it certainly is.

The kind of technology journalism I’ve practiced didn’t exist until BYTE came along in the 70s. Like all the tech publications that followed, we faced a dilemma. Do you hire practitioners who can learn to write? Or do you hire journalists who can learn about technology?

The best answer, of course, was (and is): Hire practitioners who are also reporters and writers. Then make sure they keep developing their practical knowledge and skills. At BYTE, and then at InfoWorld the first time around, I was blessed with the opportunity to do that. Such opportunity may not come again. That’s OK. I need to be able to deliver value in other ways too. Doing so will keep me from devolving into a pundit.

What’s not OK is writing for commercial publications that don’t pay. If there’s no market for something I want to write, I’ll put it here instead of on Medium or Facebook or some other site that earns in the currency of dollars but pays in the currency of (presumptive) attention.

A decade ago I captured the peak of my Internet fame in this screenshot:

That was near the end of an anomalous few years during which the top result, when searching Google for “jon,” was my blog. I enjoyed it while it lasted, knowing that Jon Stewart would inevitably eclipse me, as he did in 2005 and as many others have since.

I was among the first to write professionally for the web, so for a while many of the pages in Google’s index containing “jon” were mine. That was just a lucky first-mover advantage. I knew it would erode over time as, appropriately, it has.

I still enjoy some residual benefits, though. My blog’s popularity translated to Twitter when it appeared on the scene, and although my Twitter reach has grown only modestly since, I was recently reminded that it remains another kind of first-mover advantage.

When United charged me for an error it made on a recent flight reservation, none of the regular customer service channels were responsive. So:

And then:

I’m hardly a celebrity on Twitter, but airing my complaint in a way that 5000 people might notice got results. I was grateful, direct-messaged my thanks, and received this DM reply:

You’re welcome, be sure to tweet us if you need anything. ^HN

I certainly will. But your mileage will almost certainly vary. Of those who try this method, how many will have enough Twitter reach for United to worry about? When I mentioned that on Facebook, Tony Byrne said:

I’ve wondered a lot about the equity of this. Supposedly social customer supt costs 8x traditional cust supt but brands do it for precisely the reason you cite and they are very aware of your Klout score when you complain. Too many of us digerati remain too smug about this, as if we deserve special treatment for being active on Twitter…

There’s nothing new about the attention economy. But there are always new ways to unfairly distribute attention.

In 2000 I was commissioned to write a report called Internet Groupware for Scientific Collaboration. That was before modern social media, before blogs even really got going. But arxiv.org was already well-established, and wikis and calendar services and Dave Winer’s proto-blog, Manila, and many kinds of discussion forums were relevant to my theme. On the standards front, RSS, MathML, and SVG were emerging. One of my premonitions, that lightweight and loosely-coupled web services would matter, turned out to be accurate. Another, the notion of a universal canvas for creating and editing words, pictures, data, and computation, remains part of the unevenly distributed future, though projects like IPython Notebook and Federated Wiki rekindle my hope that we’ll get there.

Now I’m writing an update to that report. There’s unfinished business to reconsider, but also much new activity. Scientific collaboration happens in social media and on blogs, obviously. It happens in scientific social media. It happens in and around open access journals. It happens on GitHub where you can find open software and open data projects in many scientific disciplines. It happens on Reddit, on StackExchange-based Q&A sites, on citizen science websites, and in other places I don’t even know about.

I want to interview researchers engaged in various aspects of online scientific collaboration. I’m well connected to some of the tribes I need to reach, but need to cast a wider net. I want to hear, from practitioners in natural sciences, social sciences, and digital humanities, about ways you and your colleagues, in disciplines near and far, do, and/or don’t, collaborate online, both in specific contexts (OA journals, academic social networks) and wider contexts (blogs, mainstream social media). How does your activity in those settings advance your work (or not)? How does it help connect your work to society at large.(or not)?

If you’re somebody who ought to be involved in this project, please do get in touch here or here. And if you know someone who ought to be involved, please pass this along.

Thanks!